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25 July 2007

Linkages

It’s been a while since we have highlighted newer finds in the greater blogsphere. It is quite amazing to see the growth of informed commentary and cogent discussion regarding the intelligence profession as a whole, as well as the overlapping areas of military studies and inter/national security policy.

We are not quite sure what to think of the rather interesting but not entirely worksafe blog Swedish Meatballs Confidential. On the one hand, we find some of the pieces quite excellent but we dislike attempts to play insider baseball with Beltway politics (especially writ large.) We find such discussions border too often on conspiracy theory. But when they focus on information operations and military matters, they prove worth reading. (We also rather like the manner in which they characterized our link - "Kent's Something of Import".... clearly an artifact of translation software, but it carries with it a flavour of the Victorian...)

The House of War is another newcomer which merits a look based on its continuing focus on matters of insurgency, future warfare, and 4GW + matters.

The Wizards of Oz
, although so new it hasn’t yet accumulated much of a back archive, promises to add further to the 5GW discussion, and comes to the table with a pretty interesting follow-on to LTG Van Riper’s comments at Boyd 2007.


We have found ourselves occasionally tripping over the work of the Deception Blog – which deals with the entirety of the wider psychological aspects of deception (rather than the strictly intelligence context of D&D), but nonetheless occasionally offers links to exceptionally relevant new research. Regrettably, the wider blog cluster of which it is loosely a part of tends to run towards the whole “anti-polygraph” crowd, but thankfully this is not common as long as one sticks with the core psychological research sections.

It will be interesting to see the higher order effects of the informal online discussion in the blogsphere on future iterations of the literature of intelligence. But we expect that this will be the native communications behavior of the next generation of analysts and operators - and we strongly believe that if the community must quickly come to terms with the changing nature of organizational and individual expression and learning in the online environment, especially in the public discussion of the intelligence studies field.

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