Field Notes, First Drafts, & Foreign Correspondence
From the Washington Post:
The line between what’s real and what’s not is thin and shifting, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has decided to explore both sides. Boldly going where few government bureaucracies have gone before, the agency is enlisting the expertise of science fiction writers.
Read the rest here.
No, that’s not a joke. This, from the NYT:
OSLO — In a stunning surprise, the Nobel Committee announced Friday that it had awarded its annual peace prize to President Obama“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” less than nine months after he took office.
Urmmm…. OK, I guess.
Hunh?
[UPDATE]: I saw this a couple of days ago. Waaaaayyyy too timely to be coincidental. The word must have been floating for a while before today’s announcement. Based on the standards by which Ghandi was famously ommitted, I’m still scratching my head over this…
Thanks to Dan Drezner for exposing Tom Coburn’s ridiculous initiative to cut National Science Foundation money to political science… except in Drezner’s nightmare vision of a world without political science funding, historians would be one of the few remaining sources, along with (parodying Coburn) “CNN, pollsters, pundits…candidates, and political parties”, of knowledge about political behavior.
Horrors.
As an academic discipline, history is sometimes considered an art, sometimes a “science”, which says more about the intended readability of the discipline’s output than anything else. In terms of philosophies and practice of history, there’s a disciplinary truism, wie es eigentlich gewesen – telling it like it is – that many would argue is more “empirical” (not quantitative, which is something else) in its reading of evidence and “scientific” in its rigorous adherence to scholarly method, than a lot of the political “science” that gets pushed out. Lumping historians in with the media and punditocracy is just as silly as Coburn’s argument that knowledge of political behavior should be limited to those fields.
Interesting verbiage, here. In the discussion of what Washington’s reading these days to try to figure out what to do next in Afghanistan, the focus seems to be on institutional lessons learned. While Josh makes a good point on what to read, the more interesting one, I think, is how some comparisons are being described as being more appropriate than others:
Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), long an advocate of the narrative detailed in “A Better War,” warned that while Vietnam may appear to have some parallels to Afghanistan, the better comparison is Iraq, where many of the same commanders now managing the Afghan war learned the value of surging more troops into a battle zone. “Vietnam fell to a conventional invasion of the North Vietnamese military,” Mr. McCain said. “The closest parallel to Afghanistan today is Iraq, the strategies that succeeded and the generals that succeeded.”
So, if we want to learn anything, we apparently need to find the case study that’s most similar or closely related to the one we’re interested in. Hmmm. Not sure how that’ll result in new knowledge. More like a recipe for reinforcing what we already think we know. Comparative case studies can certainly help establish generalizable observations, but that doesn’t mean they have to have identical characteristics.
This, via SSRN’s Conflict Studies Abstracts:
Developing an Analytical Framework for Genetic Warfare Policy
R.E. Burnett
ABSTRACT: Within the general notion of biological WMDs is a weapon that has been least discussed – the potential genetic weapon. Technologies that have been evolving from basic research into the molecular biology of genes and DNA/RNA are now providing us with the knowledge necessary to create new kinds of weapons that pose a strategic dilemma for the United States and its allies. This project will investigate the strategic environment of genetic warfare – notably the notion of the human adaptation of natural disease events as applied to state and non-state conduct in the contest for political and economic power and influence. Specifically, we seek to augment the security literature with regard to the conceptualization of the strategy which will hopefully provide deterrence and, if necessary, a successful defense against genetic weapons. To accomplish this task, we must integrate the historical and current strategic doctrine of biological WMDs in American doctrine and thinking, and the evolving literature in genetic science and epidemiology. An important finding in this analysis will be the growing importance of genetic forensic epidemiology is becoming a principle national security tool .
Furthermore, it will be established that the preeminent threat of biological warfare in the future – a more rational and lethal form of disease – one that threatens to nullify our decades old disease therapy model of vaccine development and deployment – is slowly leading futurist thinkers to resurrect Eugenics as a new model of science-based national security. Specifically – the argument will made that human enhancement may be the only path toward a protected human population in a future world of radically new diseases. Genetically enhanced pathogens – once posited – deconstructed – and placed within a genetic and political construct – can be combined with the growing logic of eugenics as suggested by Dr. James Watson, Dr. Francis Crick, and other aggressive utilitarian-oriented scientist/engineers who are leading these fields today. The genetically enhanced pathogen can only be resisted and/or defeated by the genetically enhanced human being. This sentence portrays the logic of a potential eugenics future – one that continues to arise from the combination of advancing genetic science and technology to the task of terrorism, warfare, and weaponology. To this logic – we will seek to establish a formal ethical analysis and conclusion for the policy and scholarly community.
It is important to note that most of the thinking on biological war in the unclassified literature to date has occurred in the medical community. There is advantage to this in that our medical scientists and physicians are the ones who will provide the basic research needed to generate technological solutions to such weapons. Therefore, the research that we seek to conduct in this project is of clear importance. The task of this research is to integrate the knowledge of how to defend against a range of international and national actors from the security literature with the knowledge from the medical and biological literature of how genetic weapons will work for/against those actors and the United States. In this sense, the outcome of this research will be to establish a dialogue on the strategic environment of genetic warfare informed by the knowledge and corresponding technologies of molecular biology. What is possible regarding the creation and use of genetic weapons will help to determine the corresponding political, economic, and technological strategies for defending against them. Too – the ethical dimension of human genetic enhancement – as the direct operational juxtaposition to the empirical record of scientific work on pathogen genetic enhancement – causes us to write a formal statement about the specter of a renewed call for some form of eugenics – this time as a response to the need for the state to provide for the genetic security of the American population.
MICHAEL A. INNES 