Sofcoast

Thinktank NAS Integration Primer

Thought this was a well written thinktank primer about NAS integration.

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Flying the Friendly Skies: Merging UAS into Civil Airspace
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March 2011


Flying the Friendly Skies: Merging UAS into Civil Airspace

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have transformed modern warfare and are expected to have a similar transformational impact as they are routinely integrated into our national airspace. A wide range of civilian applications are envisioned for UAS (also commonly referred to as unmanned aerial vehicles, remotely piloted aircraft, and other names), including border patrol, crop dusting, cargo delivery, traffic reports, weather forecasting, and a long list of other potential applications. Some of these UAS will be as big as a Boeing 737 and others will be launched by hand.

Several questions face the Federal Aviation Administration: How will UAS be integrated safely into our national airspace? How airworthy must the UAS be? How will the safety of people on the ground be ensured? What's the best way to provide air traffic control? And how can the risk of mid-air collisions be mitigated?

The introduction of UAS into the national airspace is part of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), which is a multi-agency government program tasked with transforming the U.S. National Airspace System to meet the nation's future aviation needs. In addition to the FAA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security play critical roles in NextGen. MITRE works closely with each of these government organizations.

Different Cultures

Since September 2009, a team of MITRE experts from across the company has been working under the auspices of a special corporate team to better align MITRE's work with sponsors to introduce UAS into civilian airspace.

"We have strong relationships with the FAA, DoD, and DHS," says Tim Szczerbinski, executive director of MITRE's Enterprise Integration division and member of the UAS Leadership Edge team. "If there's one area that requires you to be able to think 'big enterprise,' it's UAS."

In addition to Szczerbinski and others from MITRE's DoD FFRDC, the team includes members from our DHS and FAA FFRDCs as well. "We come from different sponsor bases, and we have different customer expectations, and clearly different organizational cultures," Szczerbinski says. "However, we all have the same desired outcome-to get UAS to fly safely and routinely in the national airspace."

Differences in Vocabulary

The UAS Leadership Edge team began by working with the DoD and the DHS to identify each agency's priority needs for routine operation of UAS in civilian airspace. Next, they approached the FAA to discuss the development of a roadmap for defining and achieving acceptable UAS capability.

"Our customers would often state the same issues and concerns, but they'd use different words, or use them only in the context of their environments," says John Kreger, chief systems engineer for the Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, which MITRE operates on behalf of DHS. "We're trying to get over that- overcome the differences in vocabulary and start to identify the common issues and concerns people have about UAS operation."

"What we did, basically, was listen to what they were saying and then figure out a way forward incorporating their concerns," says Szczerbinski. "That diversity of thought and sponsor bases was initially perceived to be an impediment, but it actually was what made us successful."

Now, when Kreger speaks to his DHS customers about UAS, he doesn't come alone. If a DHS official has a question about the FAA views on UAS, Kreger can refer that query to Dave Hamrick, an executive director in MITRE's FAA FFRDC and a Leadership Edge team member.

Sense-and-Avoid Simulation

Last June, the team invited DoD and FAA officials to McLean to view a realistic simulation of the use of ground-based sense-and-avoid radar systems to manage UAS. This radar technology offers the potential of producing air traffic data that can be passed on to UAS pilots so they can avoid other aircraft.

"This simulation enabled these groups to start talking," says Chris Jella, a senior principal multi-discipline systems engineer. "It also enabled MITRE to be a focal point for folks to get together to start discussing the various issues."

Szczerbinski agrees. "The participants in the simulation were energized by it," he says. "I think they began to see what we were trying to do. People came to me after and said that if there was anything they could do to help us out, they would be honored to do it again."

After watching this demo, Air Force Major General Marke Gibson invited FAA and MITRE leaders to Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to see how the military manages UAS in the skies over Afghanistan. MITRE has worked closely with the Air Force at Creech to improve these operations.

Another experiment-the Limited Deployment-Cooperative Airspace Project (LD-CAP)-is scheduled for 2012. LD-CAP is a research initiative to create an experimental environment to evaluate the viability of a cooperative, autonomous sense-and-avoid capability for UAS. The project will focus on what could be done if all aircraft in a particular airspace can transmit their positions to UAS pilots, and what those pilots can do to fly UAS safely.

The goal of LD-CAP is to inform policy discussions by producing operational and technical data from evaluations in a live operational setting. The project will be capped with experiments in North Dakota to evaluate cooperative sense-and- avoid capabilities. "We've been on our internal roadmap for over a year, and so far, we've hit every mark," says Szczerbinski. "There's been many a speed bump, but we've been very focused on the overarching sponsor outcome, and we believe that it's in the nation's interest that we get this technology out there.

"People talk about MITRE speaking with one voice. We think it's even more important that MITRE listen with 'one ear'-to hear what our customers and sponsors are saying and drive toward a common outcome. Everything else becomes details and tactics."

-by Russell Woolard
http://www.mitre.org/news/digest/defense_intelligence/03_11/unmanned_systems.html

Related articles

• Thoughtstream: When "soon" really isn't so..."soon" (sofcoast.com)
• Air traffic overhaul hinges on 'human factor' (cnn.com)
• The future of NextGen (thehill.com)
• Will air traffic overhaul make us safer? (cnn.com)
• Can the FAA Get Rid of Air Traffic Controllers? (theatlantic.com)
• Airspace victory planned (magnoliavoice.com)
• FAA Issues New Rules For Air Traffic Controllers (wnyc.org)

US Small Businesses, Endangered Species?

You know with all the talk by all of the politicians I'm still confused as to why they can't agree to fund the defense spending bill. Boggles the mind. Not to mention small businesses who are waiting for the bill to pass so they can hire........kind of ironic to have to lay off staff and get a part time job to make ends meet while waiting for congress to pass the defense spending bill while we are still fighting the longest war in the history of our country on multiple fronts abroad. Gates may be frustrated - but he's not bleeding to death. Republican. Democrat. Tea-Party. Independent. = Who cares if you can't (or won't) fund your military to defend the nation which translates to the small businesses in defense (job creator's) who are offering product or services the military has requested / needs end up going out of business and military leaders / planners / operator's pay an even higher price while congress plays politics? 

I thought the politicians were going to get serious about leading the nation and not playing pin the tail on the political donkey.

I'm starting to feel like the Donkey.

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Lack of FY11 Budget Ties Up Pentagon

New Programs Languish; Funds Flow to Axed Weapons

By KATE BRANNEN and CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS

Published: 6 Feb 2011 17:00

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=5636878&c=AME&s=TOP

One-third of the way through fiscal 2011, the Pentagon is still trapped in last year's spending plan, unable to launch new programs and running out of money to pay its troops.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, shown here Jan. 14 in Tokyo, recently expressed his frustration with the lack of a FY2011 budget for the Pentagon. (Larry Downing / Agence France-Presse)

Congress, having failed to pass any of the dozen annual budget bills, has instructed the military and the rest of the U.S. government to continue spending at 2010 levels at least through March 4.

That means, among other things, billions of dollars too little for the Air Force's tanker effort, which was supposed to get started in earnest this year, and billions too much for the Humvees that the Army wanted to stop buying.

The frustration finally spilled over for Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Jan. 26.

Continuing work under a continuing resolution (CR) would be "the worst of all possible reductions," Gates told reporters. "That's how you hollow out a military even in wartime."

Pentagon officials have some flexibility to move money around, but that margin is running out, said Stephen Daggett, a defense budget specialist at the Congressional Research Service. Under the current CR, there is not enough general transfer authority to shift the needed funds into must-pay accounts such as payroll and health care, Daggett said.

Meanwhile, the workload in military comptrollers' offices has gone up as Pentagon officials improvise in fiscal 2011, prepare to defend the fiscal 2010 budget on Capitol Hill and begin work on the fiscal 2013 spending plan.

"When you have so many tasks to do, you can't do any of them well," an Army official said. "In some respects, it's a cliff we're driving toward, but we still have time to turn around."

Lawmakers of the new Congress are only starting to grapple with the issue.

"The best case is: we're going to be six months into the fiscal year and we don't have a budget. It is not a good situation to be in," a senior Navy official said. "It forces you into stupid management decisions."

Several solutions are under discussion. One is to extend the continuing resolution to cover the rest of the year.

"That's the worst case," said the senior Navy official. "That would keep us at $23 billion below the Pentagon top line of $549 billion [requested for 2011]."

The official said that might threaten up to 7,300 civilian jobs, as new contracts fail to be issued and work slows on any number of projects.

The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a Washington-based lobby, is also pressing Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, to replace the CR with a full appropriations bill. In a Feb. 3 letter that was signed by 10 other associations, AIA officials said extending the CR would force companies to lay off employees and delay new hires.

Daggett said it was unlikely that lawmakers would simply extend the status quo.

"A yearlong CR at last year's levels would create so many problems that I don't think that's the worst that could happen; I don't think that could happen," Daggett said.

But he said a modified yearlong CR might be passed, with "legislative anomalies" or special conditions that allow quantity increases, new program starts and enough flexibility to cover must-pay personnel accounts.

Gordon Adams, who oversaw defense budgets at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, sees no problem with a reduced top line of roughly 3 percent under a yearlong CR.

"It might even help restore what Adm. [Michael] Mullen says was lost as the Pentagon budget doubled between FY 2001 and FY 2010: 'our ability to prioritize, to make hard decisions, to do tough analysis, to make trades,'" Adams wrote in a Jan. 28 blog entry on the Stimson Center's website.

But he agrees that DoD would need a higher level of general transfer authority to shift money toward its most important priorities.

"Right now, that flexibility is less than $10 billion," he said. "Congress could include a higher amount for this year, perhaps as much as the $19 billion of [General Transfer Authority] the House was prepared to provide in the CR that failed to pass in December, at the end of the lame-duck session."

A third option is passing an actual appropriations bill, perhaps an earmarkless version of the one that failed to pass in December, or a new one that also includes funding for the Department of Homeland Security and possibly other security entities.

From the Pentagon's point of view, the best-case scenario is an appropriations bill that reflects the fiscal 2011 request, with some congressional adjustments, Daggett said.

Also being discussed is another continuing resolution tied in some way to a deficit ceiling.

