Time's Battleland: Drones + biometrics: Weapons that conquer globalization's frontiers

Cool NYT story on the US military's use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the same technology here in the States, along with the usual fears of loss of privacy.  Trust me, along with drones, these frontier-settling technologies will most definitely infiltrate our society in coming years, just like the military's Internet and GPS did before.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

I first wrote about this concept in Blueprint for Action in the final chapter called "blogging the future."

Blast from my Past: The Brief at JHUAPL (2005)

A nice archive of a "Blueprint for Action" era version of the brief, delivered in Alexandria Va as part of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory's "Rethinking the Future International Security Environment" series of speakers 2005-2006.  A lot of great talks from great thinkers found on the page here.

Video of my talk found here.

Audio only here.

Download notes version.

Download copy of unanimated slides.

Brief Reminder: Triangulating "The Pentagon's New Map"

This was my set-up slide in the old “Blueprint”-era brief.  In it, I provided a triangulating argument to orient the audience to other, more famous books.  I’d start with Friedman’s book, saying it was economic determinism, then I’d draw a line over to Huntington’s “Clash,” dubbing it social Darwinism.  Then I’d add the triangle and say I sought to add the third, pol-mil leg to that implied stool by splitting the difference between them:  yes, I believed in Friedman’s determinism, but yes, I also believed that globalization’s spread would trigger conflict along the “border”—so to speak, or along the Seam between Core and Gap.  My book’s “conceit,” I would say, was that it predicted where conflict would occur in the world on the basis of globalization’s expansion—hence it was the “Pentagon’s” new map and not Google’s or Goldman Sachs’ map (even though, in truth, their maps aren’t all that different looking).

Got my Chinese-edition copies of "Blueprint for Action"

Twenty copies in the mail, right on the heels of getting 4 copies of the Turkish edition of the same.

In sum, I now have The Pentagon's New Map in Turkish, Chinese and Japanese, and Blueprint for Action in Turkish and Chinese.

Great Powers already sold to the Turks, and I have high hopes a Chinese edition will follow with its usual deliberate speed.

Shots of the Chinese edition of Blueprint:

I showed Vonne Mei a copy last night and she hugged it until she fell asleep with it in her arms.

I will take that as a thumbs-up!