Deadly Paradigms

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?hp

Link to this article from the New York Times from today, April 27, 2010 and take stock of how incredibly delusional our military people have become, under the influence of technology, here power point. People worry about kids playing video games when they should be worrying about real soldiers playing power point games and actually believing that they are "in the know." It would be comical if it weren't so tragic - wasted lives and wasted tax dollars to support the illusion that we know what we are doing in Afghanistan [and elsewhere] and that we are in control.

For more on this, there is an excellent book entitled Deadly Paradigms, by a guy named Shafer [available on Amazon] who investigates the counterinsurgency paradigm that was supposedly successful in Greece and in the Philippines, where success has been claimed. However, Shafer shows convincingly that those successes, such as they were, cannot be explained by the counterinsurgency paradigm that was guiding U.S. policy then. He also shows and helps one to understand why these paradigms, even or especially in the face of failure, continue to be appealing to policy makers, both professional and political, along with academics. It is an enlightening book, well worth a read.