"That's the hardest to foresee," said the senior Navy official.

The lack of a 2011 budget may disrupt Pentagon efforts beyond the end of this fiscal year. Planners don't know how much money to properly construct the 2012 budget due to go to Congress on Feb. 14.

"There is going to be disruption," and the White House may have to go back and submit changes, said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "This [fiscal 2012] budget is already a week late coming out from what's usual, and so it could start cascading. If Congress is tied up for the next few months considering the FY11 budget, then they're going to be later starting work on the FY12 budget, which makes it less likely they will finish the FY12 budget on time. Then you start geting into the campaign season."

 

-- Dave Majumdar contributed to this report.

Related articles

• US CEOs urge passage of fiscal 2011 Pentagon budget (reuters.com)
• Pentagon War Request to be Lowest Since '05 (businessweek.com)
• Reagan model - or a disaster for defense | James Carafano ... (washingtonexaminer.com)
• UPDATE 2-US CEOs urge passage of fiscal 2011 Pentagon budget (reuters.com)
• Pentagon May See Modest Growth in Fiscal 2012 (businessweek.com)
• Defense Cuts We Can't Afford (bigpeace.com)
• A Peace Dividend from Troop Withdrawals (businessweek.com)
• The Project on Defense Alternatives Exposes Truth of Pentagon's ... (warisacrime.org)
• US House Budget Chief Wants to Cut $74B From Obama FY11 Budget (forexlive.com)
• UPDATE 1-US defense chief warns of "crisis" over budget (reuters.com)

Wavetops: Technology Readiness Levels "TRL's" - Demystified.

In order to describe and understand the level of readiness or maturity the Department of Defense and other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security use a "TRL" (short for Technology Readiness Level) framework.  I thought it might be helpful to share a slide I found in a DHS S&T presentation that quickly and efficiently depicts these different "TRL" levels.  What this means for us is that when I describe to someone that Mako (our product) is at a "TRL 6" , the meaning is that "the system/subsystem model / prototype has been demonstrated in a relevant environment" - in our case this means Mako has flown and performed as advertised in wind, rain, snow, dust, mountains, etc... not just on a sunny day or inside of a building on a bench.  

Image courtesy of The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate

Why this is relevant is because as a team, we have been and are continuing to attempt to blend the best of both processes and deliver as much value to end users on the frontlines as quickly as possible while not asking tax payers to bear the highest risk but provide investors an opportunity to benefit from large returns on investment by providing us with the highest risk capital which is the earliest capital with no revenue and no product.  Our private investor funding has enabled us to rapidly iterate (18 turns over three years) and to advance our product development much faster than any government agency would have allowed up to this point. 

Why this is valuable is that while our private investors have borne much of the early risk (and stand to benefit the most over time) with their capital to enable us to rapidly iterate in very short cycles, we believe that we are now in transition from product R&D (lots of cash out) to a go-to-market strategy (lots of cash out with cash starting to come in).  We have made our first product sales to the commercial market, we have additional interest from partners and service providers and are targeting these commercial sales and services revenue opportunities in the first quarter of 2011 while we continue our efforts to pursue and win federal funds for continued product improvements and program insertion to meet both recognized and unrecognized needs of Department of Defense and other federal customers.

Cheers,

John Surmont

Founder/CEO

Sofcoast, Inc.

Wavetops: Does this sound familiar?

Image via Wikipedia

I couldn't help but chuckle at this slide while reviewing a DHS S&T presentation.  I think Steven Gary Blank should incorporate these pictures in his book the four steps to the epiphany.... it might make it very easy for people to understand.

Note:

Below images courtesy of The United States Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.

 

 

Related articles

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MAKO Overview

Sharing the latest Mako overview which includes some pics and video from flights conducted in Portland Oregon 28 and 29 December 2010.

Enjoy.

 

Wavetops: Printed Memory Devices are coming

Image via Wikipedia

PARC Readies Printed Electronics for Market

Early 2011 will see printed memory devices in toys and printed sensors in packages used to ship drugs.

By Katherine Bourzac

Inexpensive printed sensors, transistors, and memory devices that aren't as speedy or as high-capacity as silicon devices could enable the widespread use of sensors in places that aren't cost-effective today. Disposable devices could monitor and store information about the temperature of drugs, the safety of food during shipping, or air quality.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which is owned by Xerox, have been developing a suite of materials for making printed electronics, including sensors and transistors. This week at the Printed Electronics USA conference in Santa Clara, California, PARC announced details about two partnerships to develop products based on its research prototypes. PARC will work with Norwegian company Thin Film Electronics to make higher-capacity printed memory devices that incorporate the research center's printed transistors. And PARC is working with Soligie of Savage, Minnesota, to develop products based on its printed temperature sensors.

Much of the excitement around printed electronics has centered on the potential to replace silicon electronics in complex devices such as display screens so that they can roll up. For these types of applications, researchers are working to match silicon's performance in materials that are just as fast and efficient, but flexible and inexpensive.

These more sophisticated printed electronics may be a few years from commercialization. "We want to go to market in simpler applications to prove that printed electronics can work today," says Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film. The company's 20-bit printed memory devices will be in toys early next year.

Products integrating these postage-stamp-sized memory devices will include playing cards paired with online games. Kids will use the cards to transfer their playing history between a PC and a handheld device. For a toy or a game that requires only a small amount of memory, using silicon-based memory like flash is impossibly expensive. "When you're only storing a small amount of data in lots of places, the cost threshold is right for printed electronics that cost a few cents," Sutija says.

Thin Film's memory devices are made on long reels of plastic using roll-to-roll printing, the same basic process used to churn out newspapers. They sandwich a layer of electrically sensitive polymer between top and bottom layers of wire-like electrodes that are perpendicular to one another. Where the electrodes cross, it creates a charge-storage device called a capacitor. When a small voltage is applied to the capacitor, the orientation of the polymer in the capacitor changes; this change in orientation makes the "1" and the "0."

The current devices have a large footprint relative to their storage capacity. By increasing the storage density in collaboration with PARC, Thin Film hopes to make a printed memory product that can be integrated with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in disposable packaging to store information about an individual item's history. Today, this requires silicon chips, which are too expensive to implement widely. However, cheaper devices could hold information about the history of, for example, individual bags of spinach, rather than about pallets that hold many boxes of bagged spinach. And more cell phones are expected to begin integrating near-field communications devices that will enable them to act as a contactless credit card and read ubiquitous RFID tags on things like bags of spinach.

To improve the storage density of the printed memory devices, Thin Film will integrate PARC's printed transistors. This will reduce the total number of electrical contact pads needed to read and write to the device. Sutija says the collaboration with PARC will lead to a 128-bit memory product that costs less than 10 cents.

Printed-electronics company Soligie is working with PARC to commercialize printed temperature sensors, or "thermistors," devices commonly found in air conditioners, ovens, and containers used to ship drugs. They're based on materials whose electrical resistance varies with temperature. To manufacture them usually requires baking ceramic materials at high temperatures to make a rigid wire-like structure. PARC has developed printable materials to make flexible thermistors that should be less expensive to make, says PARC's senior director of business development, John Knight.

The thermistors PARC will commercialize with Soligie will still need to be connected to a silicon chip to read out the temperature; down the line, the researchers expect to integrate them with all-printed circuits. The company will begin sending prototypes to customers early next year.

Copyright Technology Review 2010.

 

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Signals & Drumbeats: Paparazzi Drones

Paparazzi 'to deploy unmanned drones'

Celebrities could soon be running for cover as paparazzi deploy unmanned drones to take their pictures, according to reports.

Paparazzi could soon be using unmanned drones to take their photographs Photo: REX

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles 6:11PM GMT 08 Nov 2010

So-called "personal drones" mounted with cameras have already been used by police in crime fighting and photographers believe they could also be used to track stars.

Remote controlled flying devices about the size of pizza boxes are being developed by several companies and universities in the US and could be in use by the end of next year.

They are much smaller, simpler versions of the Predator drones used by the CIA to fire missiles in Afghanistan.

Ken Rinaldo, an associate professor at Ohio State University, is working on the "Paparazzi Drone." At the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada earlier this year he deployed "Paparazzi Bots," human-sized robots which followed athletes and spectators and took photographs of them.

Prof Rinaldo told the Wall Street Journal his drones would have "a lot of flash and bling, probably some lasers too." The US Federal Aviation Administration advises that only the government should use unmanned drones over US airspace.

However, it does not have rules prohibiting the flying of mini-drones for recreational purposes, and only advises that such aircraft be flown at low altitude and away from airports.

The FAA said if paparazzi began using the drones the "primary concern with that would be safety issues." Supporters of the idea suggest that stars could benefit because they would no longer be followed by photographers in cars. However, lawyers suggested celebrities would fight any use of drones on privacy grounds.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also working on small unmanned drones.

Other potential uses include accompanying soldiers on the battlefield, as search and rescue tools following natural disasters, for parents to check on children, or even for suspicious husbands and wives to track their spouses.

In February it was disclosed that Merseyside Police in the UK had used a £40,000 drone called the "Air Robot" to successfully track a suspected car thief and arrest him.

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• Paparazzi 'to deploy unmanned drones' (telegraph.co.uk)
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• Another Gift of the State (lewrockwell.com)
• Success!: Anti-Aircraft Laser Pews Down Unmanned Drone At English Airshow (geekologie.com)
• Unmanned Global Observer Aims to Make Satellites Obsolete [Drones] (gizmodo.com)
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Thoughtstream: The Global vs. Local divide

Image by uscgd8 via Flickr

I read an article today from the Homeland Security NewsWire about the recent release of AT&T's new satellite smarphone called the TerreStar Genus.  As a former military operator of sophisticated satellite communications systems, I've always been impressed with the tech.  I was impressed with the article about this gadget as well.

To summarize the article

"AT&T’s TerreStar Genus satellite smartphone allows users to communicate from areas where no wireless network coverage exists -- or areas where such coverage was destroyed by a disaster; the phone is not cheap, and using it is costly; there are other limitations, too -- but for those who need to stay in touch with headquarters even when outside of traditional coverage areas, or when such coverage has been disrupted, the phone offers a reasonable solution."

