(2004-10-29) Lind Election Security

William Lind on the Presidential Election candidates, Security, Dealing With Terrorism, FourGW, etc. An excellent summary of his perspective.

• Adopting a defensive rather than an offensive Grand Strategy. So long as we are on the grand strategic offensive, threatening to impose our ways on every one else through military force, we will be defeated regardless of how many battles we win. Like Germany in both World Wars, we will generate new enemies faster than we can defeat old ones. Bush promises in every other sentence that "America will stay on the offensive," while Kerry's foreign policy utterances sound as Wilsonian as any neo-con. Can we be sure Kerry isn't in fact a neo-con? No.

• Developing a "counter-terrorism" capability that, instead of pretending the whole thing is a law-enforcement problem, mimics the way Fourth Generation entities fight and turns it on them. Our armed services can't do this because it requires a non-hierarchical organization free of the First Generation culture of order. Bush and Kerry both seem as clueless on this as Bart Simpson.