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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 02:44pm Sep 21, 2001 EST (#9564 of 9569)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And if their culture is paralyzed by so many lies that it can't achieve complex cooperation, we have to help them sort it out, for all sorts of practical reasons.

rshowalter - 02:49pm Sep 21, 2001 EST (#9565 of 9569)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Want to set people up for failure? Show them enough that they are sure what they want to do - - but make sure that, as a practical matter, they don't know enough so that they can possibly do it.

That sets them into a bind -- they can't do what has been implicitly asked (and, they may think) they can't get what has been implicitly promised to them.

A lot of people in the world think Thomas L. Friedman's THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE is a cruel hoax for reasons like this. Almarst is one of these people.

Almarst isn't one of the "wretched ones" -- but he's concerned about people who are. These people aren't "exploited" in any ordinary sense -- or "opressed" in any ordinary sense, either. But they are so "out of the loop" that they are left in situations so desperate, so ugly, that Bin Laden can look good to them.

We ought to help offer them better alternatives than that. If we did so effectively, a central source of terrorist power, and terrorist hatred, would dry up. And it is our reasonable fear of that hatred, and that terrorist power that motivates missile defense. We ought to work to reduce the hatred

rshowalter - 02:51pm Sep 21, 2001 EST (#9566 of 9569)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Missile defense is one approach to achieving security. It is to be thought of as a part of a system of security measures, to meet the system of security needs that we have.

To meet needs, we have to do possible things.

That means we have to avoid approaches that cannot possibly work, and find patterns that are consistent with the constraints, including constraints on fact, that solutions have to be fit to.

The logic of consistency is absolutely central to any reasonable hope.

Here are postings about consistency relationships, that seem to me to be practical and hopeful.

MD9469 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:22pm ... MD9470 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:26pm
MD9471 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:27pm ... MD9472 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:28pm
MD9477 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:31pm ... MD9478 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:33pm
MD9479 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:34pm ... MD9480 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:35pm

rshowalter - 03:02pm Sep 21, 2001 EST (#9567 of 9569)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD9484 rshowalter 9/19/01 5:42pm An absolutely fundamental fact is that to get ideas focused well enough for action takes a lot of crossreferencing, and crosschecking - - and somehow people "form" connected idea systems out of context.

Want to ASSURE misunderstandings between groups - - enough so that they cannot really cooperate, except in very minimal ways?

. Restrict conversation.

To see how very completely this can be done, here is a document which is, depending on your assumptions, either absolutely beautiful, or starkly ugly.

. NUNN-WOLFOWITZ TASK FORCE REPORT: INDUSTRY "BEST PRACTICES" REGARDING EXPORT COMPLIANCE PROGRAMS http://164.109.59.52/library/pdf/nunnwolfowitz.pdf July 25, 2000

This doesn't show "oppression" or "exploitation" - - but it does show, in detail, how to "keep people out of the loop."

At the levels required for decent economic function, and the most basic kinds of military cooperation, many more people have to be "in the loop."

Our patterns for excluding communication have become terribly cumbersome, all over the world, and we have to open up. Very many of our most basic challenges, missile threats among them, are not really cleanly soluble unless this is done.

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