Beyond the typical information about features, benefits and costs there was an interesting comment made by the author about users of this device and "priviledge". 

For some reason the statement "the phone offers a reasonable solution." for those "priveledged" (to use it) bothers me.  I think primarily because I kept asking myself, "reasonable and priveledged for whom?  and by whose standards?"

Anyway.

I decided to look into some statistics about the number of casualties just this year from natural disasters. I learned that there have been 103 documented natural disasters so far in 2010. I also found here that the number of casualties from natural disasters in 2010 is already well above 200,000, which is outside the norm, and that this abnormally high death toll is primarily due to one single disaster, the Haiti Earthquake.

What I discovered is that while the tech is cool I started to think about the concept of two people separated by a few miles from one another trying to talk to each other and using something like this to enable those kinds of communications.  Then it hit me.  What bugs me is that this is a really sophisticated system that was originally developed for the United States Military to have their troops in the field be able to communicate in real time with their Headquarters which in some cases could be halfway around the world. 

According to the article...

"AP reports that there are some important benefits to the Genus. It could become an important tool for businesses that operate off the beaten path, like mineral mining companies, commercial fishermen, wilderness authorities, and emergency response workers."

My observation is that there are people who use and will use these devices to talk or message someone a few miles away with each other and end up paying the same premium one would expect to pay for something that enables you to talk or message someone halfway around the world.  I mean think about it.  Would you pay 65 cents per minute to talk to someone, $5 per megabyte to send data back and forth or pay .40 cents per text message if you could avoid it? Especially if you've got multiple people scattered out over a 20 mile radius? (as an example)

I'm not a doctor, but it seems kind of like using a sledgehammer when you need a scalpel, it just seems to me to be really expensive and inefficient. 

This is the reason we're bringing our technology to market.

As I've said before, we've observed over the years that something was missing for individuals who simply need lightweight, affordable, rapidly deployable and highly mobile technology to enable them to provide themselves with effective and efficient localized voice, data & imagery coverage capabilities. 

If you want to think about it in geeky computer science terms, we believe that the world is transitioning from a "Client Server or mainframe" architecture to a peer-to-peer architecture or even a Peering-Client-Peering-Server architecture.  Think about the way the United States Military developed their satellite communications or satellite Imagery systems.  To reflect their organizational requirements - which are global reach and centralized command and control, which is shifting and decentralizing and flattening, by the way.  This leads one to choose a Client Server or main-frame architecture.

Obviously this is fantastic technology and is very useful for many many people.  But it's not a cure-all for communications and imagery coverage for everyone.  Again, the problem is having to connect back to a server.  If you use Gmail you realize the limitations when Gmail slows down or is unavailable.  It stinks! 

The opportunity we see is to design, build, develop and deliver game-changing 21st century expeditionary enterprise platforms to front-line users.  In addition to the simple example outlined for  localized communications coverage, front-line users need the ability to generate localized iterative data and they need approachable systems, methods and techniques to accomplish this.  Examples of localized iterative data are high resolution aerial images or full motion video.  Of course, the data would be processed locally and then shared locally first and globally second which provides the (most important) local users "first dibs" on the data.  An additional benefit will be increasingly precise data, information, decisions and execution - resulting in more desirable outcomes.  By the way, the military calls this idea "Persistent Coverage".  They also have an interesting project ongoing in Afghanistan right now called "Gorgon Stare".

Today, if you aren't in the military (or a humongous publicly traded corporation with gobs of investors capital and net margins to spend) how do you affordably and effeciently achieve "persistent coverage" at the local level?  

Besides the military, additional users of persistent coverage generating iterative data are mineral mining companies, commercial fishermen, wilderness authorities, and emergency response workers.

Think about it, if wall street can come up with methods, techniques and systems to get the robot traders up to the minute data to generate enormous gobs of cash and transactions, why can't an expeditionary enterprise user on the front-line trying to save human life or defeat murderous thugs have a 21st century capability that puts their immediate and local needs first?

Global strategies, global reach, global this, global that sounds great on paper, looks wonderful in a prospectus or in the financial summary of a quarterly report or from a pundit on television.

The cold hard truth is that people (you and I) think, act and respond locally.

Like when you are trying to dig your relatives out of the rubble of a collapsed building or keep your shipmates or fellow soldier's safe in a hostile place far from the comforts and safety of home - the only thing that matters to you is to be blunt - what's going on around you. Nothing else really matters.

If you don't believe me - find a member of the military or a public safety professional or a Disaster Responder, or an NGO/Humanitarian Aid professional and ask them.

Before you ask them though, thank them for serving and for not being too "priveledged" to serve.

 

Cheers,

John

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Signals & Drumbeats: SDVOSB Set-Asides

One of the most important and impactful developments for federal contracting and small businesses who are classified as HUB Zone and Service Disabled Veteran Owned small business's (SDVOSB's) in years.  

This has not been widely covered and I'm not sure why but it unequivocally levels the playing field between HUB Zone, SDVOSB's and 8(a) businesses in their consideration for no-bid and sole source contracts and the pursuit of federal contracts with the United States Government.

http://blogs.cbh.com/govcon/?p=933

The FAR Revises Its Coverage of SDVOSB Set-Asides to Be Consistent with SBA Rules

In FAC 2005-43, the FAR Council amended the circumstances in which a sole source award could be made to an SDVOSB concern. FAR 19.1406(a) was amended, effective August 2, 2010, to state that a sole source award can be made to an SDVOSB concern if the “contracting officer does not have a reasonable expectation that offers would be received from two or more service-disabled veteran-owned small business concerns.” This change was made to make the FAR consistent with the SBA regulations concerning sole source SDVOSB awards and followed a successful protest against a contracting officer’s actions that complied with the old FAR coverage.

In MCS Portable Restroom Service, B-299291, March 28, 2007, the GAO sustained a protest challenging an agency’s failure to make a sole source award to a SDVOSB. MCS, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business concern, protested the Air Force’s decision not to make a sole-source award to an SDVOSBC, for portable chemical toilet services at the United States Air Force Academy, and to instead obtain these services as a small business set-aside.

As part of the market research for this acquisition, the contracting officer searched the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) database under the appropriate North American Industry Classification System code, and located 28 SDVOSBCs, 29 section 8(a) concerns, 10 Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) concerns, and 28 other small business concerns that potentially could perform the work.

The agency sent e-mails to all of these firms in February 2006, and received responses from two SDVOSBCs (MCS and a Florida company that expressed interest in developing a joint venture to perform this work), one HUBZone concern, and four small businesses. The agency then posted a “sources sought” notice on FedBizOpps and three companies responded: one small business, one women-owned small business, and MCS.

After considering this market research, the contracting officer determined that she did not have a reasonable expectation of receiving two or more bids from HUBZone or SDVOSBC concerns. Based on this determination and after receiving approval from the Air Force small business specialist to set aside the procurement for small businesses, the agency posted a synopsis of the proposed solicitation for these services as a small business set‑aside on FedBizOpps.

MCS then filed an agency-level protest of this determination.

After receiving the protest, the contracting officer searched the CCR for all SDVOSBCs in Colorado and nationwide. This search revealed the existence of 2 SDVOSBCs in Colorado and 20 SDVOSBCs nationwide that could potentially perform the work. The agency determined that a sole‑source SDVOSBC award was prohibited by the FAR. The agency then affirmed its decision to set aside the procurement for small businesses and denied MCS’s agency-level protest.

When the IFB was posted on FedBizOpps as a small business set-aside, MCS then timely protested to the GAO, reasserting the grounds raised in its agency-level protest.

In processing this protest, the GAO sought the views of the SBA on the propriety of the contracting officer’s actions. In commenting on the protest, the SBA disagreed with the contracting officer’s actions.

MCS complained that, even if the agency were correct that there was insufficient interest from two or more SDVOSBCs to set aside the procurement for SDVOSBCs, the agency should have made a sole-source award to MCS.

The agency asserted that FAR 19.1406(a) precluded a sole-source award to an SDVOSBC where more than one SDVOSBC exists that can satisfy the requirement. FAR 19.1406(a) states in pertinent part:

A contracting officer may award contracts to [SDVOSBCs] on a sole source basis . . ., provided–

(1) Only one [SDVOSBC] can satisfy the requirement

The Air Force’s essential argument was that FAR 19.1406(a) precluded making a sole‑source award to an SDVOSBC if, as its later CCR review established, more than one SDVOSBC existed that could potentially perform the work. In other words, although an offer was expected from only one offeror, other firms existed that were capable of performing the work. Therefore, the Air Force believed the FAR provision did not authorize the award of a sole source contract.

MCS and the SBA asserted that the Air Force misinterpreted FAR 19.1406(a). The SBA argued that the FAR should be interpreted “logically and consistently” with the Small Business Act and the implementing SBA regulations, which provide that a contracting officer may consider making a sole-source award to an SDVOSBC unless more than one SDVOSBC is expected to submit a bid under the acquisition. Using this approach, it is irrelevant how many firms can perform the work. What is the determinative factor of whether a procurement should be awarded on a sole source basis is how many SBVOSBCs are expected to submit bids or offers.

In resolving this issue, the GAO began its analysis with the language of the Veterans Benefit Act of 2003, which provides for sole-source contract awards to SDVOSBCs and states in pertinent part:

(a) Sole source contracts — In accordance with this section, a contracting officer may award a sole-source contract to any [SDVOSBC] if –

(1) such concern is determined to be a responsible contractor with respect to performance of such contract opportunity and the contracting officer does not have a reasonable expectation that 2 or more [SDVOSBCs] will submit offers for the contracting opportunity; . . .

15 U.S.C. §657f

The GAO observed that both the Act and the implementing SBA regulations provide contracting officers with the discretion to make sole-source awards to SDVOSBCs where the prerequisites that would allow for an SDVOSBC set‑aside have not been met, i.e., offers will not be received from two SDVOSBs and award will be made at a fair market price. Neither the Act nor the SBA regulations make a sole source award dependent upon the number of firms capable of performing the work, only the number of bids or offers expected.

