Late comments on “Triage” and the CNAS Conference

The Center for a New American Security held its annual conference last Thursday at the Willard Hotel. The event featured GEN Petraeus as the morning keynote speaker, followed by a series of panels related to the rollout of several new policy papers. The one I’m most interested in, pretty obviously, is Triage: The Next Twelve Months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Andrew Exum, Nate Fick, Ahmed Humayun, and Dave Kilcullen. Fick and Ex participated in a panel discussion — moderated by the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, LTG (ret) David Barno — alongside noted counterinsurgency skeptic Andrew Bacevich and COL Chris Cavoli, who commanded a battalion of the 10th Mountain in RC-East in 2006-07.

Insurgent basketball: Gladwell on sports and asymmetric conflict

I was all girded up to write a couple thousand words on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.” I even made notes. And then I left them at work. 

So as part of my new commitment to try to write something every day (increase frequency of posts, decrease frequency of “excuses” tag), I’m just going to direct you to the article and the thread on Abu Muqawama where I got scooped in the middle of the work day. Hopefully I’ll get back to this tomorrow, because I think there’s really a lot of interesting stuff to say about this. Gladwell has really only just nibbled at the edge of this subject, but his conclusion that “effort > skill” is noteworthy.

This guy rules

I haven’t written anything in ages, and I’m leaving for Moscow in like sixteen hours and haven’t packed a stitch, so just go read this article from the 29 March New York Times Magazine about Freeman Dyson, a physicist who rules.

New book in the mail

Fresh out of the mailbox!

If I end up falling back into my habit of infrequent posting any time soon, then this time it won’t be because I’m distracted by beer and basketball (like every other time). No, this time it’s different: it’s because I’m likely to end up spending the next three or four years, Roget’s dictionary close at hand, trying to get through the 209 pages of Vincent Desportes’ La Guerre Probable (The Likely War). After two weeks’ wait and twenty-odd dollars in shipping charges the book arrived in my mailbox today via Amazon.fr. 

Update on Bacevich/Kilcullen

Dave Kilcullen responds on Small Wars Journal and does a hell of a lot better job than I did.

D. F. Wallace’s unfinished novel, from The New Yorker

I spent much of tonight [yes, I am that slow of a reader!] with “The Unfinished” an article in this week’s New Yorker about the truncated final novelistic effort of the staggeringly talented David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in September of last year at the age of (I think) 46. Wallace has been my favorite fiction writer since I read Infinite Jest — the 1,200-odd page tome for which he gained notoriety — during procrastination related to the writing of my graduate thesis back in 2002.

Signed up for GoodReads

At the behest of friends, I’ve signed up for GoodReads. It’s a site that gives you the opportunity to share what you’re reading, review books, and rate books you’ve read in the past. My profile’s here, so take a look and add me if you’re on there.