Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 25 January 2005
Some walking around today. Gotta get the dog out now and then. Kids home a second day off from school. Back settled down by end of day. Will get it stretched tomorrow and head back to the college on Thursday for my 4th-to-last day. Think I have enough boxes now to get the rest of my stuff out. Will definitely use the cart and elevator to get them down to my car.
I had spent yesterday organizing Chapter 3, which I'm now calling "Growing the Core By Securing the East." Original plan was section 1 on China domestic and section 2 on China foreign policy, with a third section on how the New Core offers the third way between America's Go-Fast ideology and Europe's Go-Slow. But as I planned the chapter, I felt that was too China-centric, plus it would be too hard to disaggregate China over two sections like that.
So Section 1, which I wrote today at just over 8,000 words, is the combined China treatment, which I now tentatively call "Locking-In China at Today's Price," borrowing the sub-title I used in the Esquire piece. I don't know if I'll stick with that title, as I have several others, but it seems most logical and blueprint-for-action-like in its tone. I had thought of using "The Theory of Peacefully Rising China," but that's not mine, and I like all titles in the book to be very mine, otherwise, whose book am I writing?
Pretty happy with how the section turned out. Doing China up in 8k is pretty hard, but a good challenge. I don't pretend to do it comprehensively or for the ages, but only for the purposes of the book, in my own particular style. You have to be careful with that. I write this section and it's not like I'm trying to impress the hell out of the reader with my mastery of Chinese history or anything, because I'm not a Chinese historian, but a grand strategist, so I have to think time and time again as I write: What's important about all this that the reader needs to know to understand what I'm advocating in terms of America's grand strategy to shrink the Gap, grow the Core, win the war, build the future worth creating, etc.? So I try to stick to what I know, leaving the details to others, and painting in broad strokes.
I know that disappoints those who want the "proof" in detail--up front no less, complete with yearly budgets--otherwise how can they possibly be convinced my approach will work? Like anyone pursues a grand strategy because "the numbers seem so good on this one!" I mean, geez, we can't even agree on the data for global warming, so where in the hell am I going to get hard data to show, in advance, that my shrink-the-Gap strategy will work ("I'm still not convinced! Have you taken into account inflation and the Hubbert's Curve effect on crude oil prices in your calculations? Because if you could just get those numbers right, I'm pretty sure I'd be emotionally invested in your vision of the future! No, really! Just get me those two numbers!").
Tomorrow I will write on the New Core as a whole. Looking forward to that one.
Saw an interesting article in the Post yesterday (24 Jan, Associated Press, "Army Prepares 'Robo-Soldier' for Iraq," by Michael P. Regan) that reminded me why I honestly believe there's more than enough technical challenges in the SysAdmin force to keep the military-industrial complex humming and happy for decades to come. The notion, as voiced in the Military Officer review below, that the SysAdmin force is low-tech, is just plain wrong. It's lower-tech but not low-tech. It's lower tech because it tends to be more node-like and simple in its networking, compared to the godawful all-in-one packaging of today's prohibitively costly platforms (a billion for that sub, 100 million for that aircraft). I think all sorts of remotely-piloted stuff will be used in the SysAdmin force. Loitering capacity will be everything. Yet another reason I don't see the force as necessarily huge in terms of numbers.