While the Air Force’s position would seem to be consistent with a literal reading of old FAR 19.1406(a), the GAO reiterated that “a regulation must be interpreted so as to harmonize with and further and not conflict with the objective of the statute it implements.” In this regard, the “plain meaning” and intent of the Veterans Benefit Act of 2003 is that a sole-source award to an SDVOSBC is permitted if the contracting officer does not have a reasonable expectation that two or more SDVOSBCs would submit bids.

Therefore, the GAO held that the FAR should be read consistent with the SBA statutory and regulatory language. In conclusion, the GAO said that it recognized that “the plain wording of FAR 19.1406 is potentially at odds with that of the Act and the SBA regulations. By letter dated today, we are advising the FAR Council of the possible inconsistency in language with the applicable statute so that the Council may review the matter.” Over three years later, action has been taken on this error in the FAR.

As an aside, FAC 2005-45 increased the ceiling for SDVOSB sole source awards to $6M for NAICS manufacturing codes and $3.5M for all other NAICS, effective August 30, 2010.

Related articles

• Milton Security Group LLC Certified to Participate in the "Veterans First Contracting Program" (prweb.com)
• Ice Industries Highlights U.S. Government SDVOSB Designation (eon.businesswire.com)
• SBA Takes Closer Look At Federal Contractors (online.wsj.com)
• New Investigation Uncovers More Fraud in SBA Managed Programs, According to the American Small Business League (eon.businesswire.com)
• You: EG Solutions and MultimaxArray suspended in SBA contracts probe (washingtonpost.com)
• CRS: Location-Based Preferences in Federal and Federally Funded Contracting: An Overview of the Law (bespacific.com)
• Money is available for small businesses, but it takes work (usatoday.com)
• Landing Government Contracts (inc.com)

Signals & Drumbeats: Smile!

Interesting associated press article...

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Smile! Aerial images being used to enforce laws

 

AP – This screen grab taken from Google Earth shows a satellite image of the area around Riverhead, N.Y., …

By FRANK ELTMAN, Associated Press Writer Frank Eltman, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 51 mins ago

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. – On New York's Long Island, it's used to prevent drownings. In Greece, it's a tool to help solve a financial crisis. Municipalities update property assessment rolls and other government data with it. Some in law enforcement use it to supplement reconnaissance of crime suspects.

High-tech eyes in the sky — from satellite imagery to sophisticated aerial photography that maps entire communities — are being employed in creative new ways by government officials, a trend that civil libertarians and others fear are eroding privacy rights.

"As technology advances, we have to revisit questions about what is and what is not private information," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

Online services like Google and Bing give users very detailed images of practically any location on the planet. Though some images are months old, they make it possible for someone sitting in a living room in Brooklyn to look in on folks in Dublin or Prague, or even down the street in Flatbush.

Sean Walter, an attorney and first-term town supervisor in Riverhead, N.Y., insists he is a staunch defender of privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

But Walter supported using Google Earth images to help identify about 250 Riverhead homes where residents failed to get building permits certifying their swimming pools complied with safety regulations. All but about 10 eventually came to town hall.

Walter said the focus was safety, not filling town coffers with permit money, which averaged about $150 depending on the size of the pool. A 4-foot fence is required, gates have to be self-closing and padlocked. All pools must have an alarm that sounds when sensors are activated indicating someone is in the pool.

"We have a town employee who is a personal friend of mine whose son was found face-down in a swimming pool," Walter said. "He's OK, but I don't want to be the supervisor that attends the funeral of a child that drowns in a swimming pool."

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., fears that while Walter's focus was safety, other municipalities may use the images to check for other transgressions.

"It's only a matter of time," Coney said. "There are lots of ordinances where this can be used. In California, where they deal with brush fires, could a satellite image show if a homeowner has brush growing too close to his home? What if someone has junk cars on their lot in violation of ordinances?"

Riverhead resident Tony Villar said the town's action "could be considered Big Brother looking down at you."

"But at the same time, if the government can listen to your telephone conversations in the name of terrorism," he said.

Standing outside the Riverhead Public Library, Walter Casey of Flanders agreed. "I think it's a great intrusion on people's privacy; they should use it on the politicians' backyards."

The New York Civil Liberties Union's Donna Lieberman said there are ways to enforce requirements "without this sort of engaging in Big Brother on high. Technically, it may be lawful, but in the gut it does not feel like a free society kind of operation."

In Greece, officials are struggling with a debt crisis and have sought to catch tax-evaders by using satellite photos to spot undeclared swimming pools — indicators of taxable wealth.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said in a statement that Google Earth acquires its information from a broad range of commercial and public sources.

"The same information is available to anyone who buys it from these widely available public sources," she said. "Google's freely available technology has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from travel planning to scientific research to emergency response, rescue and relief in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake."

At least nine lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in the United States, contending that Google collected fragments of e-mails, Web-surfing data and other information from unencrypted wireless networks as it photographed neighborhoods for its "Street View" feature. Google is also facing investigations or inquiries in 38 states as well as in several countries, including Germany, Spain and Australia.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said in May it had inadvertently collected the data from public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, but maintains it never used the data and hasn't broken any laws.

Google Earth posts updates about every two weeks on selected images from its providers, with images ranging from a few weeks to a few years old.

For big cities like Chicago, tracking illegal pools, porches and decks through Google Earth requires frequent imaging updates, so the Chicago buildings department uses it as a reference tool on a case-by-case scenario, said spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

"We're not opposed to adopting new technology, but until it advances where we can get photos of more recent updates, we don't have any plans to implement it," he said.

Smaller towns such as Champaign and Naperville, Ill. opted to use satellite images as reference only.

"Mostly it's so we can see that we're going to the right building when we go to do inspections," said Ann Michalsen, lead inspector for code enforcement in Naperville.

It's also important for police officers to know they have the right destination when executing search warrants, said Joe Pollini, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Most departments would use it as a preliminary step, but they would also use active surveillance with their own aircraft," he said.

The nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog is seeking to determine the extent of the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration's use of Google Earth in its investigations, spokesman John M. Simpson said last week.

Federal contracting records reviewed by Consumer Watchdog show that the FBI has spent more than $600,000 on Google Earth since 2007. The Drug Enforcement Administration, meanwhile, has spent more than $67,000.

Simpson has called on Congress to investigate how U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are using Google technologies. The group says it has concerns that data could be used for racial profiling.

The New York Police Department's Real Time Crime Center uses satellite imaging and computerized mapping systems to identify geographic patterns of crimes and to pinpoint possible addresses where suspects might flee — information relayed to investigators on the street. The NYPD also has two major security initiatives where a network of public and private cameras will eventually link and be searchable.

The NYCLU has filed lawsuits in opposition.

"We live in an environment where we are told that if it's on camera, if you have a video record, that will make us safer," Lieberman said. "That may be appealing, but it is an unproven assertion. There's no evidence of that. Yet we see millions, if not billions, of post-9/11 money has gone to law enforcement for installing cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny."

___

Associated Press writers Serena Dai in Chicago and Colleen Long in New York and researcher Barbara Sambriski in New York contributed to this report.

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Article of Interest: Paradox of Innovation

Great narrative about innovation....especially when Mitch describes the difference between innovation and six sigma.....

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The Paradox of Innovation

Posted by Mitch Ditkoff at August 1, 2010 02:24 AM

My big insight about innovation these days would make Nobel Prize winner, Niels Bohr, proud.

"Now that we have met with paradox," explained Dr. Bohr, "we have some hope of making progress."

Innovation is full of it -- paradox, that is.

On one hand, organizations want structures, maps, models, guidelines, and systems. On the other hand, that's all too often the stuff that squelches innovation, driving it underground or out the door.

The noble search for a so-called "innovation process" can easily become a seduction, addiction, or distraction whereby innovation is marginalized, deferred, over-engineered, and worn like a badge.

True innovation is about allowing room enough for paradox to be a teacher and guide -- and to accept, at least for a little longer than usual, ambiguity, dissonance, and discomfort -- the age-old precursors to breakthrough.

Remember, there's a big difference between Six Sigma and Innovation.

Six Sigma is about reducing variability. Innovation is about increasing it-- and that often means allowing the kind of "messiness" that process-mavens interpret as a problem needing to be fixed, rather than a pre-condition to breakthrough and the resulting commercialization of that breakthrough that most people refer to as "innovation."

Yes, process, structures, systems are necessary, but they don't have to become overly pre-emptive. If you stay in an innovative mindset and can adapt to emerging needs, they will eventually become self-organizing when the soul of innovation is allowed to flourish.

Can we help the "innovation process" along with the right application of strategy, infrastructure, and planning?

Of course we can.

But beware! "Helping" the process too much often becomes counterproductive -- much in the same way that attempting to catch a milkweed floating through the air with a bold reach of your hand actually repels the object of your desire.

Innovation Physics 101.

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Thoughstream: Approachable aerial coverage kits

After spending some time with Stewart Long at Gonzoearth and learning more about what he's trying to do and learning a little bit about the grassroots mapping project, I decided to share a video about the backpackable system we're developing that we call the ASAP-SP (single panel).  I think this might fit some interesting usecases, especially for making approachable methods for aerial imaging.  In other words if there is a need for a kit that's still affordable but is just a little bit more robust, I think we might have something that can be immediately useable and wanted to share it.

Here are a few video's as an intro about some of our core innovations with asap and here's a photostream with some some more asap pics from CWID that might be of interest.

Cheers!

John Surmont

Founding CEO

Sofcoast

ASAP-SP in a backpack.

ASAP-XP in a dufflebag clip 1.

ASAP-XP in a dufflebag clip 2.

 

Wavetops: Comings and Goings

I had a great time at the inaugural wherecamp socal event hosted at the SDSU campus this weekend.

Dr. Eric Frost director for the SDSU Center for Information Technology and Infrastructure (CITI) and Sofcoast Chief Scientist, Todd Huffman, gave the keynote speeches - which were great. Hopefully those talks will get pushed out to the site at some point.

One note, Todd introduced me to Dr. Frost the day before the conference, they showed me around the vizlab and the inrelief website which serves as a portal to pretty valuable information. I'm stoked that they are passionate about enabling effective responses, coordinations and cooperation in times of need - at the vizlab.  And based on our discussions we just seem to be aligned very well and have numerous similar interests. We've also been invited to participate in upcoming exercises, one of them is called Exercise24 - which we'll keep you posted about.

