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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 03:41pm May 16, 2002 EST (#2248 of 2251)

Desires

• Achieve closure in negotiation of specific issues
• Define key requirements for closure
• Clarify language (use of terms)
• "Connect the dots"
  • provide information relevant to specific issues and tasks
  • aid conceptualization
  • dissipate paranoia
• Provide a communal memory
• Establish common ground for discussion; get people "reading off the same page"
• Validate solutions against human, organizational,  and technical needs [cf. Maslow, Berle]
• Dispel "lies, deceptions, half truths, and muddles"
• Replace vagueness with transparency and clarity
• Provide complete, comprehensive information
• [Make the same information available to both sides in a conflict]
• Get conflicting parties to look at each other's position
• Provide an analytical view of historical data (re positions)
• Expose provocation
• Establish common bodies of fact that the parties can
  • Understand
  • Trust

• Clarification of language is complicated by the difficulties of translation.
• There's a big difference between making the information available, even in the best form, and getting the right people to use it properly.
• Organizational systems (for example, quality systems) can give structure to human thought and action. Technology can provide "decision support"  tailored to those organizational systems. 
• Only human beings can
  • Trust
  • Understand
  • Tell the truth
  • Be fair
  • Agree.
• Agreements--constitutions, for instance--are fictions dependent finally on the good will of the parties.
• Audience is one inconstant concept in the thread. Sometimes, the focus is on negotiators and decision-makers. At other times, it is on the "general public."

• Who determines what "the good things" are?
• How can we place the process of clarifying bodies of fact "beyond politics"?
• How can we separate meaning from issues of culture, context, and historical moment?
• How can information be validated, and against what standards?
• How can it be maintained up-to-date?
• How can incommensurate data be reconciled?
• How can information transparency be reconciled with information security?
• The bias of news media is less due to their need to "entertain," more to their need to maintain believability by validating the prejudices of the audience.
• What is absent from the thread is consideration of dialogue, the essence of threaded discussion.

rshow55 - 03:41pm May 16, 2002 EST (#2249 of 2251)

Infrastructure

• Staff (5-10)
  • With different points of view represented
  • Independent of the market forces that drive the news media
• A few hundred thousand dollars, perhaps more
• A few weeks for significant accomplishment
• "Umpires" and "umpires for the umpires" for each side
• Different staffs for each side
• Managed by people who know what questions to ask
• Managers with IT experience
• Serving the efforts of Thomas Friedman, Robert Fisk, or other public, extragovernmental leaders/molders of opinion.

• What is being described is a research staff. I don't doubt that
  • diplomatic entities have their own
  • those staff use web-based tools and do web-based research.
• To me, the big questions concern sponsorship/ownership and purpose.
• The very willingness to use the proffered resources, much less to trust them, would itself be an issue for negotiation.
• The notion of "staff" is unstable in this thread. Sometimes they seem to be knowledge content specialists or web editors, at other times subject matter experts.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense