Two Wheels and Two Questions

[...] myself in Iraq in 2003-04 was (perhaps) the beginning of the end of the catechism that all national security (and many other) problems must have a technological solution, something that we probably [...]

[...] world’s engine, it’s become harder than ever to think globally and act locally, whether in national security or even economic life.  Instant communication and information overload, its latest [...]

[...] -building is a new phenomenon.  Here again, the notion that the point of reference for U.S. national security engagements is World War II and the Cold War is eclipsed by examples of the military’s [...]

[...] was not simply a moral act or an end in itself.  It was also a matter of national security and prosperity.  I had always wondered why he was the fourth president to appear on [...]

[...] power).  Joseph Campbell observed that the Europeans who came to dominate the North American continent, as Judeo-Christians, were essentially an anti-nature culture who took the Cartesian [...]

[...] Act. My epiphany had arrived.  The push of the pioneers across the frontiers of the North American continent was, of course, another link in a chain of endeavors in the American experience to find [...]

[...] of Independence and, through the Louisiana Purchase, insured U.S. domination of the North American continent; and Lincoln, who preserved the Union and re-defined the meaning of freedom, as well as [...]

[...] of the American way of life.  Santa Fe is one of the oldest settlements on the North American continent, with the Spanish presence there dating back to the early 17th century.  Yet, just a [...]

[...] -in” and the “inside-out.” He discovered insights into the American character in its national parks and presidential homes and gained an appreciation of the enduring flow of American [...]

[...] of the “savage” and “thoughtless” approach to the land noted in my earlier discussion of the National Parks, it is no wonder European-Americans, by and large, looked upon the Indians, who saw [...]

[...] of its environmental diversity was Yosemite National Park, the first of the great national parks I would see in the West on my way “back East” (an interesting term). In 1889, John Muir, then [...]

[...] anyone else, but they are luckier, beyond their geography and material treasures such as the national parks that preserve its “environmental power”.  While the United States still leads in many [...]

[...] their entitlements, and still want to reduce the national debt.  The Project on National Security Reform has it right:  It takes a nation to fix a government. Americans can’t have it [...]

[...] of a more comprehensive approach to national security advocated by the Project on National Security Reform and others.  We must do what I suggested to John Nagl after presenting on his book [...]

[...] governing process.  With respect to the interagency system alone, the Project on National Security Reform recognizes, in Forging a New Shield, “…no leader, no matter how strategically farsighted [...]

[...] a couple of reasons.  First, because my military career began just a few months prior to the Reagan era which concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall; and secondly, I wanted to gain an impression [...]

[...] more than a dozen active years with Toastmaster’s International, starting in Germany in the Reagan era during my own formative career years, it has long been apparent to me that the most effective [...]

[...] tour of duty in uniform as the Senior U.S. Military Observer and Chief of Civil-Military Coordination (or CIMIC) at UNMIL. How I wound up there is a story in itself.  The reason I [...]

[...] to have to): to be able to do nation-building in order not to have to.  The concept of civil-military coordination I had put in place in Liberia, also a model for the emerging UN military policy on [...]

[...] .  (Think the internet enabling this blog, perhaps the great game-changer of global connectivity, an endless cyber-frontier that is among the latest examples of the military’s [...]

Once I left the Lincoln Boyhood National Monument in Indiana, I became progressively melancholic, for two reasons. First, fatigue, both physical and [...]

[...] the vertical space than the horizontal space”.  This will necessitate an ethic of global cooperation heretofore unseen.  The model for which, however, as Joseph Campbell suggests in [...]