Additionally, I think everyone should bookmark the vizlab's inrelief.org web app here.... 

I also hope the people that attended got something out of the impromptu unbrief that Scott Swanson and I gave about "demystifying unmanned systems and accessing national airspace".  I'll put the brief up at some point in the future.

Just a quick note about this:  It was thrilling to essentially "build" the conference "on the fly" based on who was at the conference and where the expertise and interests were.  We've got some ideas about how to make the discussion/presentation less about what we can't do and more about what we can (or should) be doing. (Also, here's my photostream as well...)

Lastly, I was stoked to hear Stewart Long with GonzoEarth give his talk about what he's doing with grassroots mapping.

(I know Todd took a few more pics and some others did as well...I'll work on getting some more pics published and shared.)

Update:  Some pics from Todd's Photostream here...

 

Stewart Long talks about aerial imaging with a very low cost balloon rig.

Stewart's  brand new balloon and we're checking it out.

I'll work with Stewart to link/share the imagery that we collected during this flight in a few days as well...I'm sure that'll make it easy for people to "get the point".

Update: Stewar shared the stitched aerial imagery we collected during the event. (Below). You can find the Google Earth image here.  Also, here's the high res version from flickr.

I'm heading back to Southeastern Kentucky on the 19th of July and am not looking forward to the heat, but I am looking forward to having a pretty full agenda that LeAnn has put together for me and it looks like it's going to be a very productive trip!

Cheers!

John Surmont

Founding CEO

Sofcoast

Signals & Drumbeats: Information Infrastructure

Here's my shared insight with you for today.

Lots of people, especially old school manned aviation types who cross over to be unmanned aviation types think that the unmanned systems are solving the problem of flying a small $400 dollar camera around by flying it around on an $800,000 small unmanned system - which is absolutely false and ridiculous.

When you think about it you, though, you might be able to understand why this "background of obviousness" might exist. Think about it this way.

• Manned Aviation primarily solve the logistical problem of moving things around that are physical and have mass such as people and stuff.
• Unmanned Systems primarily solve the logistical problem of moving information around.

• Unmanned systems are information technology systems that are expeditionary in nature - they can go anywhere, anytime.
• In the digital age, information is now taken for granted.
• We're in the meta-digital age and meta-layered information (information with context) is considered highly valuable.
• Unmanned Systems provid real-time 'meta-layer' information coverage.

I'm also happy to share a great short piece from Seth Godin (below) who is now using the term "information infrastructure" and provides yet another way to describe information infrastructure....

cheers!

John

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Information about Information

The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you can be worth more than the item itself.

Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model. 7 Eleven in Japan dominated for a decade or more because they used information to change their inventory. Zara in Europe is an information business that happens to sell clothes.

You've probably already guessed what's now: information about information. That's what Facebook and Google and Bloomberg do for a living. They create a meta-layer, a world of information about the information itself.

And why is this so valuable? Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage in the stock market. Or in marketing. Or in fundraising.

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

The race to deliver this essential scaling asset isn't over, it's just beginning.

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Wavetops: Godin on Low Self Esteem and the factory

I loved today's post from Seth Godin. 

Enjoy.

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If you want to hire people to do a job, to be cogs in the system and to do what they're told, you might want to focus on people who don't think very highly of themselves.

People with low self esteem might be more happy to be bossed around, timed, abused, misused and micromanaged, no?

And the converse is true as well. If you want to raise your game and build an organization filled with people who will change everything, the first thing to look for is someone who hasn't been brainwashed into believing that they're not capable of great work.

A harried teacher might find it easier to teach a class to obey first and think second, but is that sort of behavior valuable or scarce now?

Industries that need to subjugate women or demonstrate power over one class of person or another are always on the lookout for people they can diminish. Our task, then, is to find people we can encourage and nurture until they're as impatient with average as we are.

The paradox is that the very people that are the easiest to categorize, to command and to dominate are the last people we want to work with.

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Thoughtstream: The Black Curtain

Towards the end of my military career I was tasked to assess unmanned systems capabilities along with the vendors that developed these systems.  Through trial and error, great advice and my own experience I learned very early on to look for teams and tech that were "slick" and "polished" - and to be very suspicious of them.

One particular group had marketed an interesting system to us - and we were interested enough to come to them and spend time with them and their technology.  Over time an interesting pattern began to emerge - I'll call it the "pit crew" and "black curtain" phenomena.

In other words, at the end of the day operations would cease and we would be sent on our way and told where and when to meet up with the vendor's engineers and systems operators the next day. "Cool." we thought. 

On our way out of the vendors facilities we would see them go behind a large black curtain and hear hammers, saws, quiet conversations and lots of activity - all of which we couldn't see because the curtain shielded our view.

The next morning we'd show up ready for another day and the engineers and flight support team would come in with red eyes and pale faces.  When asked, "why the bleary eyes?", the reply would be something like "we had a few things to take care of last night."

We began to pay very close attention to the end of day flurry of activity "behind the black curtain" - because we felt like there was much more going on "behind the scenes" than the vendor was letting on.

Eventually we learned the truth - that while the systems we were operating and performing great for us during the day, they were requiring an enormous amount of post operational grooming and pre-operational preparations by the flight engineering team (that we couldn't see) well into the evenings and in order to be ready to go for us early the next morning. 

While the equipment seemed to be holding up (we eventually found out that it wasn't holding up either) - the wear and tear on the flight engineering team was quite evident to us.

Evidently they didn't want the end users such as ourselves to discover the amount of effort and work required to keep the system operational - which (unfortunately for the vendor) led to a "no go" decision for this particular system.

At the end of the day, our assessment was that there were just too many unknowns and too much uncertainty about supportability, maintainability and sustainability.  For tactical users these are critical paths that can mean the difference between successful technology and capability integration and mission success or unsuccessful capability integration and mission abort or mission failure.  Put another way, there's an appropriate old saying..."you can bullshit the fans but you can't bullshit the players..."

According to my search of wikipedia for Pit Stop, the term is summarized as follows:

"In motorsports, a pit stop is where a racing vehicle stops in the pits during a race for refuelling, new tires, repairs, mechanical adjustments, a driver change, or any combination of the above."

I'm not a racing expert but in a short time while writing this post, I discovered that the pit stops are visible to everyone - competitors, spectators, investors, owners and customers - and strategies are developed based on this fact.  

NASCAR has embraced the fact that pit stops are a fact of life (and of racing!) and even promotes competitions to determine who the best pit crews are.

The point here is this - costs are costs. Period.

New technologies (or new Tools) have costs associated with them and the benefits must outweigh the costs.  These tools require adoption, adaptation and use (in our case by the tactical users) and if the cost curve to use, field, deploy and support is too steep, than adoption won't (or can't) happen. Also, if the technical approach to resolving or reducing this cost curve is to hide the complexity or difficulty from the customer - you're toast - and you'd better pick a new strategy, a new team or simply stop what you're doing and go into another line of business such as theater or the movie's.

Signals & Drumbeats: Worlds converge

Interesting Texas Instruments article about convergence.

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Worlds converge: defense and communications electronics look more alike every day
Sandeep Kumar, marketing manager for TI's Growth Markets business unit

The first impetus behind the convergence of military/defense electronics and the telecom industry probably came from U.S. Senator William Perry, who in 1994 started a procurement reform movement known as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS). Perry’s idea was that whenever possible commercially available goods and material should be procured under military contracts. This was quite a departure from the military’s standard practice of the day which involved awarding contracts for expensive and lengthy design and development programs, followed by expensive production of systems that would be unique to a specific military program or project.

Overcoming Differences
Although it cannot be said that the embedded defense and telecom markets have converged, there are now many more similarities between them than there are disparities. For example, defense and telecom performance and cost requirements are trending closer.

Generally speaking, the defense electronics industry has always had performance as its ultimate objective. It was believed that the military’s computers, communications systems and all things electronic had to be a step or two ahead of everyone else’s electronic systems. It was a matter of national security. As a result, the cost of electronic systems was not a leading concern. Though performance still remains at the forefront of design considerations, the COTS movement has altered the approach to embedded military design. Not only has the use of COTS devices, driven by the telecom market, lowered costs, but the use of these standardized components and solutions allows more value for the investment by enhancing system usability via interoperability, longevity and risk management. Of course, there still remain other aspects of defense systems that require additional costs, including hardware and software redundancies in mission-critical systems, high-reliability and ruggedization requirements, but overall, the use of the COTS system has steadily climbed up the list of defense requirements without sacrificing performance.

In contrast, the telecom industry’s quest for performance was always tempered first and foremost by cost. The regulated environment of the past guaranteed the user base to service providers. They did not have to worry about attracting new subscribers with promises of better or more exciting services, which would have been driven by higher performing networks. Just as the COTS movement altered the direction of defense electronics, deregulation and the rise of the Internet has radically changed the path of the telecom industry. In an open world, speed, throughput, faster data rates and more bandwidth had to be delivered at attractive price points to remain competitive. Suddenly, performance moved up on the industry’s list of priorities.

Today’s telecom infrastructure is a mix of voice, video, audio and data processing elements doing functions ranging from complex signaling protocols, voice encode/decode/transcode, advanced audio, video and graphics processing, interactive voice recognition, etc. Many of these services have been in use in the military space for quite some time but on uniquely developed hardware. The telecom sector has demonstrated the viability of providing similar services based on COTS and it only makes sense for the defense industry to leverage this learning.

Defense Technologies Today
The electronic content of every country’s defense posture has increased tremendously in the last 10 to 15 years. One might wonder whether this could have been possible without the COTS movement and the fusion of defense with telecom needs.

Modern military tactics have come to rely on interconnectivity, instantaneous communication and vast but distributed computing power. That same sense of constant connectivity enabled by the same sorts of technologies can be found in today’s sophisticated wireless and wireline telecom networks. One only has to look at the smart weapons technologies, signal/communication intelligence equipment, advanced voice and video communication systems employed for communications and many other services to see the similarities in hardware and software requirements between the defense and telecom sectors.

Both the defense and telecom industries are gravitating to the same means to an end. Industry standards and open source software tools as means to ensure interoperability, reduce risk and facilitate upgradeability and maintainability are just several examples. The point is that years ago, the defense industry believed that by shunning commercial systems it would stay a step ahead. Now, many of the ways and the technologies of the telecom industry have become the springboard by which the defense industry maintains its leadership.

Staying a step ahead…
One can argue that Senator Perry did the defense industry a favor with his concept of COTS. Had the defense industry maintained its old track of developing, all of its electronic systems from scratch under huge procurement contracts would today be lagging the state-of-the-art. Instead, defense systems today are a marvel to behold. A prime example is the technology used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

In such aircraft, severely challenged by space constraints, power limitations and thermal conditions, designers are still able to integrate an incredible array of subsystems, including radar for target acquisition, image processing, a multitude of sensors, wideband and encrypted radio communications, powerful computer processing for mission analysis systems, video cameras and compression algorithms to store video data onboard the aircraft and many others.

It is difficult to envision defense systems as complex and as sophisticated as the UAV had the defense industry not adopted many of the commercial technologies of the telecom industry. For example, the same TI multicore digital signal processors (DSPs) that are found in wireless base stations and communications infrastructure systems play a central role in various defense systems because these powerful yet low power processors have the operational characteristics defense designers are looking for.

TI’s forthcoming multicore DSPs integrate both floating point and fixed point processing to significantly shorten development cycles and accelerate the delivery of working systems to the field. Built on fast 1.2 GHz cores, these advanced DSPs deliver phenomenal performance up to 256 GMACs or 128 GFLOPs, yet their power efficient design results in low power consumption.

Floating point is important for defense applications. In most cases, floating point implementations of many algorithms take fewer cycles to execute than fixed point code (such as large FFT). In the past, when starting with MATLAB, the designers were faced with the onerous and time consuming task of converting floating point code to fixed point, to take advantage of high performance DSP. With the new integrated fixed and floating point devices from TI, designers no longer have to struggle with time to market delays, especially since the floating point ISA is fully IEEE754 compliant.

The software tools supporting these DSPs – the code composers and C compilers, as well as open source Linux OSs and GCC tools – have tremendously eased the deployment of DSPs in networking, general computing and control/monitoring applications.

Maintaining the edge
Given the advanced state of defense technology today, the trajectories of the defense industry and the telecommunications industry is clear. The image that comes to mind is not that of two ships passing in the night, but more like two ships traveling side-by-side in tandem toward a shared destination. While the defense industry will continue to leverage the commercial technology suppliers to provide the springboard on which advanced systems can be built, technology providers, like TI, will certainly continue to adapt their innovations to meet the needs of defense systems.

LFI Update: Single Panel testing

sending out a quick update...more video is being processed and on the way......

Today we conducted a test flight of what we call the single panel ASAP XP. The single panel is a very small platform for elevating technology for short duration periods.

Most importantly, Mark H. demonstrated that he can eat leftover kettle korn from Petco Park while providing moral support and encouragement to me as I flight test Sofcoast's latest creation - aka project ditto... good stuff.

Long Video (Unedited and raw....9 minutes in length)

Airborne Video clip

Another clip of airborne video

For this flight test we flew in my backyard and decided to deploy the system winchless. We tied off the tether to a concrete footer we purchased from lowes.

We lifted a Sony DSC-H20 high definition digital still video camera to 120 ft. above ground.

In this test we were focused on demonstrating that the ASAP system is highly modular and flexible. We think it might be considered the first 'scalable' tethered system in the world.

We flew one bladder with a single shell attached to standard bridle lines and to a non powered tether.

Yesterday we flew a ubiquiti bullet with a 9db omni antennae along with a power tether to 150 ft.

More video here.

stay tuned!

LFI Update: CWID Technology Interoperability

Here's a quick report of the product performance and the capability we provided at the CWID events.

Summary

• Estimated Coverage 9.5 miles to the North, West & South.
• The test site was approximately 200’ below the hill top to the East.
  
• The ASAP raised the repeater 150’, making the differential approximately 50’ to the top of the hill. 
  
• The objective of covering the green and yellow area with reliable communications was met. 
  
• Communications was not needed to the East.

Here's the color legend for your reference:

• Red =  no coverage
• Yellow = Coverage Likely
• Light Green = Coverage Very Likely
• Dark Green = Coverage Certainly Likely

Signals & Drumbeats: Wind-powered Car settles DWFTTW debate

Wind-powered car goes down wind faster than the wind

June 4, 2010 by Lin Edwards

Image credit: Thin Air Designs

(PhysOrg.com) -- A wind-powered car has been clocked in the US traveling down wind faster than the wind. In a recent run at New Jerusalem in Tracy, California, the car reached a top speed of more than 2.85 times faster than the wind blowing at the time (13.5 mph) powered by the wind itself. The run should now settle the DWFTTW (down wind faster than the wind) debate that has been raging for some time on the Internet about whether or not such a feat was possible.

The Thin Air Designs car, called the Blackbird, was built by Rick Cavallaro, an aerodynamicist, paraglider and kitesurfer, who was alerted to the DWFTTW debate by his employer at Sportvision Inc., Stan Honey, a world-class sailing navigator. Cavallaro is chief scientist with the company. He made some calculations that convinced him the feat was possible and then built a model to prove it. When skeptics remained unconvinced, Cavallaro and a friend decided to build a full-size version.

The “Faster than the Wind” team was able to attract sponsorship from wind turbine company Joby Energy and Google, and worked in collaboration with the aero department of the San Jose State University to build their ultra-light vehicle, which is made largely of foam. The car has a passing resemblance to a Formula 1 racing car, except for the five meter high propeller mounted on the back, and it is this propeller that holds the key to how it is possible for the car to travel down wind faster than the wind. An earlier version known as the BUFC for Big Ugly Cart (fill in the blank), also achieved speeds greater than the down wind speed at the North American Land Sailing Association (NALSA) meeting on a dry lakebed in Nevada in March.

Cavallaro explained the car is able to move faster than the wind because the propeller is not turned by the wind. The wind pushes the vehicle forward, and once moving the wheels turn the propeller. The propeller spins in the opposite direction to that expected, pushing the wind backwards, which in turn pushes the car forwards, turning the wheels, and thus turning the propeller faster still.

The vehicle was built after over a year of trials. Building a transmission able to transfer power from the wheels to the propeller was the most difficult part of the design. The next stage in development will be to have trials confirmed by NALSA.

More information: Thin Air Designs blog: http://www.fasterthanthewind.org/
via Autopia

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

Signals & Drumbeats: Welcome to the world of Wicked Problems

The Gulf oil spill just highlights a national problem: the need for a national innovation panel to tackle our increasingly sticky problems.

Original Article Written by John Kao

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As Deepwater Horizon enters into its seventh week, one can’t help having a bit of the ‘I’m stuck in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone’ feeling.

 

First, the problem seems unending. No high tech magic wands. No victory laps. Rather, we’ve witnessed a series of techno-flops. Top kill, robots, container domes, riser insertion tubes, and now back to more robots. A definitive remedy, we’re told, can’t be in place until August. Hmm let’s see 5,000 (or is it 100,000) barrels per day times another 45 (or is it 60 or 90) days. Only one thing seems for sure. We’re talking a mighty big number.

 

Deepwater highlights how far we have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly in relation to important and emerging agendas.

 

 

And that’s the second striking feature of Deepwater: the mushiness of the data and the conflicting positions that result from it. Leak volume is only one example. Opinions also vary on environmental impact, costs, and on policy remedies that are now needed. We are now in the realm of challenges that defy simple technological solutions or orderly chains of command. It’s business Rashomon now, since how we define the problem (profits, environmental and economic impact, academic truth, regulatory oversight) determines what we think should be done.

 

This takes us to the third aspect of Deepwater, the ‘could have been’s’ that emerge as we walk the cat back. If only BP had better safety procedures, or had questioned the well’s stability earlier or had used a more conservative remedy in the first place. If only the federal government had stepped in sooner. If only our policies with regard to regulation of oil companies and offshore drilling had been more strict. If only we had brought other expert opinion in at the outset to work the problem.

 

 

Welcome to the world of wicked problems.

I touched on this topic recently in relation to the UK elections, but it is worth expanding on in relation to Deepwater. Almost 40 years ago, the social scientist Horst Rittel proposed the term “wicked problems” as a way of trying to understand why some challenges were intractable and highly difficult to deal with. Wicked problems shared certain characteristics, in his view. First, they were hard to define. (Is Deepwater an issue of technology, safety, policy, or environmental policy? Yes.) Second, they involved many different and hard to reconcile perspectives? (For sure, in this case.) Third, solutions weren’t true or false, but better or worse, and hard to test in advance. (Yep.) And fourth, the resut is a brace of conflicting opinions. (Definitely.)

 

So there may be an important, teachable element to the Deepwater story. While we would have all preferred a straightforward technological success story (top kill worked and it’s Miller time), the failure goes much further. It’s about how we look at our preparedness to address complex challenges and how we might deal with them better in the future. Because we are in an era of wicked problems, folks, and something like this, sadly, is bound to happen again. And again.

 

How do you deal with wicked problems? The key for Rittel was bringing a highly creative process to bear and collecting all stakeholders and viewpoints under one roof to engage in the work. He felt it important not to give in to the temptation to simplify, but rather to examine the challenge in all its complexity. Some of this is reflected in our president’s recent statement, We will take ideas from anywhere. That’s crucially important, but success is not just about ideas – it’s what you do with them to make them happen and when, as well as how you use the convening power of government to create blended solutions and fast synchronization among divergent parties.

 

Where can we find some best or at least promising practices? Certainly the military is in the wicked problems business. And in that culture, you find situation rooms, sophisticated approaches to command and control, experience in crisis management, mental rehearsal and training to think the unthinkable, and investment in leadership development. But comparable capabilities still seem lacking for the kind of societal disaster that is Deepwater. And they are desperately needed to generate the kind of divergent thinking appropriate to wicked problems. In the Deepwater story, it took a long while for academic expertise to be allowed into the tent and for the full weight of government expertise to make itself known once we had resolved a few little problems in the Minerals Management Service.

 

Info

So we need to know a lot more about how to do the work of innovation in order to address the kind of wicked problems that threaten the common good. In short, we need to design a new kind of innovative and fast capability in government that is also capable of blending in the perspectives of the private and NGO sectors as well as academic experts and civil society.

 

I have been saying for years that our government needs to get better at innovation. Deepwater highlights how far we have to go in terms of practicing innovation on the fly in relation to important and emerging agendas. We are still stuck in a government narrative that looks at innovation as being about cool, high-tech ideas, people in white lab coats or economic inputs within broad development policies. Well yes, but innovation is also about coming up with innovative solutions to wicked problems at the tempo of life. It’s about how senior people come together to figure out new solutions in a crisis to get us to where we want to go.

 

We need, I believe, a new kind of innovation rapid response capability that employs the state of the art in facilitation, communication and collaboration technology to generate speed and alignment. We need a new approach to cultivating facilitation skills that will enhance the work of stakeholder groups and allow the generation of rapid alignment among differing points of view. We need better tools for visualization and problem solving to create shared understanding. In short, we need a new kind of innovation SWAT capability with a seat at the table of power. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest during the last presidential campaign that every federal department have a senior facilitation team as part of a national facilitation corps that is prepared to deal with unexpected emergencies.

 

If we don’t do something like this, I fear that the history of our future will be written in terms of a series of wicked problems that turned out to be a lot more wicked than they could have been.

 

Dubbed "Mr. Creativity" by The Economist, John Kao is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and an adviser to both public and private sector leaders. He is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an association of national innovation "czars." He wrote Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek bestseller, and Innovation Nation. He is also a Tony-nominated producer of film and stage.

 

 

LFI Update: ASAP XP Radio Repeater Integration

I wanted to send out a brief update on our land mobile radio repeater payload development and integration efforts for ASAP XP. 

The purpose is to extend the range of handheld and portable radio's for expeditionary enterprise users.

Our first land mobile radio repeater payload is a 2 watt UHF system that includes a portable power distribution system.

Check out the photostream here.

The power distribution delivers 18V at 2-20 amps to the top of the tether.

Power cables.

Repeater and Payload Packaging

Here's the range matrix...

We've done our ground tests and we'll be flying the LMR package for the first time on a Six Panel ASAP XP monday June 7th.

Cheers,

John

Wavetops: "Surely not everyone"

Worthwhile post to read by Seth Godin about elitism run amok.  His latest book "linchpin" is fantastic as well. Highly recommended.

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Surely not everyone

A newspaper asked me the following, which practically set my hair on fire:

What inherent traits would make it easier for someone to becoming a linchpin? Surely not everyone can be a linchpin?

Why not? How dare anyone say that some people aren't somehow qualified to bring emotional labor to their work, somehow aren't genetically or culturally endowed with the seeds or instincts or desires to invent new techniques or ideas, or aren't chosen to connect with other human beings in a way that changes them for the better?

Perhaps we need people to sweep the floor or clean the deep fryer. But it doesn't have to be you...

Some people want to tell you that your DNA isn't right, or you're not from the right family or neighborhood. I think that's wrongheaded.

Bob Marley grew up in one of the poorest villages in the world. Sir Richard Branson has dyslexia that makes it difficult for him to read. Hugh Masakela grew up in Witbank, a coal mining town. It's not just musicians and entrepreneurs, of course. The Internet makes it possible for a programmer in Russia or a commentator in South Africa to have an impact on a large group of people as well.

We've been culturally brainwashed to believe that the factory approach (average products for average people, compliance, focus on speed and cost) is the one and only way. It's not.

We make a difference to other people when we give gifts to them, when we bring emotional labor to the table and do work that matters. It's hard for me to imagine that this is only available to a few. Yes, the cards are unfairly stacked against too many people. Yes, there's too many barriers and not enough support. But no, your ability to create and contribute isn't determined at birth. It's a choice.

A newspaper asked me the following, which practically set my hair on fire:

What inherent traits would make it easier for someone to becoming a linchpin? Surely not everyone can be a linchpin?

Why not? How dare anyone say that some people aren't somehow qualified to bring emotional labor to their work, somehow aren't genetically or culturally endowed with the seeds or instincts or desires to invent new techniques or ideas, or aren't chosen to connect with other human beings in a way that changes them for the better?

Perhaps we need people to sweep the floor or clean the deep fryer. But it doesn't have to be you...

Some people want to tell you that your DNA isn't right, or you're not from the right family or neighborhood. I think that's wrongheaded.

Bob Marley grew up in one of the poorest villages in the world. Sir Richard Branson has dyslexia that makes it difficult for him to read. Hugh Masakela grew up in Witbank, a coal mining town. It's not just musicians and entrepreneurs, of course. The Internet makes it possible for a programmer in Russia or a commentator in South Africa to have an impact on a large group of people as well.

We've been culturally brainwashed to believe that the factory approach (average products for average people, compliance, focus on speed and cost) is the one and only way. It's not.

We make a difference to other people when we give gifts to them, when we bring emotional labor to the table and do work that matters. It's hard for me to imagine that this is only available to a few. Yes, the cards are unfairly stacked against too many people. Yes, there's too many barriers and not enough support. But no, your ability to create and contribute isn't determined at birth. It's a choice.

Thoughtstream: High Order Bits

All Things Digital Q&A session with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 2007.  Wonderful to see two of the most influential people of the our generation share space and time and discuss computers, software and innovation.

Watch All Things Digital 2007 (D5) - Bill Gates & Steve Jobs (Part 2 of 2) in Technology  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Wavetops: The IBM Muppet Show

The IBM Muppet Show

Before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson made short films for Big Blue. The tech may be archaic, but the entertainment is timeless.

By Andrew Leal  |  Posted at 10:11 pm on Monday, May 31, 2010

IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff. Little known today, these remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. Henson would return to their gags and situations in his famous later works–and he plucked the Cookie Monster from one of them when assembling the Muppet cast for Sesame Street in 1969.

Whose idea was this unique collaboration? Well, Henson had already established himself in the advertising field. He was best known at the time for the Muppets’ guest skits on variety shows and Rowlf the Dog’s appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. But he was busier making a wide array of commercials and longer sales films for regional and national products from Esskay Meats to Marathon Gasoline.

For its own part, IBM was keenly aware that its products–including computers, electric typewriters, and very early word processors–had to be explained to both the public and IBM’s own employees. So it formed its own advertising group, including a film and television division. An executive named David Lazer headed this division, overseeing the production of training and sales films.

Jim Henson and friends in the 1960s.

According to Henson archivist Karen Falk, the IBM films were produced between 1966 and 1976, but most of the only confirmed examples date to the 1960s, primarily 1967. Jim Henson was the primary puppeteer and director in these projects. Assisting were the Muppets Inc./Henson Inc. staffers: Frank Oz (later to play Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and others), writer Jerry Juhl (who co-wrote The Muppet Movie, worked on Fraggle Rock, and scripted classic Ernie and Bert sketches), and puppet builder Don Sahlin (whose credits included George Pal’s Time Machine), among others.

1967 was an interesting time for the team-up: two years before the Muppets’ national prominence would rise thanks to Sesame Street, and two years after the introduction of IBM’s Selectric typewriter, an electric device which was crucial in the transition from old Remington typewriters to the modern word processors which would soon make the Selectric look old-fashioned.

Short and Silly Films

The films Henson made for IBM fell into two basic classes. The first were short comedic “meeting films,” which acted as icebreakers or to signal breaks in long corporate, sales, and training meetings. The second category consisted of longer industrial films which explained IBM’s products, service, and approach. Though the industrials look like commercials, their purpose seems to have been to motivate IBM’s sales team and/or to serve as a primer to potential corporate clients.

The meeting films were comedy bits which could have fit right in on The Muppet Show (and in fact some would be reworked and repeated on the series). Muppet trademarks, such as characters eating each other or spontaneous explosions, were already in force, as seen in a clip with two businessmen arguing.

Another features an early version of Kermit the Frog, one of only two star Muppets at the time, attempting to deliver a long speech on sales success while intimidated by a gruesome monster.

The third spot, “Coffee Break Machine,” is a quintessential Muppet comedy skit (it was remade twice, for The Ed Sullivan Show and The Muppet Show). It’s also the first explicit link between the meeting films and IBM’s products. The premise is simple, as an elaborate talking computer device (voiced by Jim Henson) recites a laundry list of features and components  all to produce a single cup of coffee. A Muppet monster, instantly recognizable as a prototype of Cookie Monster (but scruffier and with prominent teeth), enters and devours the machine piece by piece. (The monster’s voraciousness would remain when Cookie showed up on Sesame Street, but a modified toothless puppet would be used instead.)

This entertaining short displays an ambivalent attitude towards technology, showing it as complicated, seemingly pointless, and likely to self-destruct. Not a message one would expect from IBM, but it shows that the company–despite its reputations as a pretty button-downed place–had a corporate ability to laugh at itself.

IBM Puts on the Dog

When it came to the actual selling of its technological products and services, IBM worked with Henson and crew to produce more sales-driven but still entertaining sales and industrial films. In an entertaining untitled ten-minute short, Rowlf the Dog (the other established star Muppet, thanks to his regular stint with Jimmy Dean) appears as a newly hired IBM salescanine, proudly writing a letter to his mother about his exploits. Rowlf displays an adeptness at the keyboard which would serve him well years later as The Muppet Show‘s resident pianist.

Over the course of the film (divided into parts, with typed out intertitles), Rowlf progresses from a standard typewriter to an electric IBM model to finally using a Selectric, complete with shots of the famous “golf ball” typing element, which he observes with keen interest. Comedic bits include Rowlf accidentally breaking a bottle of mimeograph ink , struggling with stairs, and a running gag where the typewriter carriage backs up and knocks over objects.

In an industry in-joke, Rowlf’s sales territory is expanded to include an office building, only the camera trucks in to reveal the name “Sperry-Rand,” the early IBM competitor behind the Univac. By 1967, however, the company had become embroiled in a lawsuit with Honeywell and was diminishing in importance. Still, based on his track record, sending Rowlf to sell IBM products to a competing company might be construed as an act of corporate sabotage! In addition, the acknowledgment that IBM wasn’t the only fish in the pond differed from the period in the 1940s and 1950s when corporations were afraid to acknowledge competing companies (and long before the Mac/PC ads).

Among the other highlights are a series of amusing commercial spoofs made by Rowlf. One parodies a then-current series of Timex durability ads featuring newsman John Cameron Swayze. Another, referencing Wrigley’s Doublemint Twins ads, has twin Rowlfs chanting “Double your output, double your speed! With IBM MTS MT/ST” and then typing on dual machines.The MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter) would feature far more prominently in the next film, The Paperwork Explosion.

That film –whose title was a common term in the 1960s and perceived as a side-effect of the information explosion–eschews Muppets for a more serious but still creative presentation. It’s not dissimilar in its rapid cuts and use of animation to Henson’s earlier, Oscar-nominated short Time Piece.

The Paperwork Explosion (made concurrently with a same-named print campaign) uses a talking heads approach, as various office workers and/or IBM employees discuss the problem and its solution. The cast consists of a mix of New York commercial and character actors, Henson Inc. employees (a young Frank Oz can be glimpsed smoking a cigarette and Henson’s voice is briefly heard), and actual IBM people (including David Lazer).

The short’s music was by Raymond Scott, who had worked with Henson before but is best known as the composer of that Looney Tunes staple “Powerhouse,” usually played during  assembly-line scenes. Scott’s synthesizer score is perfectly matched to the subject matter, presenting both an insistent feel to the initial problem (businesses overwhelmed by paperwork in every facet) and then to IBM’s mechanized solution.

The IBM Selectric Composer, in a photo from IBMComposer.org.

The soundtrack and pace  gradually slow to a more comfortable rhythm, as the previously shown office folks begin to investigate the ways IBM products can help, especially the MT/ST. IBM’s print “paperwork explosion” ads described it further, as “a rather remarkable typewriter that takes a secretary’s rough draft and types it back error-free at the rather remarkable rate of a page every two minutes.”Also shown in the film is the IBM Selectric Composer, an advanced typesetter used to prepare copy which would be photographed for print ads and which allowed for a choice of font. Dictation machines are presented as ways to record the office staff’s thoughts more efficiently than freehand transcription or the best secretary.

These products may look quaint and amusing today, but in the 1960s this was futuristic stuff. And the mantra, reiterated by the chorus of talking heads, is that IBM office equipment and other machines will help do the work, leaving people more time to think.

Forty odd years later, it’s not clear that technology and our increasingly digital world have freed up time to think (though unquestionably they’ve given us more to think about). Outside of deeper messages, the film is very effective salesmanship and a fascinating mixture of techniques and look at the 1960s business world (or one version of it). As with his personal films, it proves Jim Henson could do more than wiggle frogs and dogs.

And Now For the Rest of the Story….

Once work had been completed on these films, Henson and IBM ended their partnership. But the collaboration’s impact continued to be felt, and the relationship between the Muppets and technology continues to this day:

• Once personal computers and related gadgetry entered American households, the Muppets were there. In the 1980s, for instance, there was a Muppet keyboard for IBM’s infamous PC Jr and a Muppet computer literacy program for the Commodore 64. In the 1990s, there were Muppet CD-ROMs. Today, the Muppets star in several apps for the iPhone.


Henson scribe Jerry Juhl with animatronic Muppet at the 1964 Worlds' Fair.

• Writer Jerry Juhl remained with the Muppets, but he used his IBM experiences for his sole foray into adult literature, a 1968 science-fiction short story called “The Edward Salant Letters,” detailing the correspondence between the owner of an IBM-like dictating typewriter (called a Phonotyper) receiving automated computer responses from the manufacturer (and thus eerily foreshadowing customer service hassles of today).
• IBM film honcho David Lazer joined Henson as a full-time executive, where, among other things, he was a producer for The Muppet Show and the movies The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. He also worked with Jim to develop and expand the “meeting film” concept. While IBM owned the original shorts, Lazer proposed making similar films which could be marketed to any business, spoofing corporate doubletalk, workplace tedium, and hard sell exhortations. These Muppet Meeting Films began in the 1970s, were significantly promoted in 1980 when new shorts were added, and remain available.
• Following Jim Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppets experienced many ups and downs and been sold and resold, but they’re currently enjoying a resurgence, due both to an upcoming Disney movie (The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever) and–benefiting from the computer era and the Internet–a series of clever and popular viral YouTube videos (notably an acclaimed cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
• IBM may no longer make typewriters or word processors–or office-automation machinery of any sort–but it remains a technological giant. In a touching nod to the past (or more likely, just using a popular internet phenomenon as an example), its developerWorks page on the Lex parser uses the Swedish Chef translator (turning text into mock Swedish and adding the Muppet’s trademark “Bork bork”) as an example.

And Jim Henson himself? He continued to toy with computers for as long as he lived, from making “Scanimation” films for Sesame Street to hiring engineers who created some of the earliest motion-capture CGI puppetry. And after his passing, one of the most memorable tributes he received came from a computer company. No, not IBM. It was Apple that prominently featured Henson (and Kermit) among the notable minds in its famous “Think Different” campaign. Jim Henson did indeed think differently, as these early films attest.

(Andrew Leal is a freelance writer in El Paso, Texas. A lifelong Muppet fan, he serves as administrator at Muppet Wiki and contributed to the book Kermit Culture. He’s also an animation historian, with selections in the books Animation Art and The Animated Movie Guide. He completed this article without the aid of an IBM Composer.)

Signals & Drumbeats: Human Capital and Diffusion

If you are interested in these kinds of things, this is an Interesting article titled The Density of Smart People by Richard Florida author of The Creative Class and founder of the Creative Class Group.

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Clusters of smart people of the highly educated sort that economists refer to as "human capital" are the key engine of economic growth and development.  Jane Jacobs argued that the clustering of talented and energetic in cities is the fundamental driving force of economic development. In a classic essay, "On the Mechanics of Economic Development," the Nobel prize-winning, University of Chicago economist Robert Lucas formalized Jacobs' insights and argued that human capital, or what can be called Jane Jacobs externalities, are indeed the key factor in economic growth and development. Still, the standard way economists measure human capital is to take the percentage of people in a country, state, or metropolitan area with a bachelor's degree or higher most scholars measure human capital in terms of population.

So I was intrigued by this fascinating analysis by Rob Pitingolo (h/t: Don Peck) which looks at the density of human capital. Pitingolo put together a neat measure that he refers to as "educational attainment density." Instead of measuring human capital or college degree holders as a function of population, he measures it as a function of land area -- that is, as college degree holders per square mile. As he explains:

I compiled the data at two geographic levels: first at the city level and second at the "urban county" level. I realize that comparing these geographies is not always entirely fair. That's why I'm giving away the spreadsheet with all of my work to anyone who wants to build upon this analysis (download it here). I picked these cities by looking at the 50 largest metro areas by population and pulling what I deemed to be the "primary city" from each. In two metro areas, the Twin Cities and Bay Area, I pulled two "primary cities."

He goes through a variety of analyses -- all of which I highly recommend. But let me just show the results of his analysis of college degree density for the 50 largest cities.

• San Francisco and New York are far and away the leaders in human capital density with 7,031 and 6,357 college degree holders per square mile, respectively. Boston (3,871), Washington, D.C. (3,395) , Seattle (2,853), and Chicago (2.543) all have human capital densities in the range of 2,500 to 3,500 degree holders per quarter mile.
• Silicon Valley has a human capital density of 1,259 degree holders per square mile. Also in this range and above the 1,000 threshold are Minneapolis (1,997), Providence (1,711), Philadelphia (1,664), Miami (1,633), L.A. (1,596), Oakland (1,596), Baltimore (1,336), St. Paul (1,293), Pittsburgh (1,289), San Jose (1,259) Portland (1,194), San Diego (1,071), Atlanta, (1,035) and Denver (1,023).
• Interestingly, noted high-tech clusters of Austin and Raleigh are slightly below this level with 857 and 799 college degree holders per square mile, respectively. The median density in his data series is 792.
• The lowest human capital densities are in Oklahoma City (159) and Jacksonville (167). Human capital densities of less than 500 degree holders per square mile are found in Birmingham (210), Louisville (250), Nashville (268), New Orleans (285), Kansas City (288), Memphis (313), Virginia Beach (370), Indianapolis (408), Detroit (425), Salt Lake City (445), Cleveland (453), San Antonio (469), and Phoenix (470).

Pitingolo also provides an interesting analysis of human capital density at the county level, as well as identifying places that perform better or worse than expected on "predicted degree density" via a residual analysis.  He raises an important question about "human capital sprawl." As he defines it, this occurs when human capital density is lower in the central city than its surrounding county. He finds preliminary evidence of human capital sprawl in five places -- Louisville, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Indianapolis, noting that: "This preliminary result is particularly worrisome if you believe that metro areas need strong central cities and strong central cities need a lot of smart people."

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Signals & Drumbeats: 2010 National Security Strategy

Obama redefines national security strategy, looks beyond military might

By Karen DeYoung

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 27, 2010; 4:46 PM

 

In a broad redefinition of U.S. strategic priorities, President Obama has said that the United States must revitalize its economic, moral and innovative strength if it is to continue to lead the world.

Just as it did after World War II, the United States today must shape an international order and system of global institutions that reflect a 21st-century reality in which "America's greatness is not assured," Obama says in a 52-page "National Security Strategy" released Thursday morning.

"As we fight the wars in front of us, we must see the horizon beyond them," he writes in an introduction to the document. "To get there, we must pursue a strategy of national renewal and global leadership -- a strategy that rebuilds the foundation of American strength and influence."

The report is the first that Obama has prepared under a 1986 law requiring the president to present Congress with an annual strategic statement. Most administrations have only sporadically adhered to the requirement; George W. Bush issued two national security strategies during his presidency, in 2002 and 2006.

 

The document serves to set administration priorities inside the government and communicate them to Congress, the American people and the world. It also is intended as a framework for strategy documents produced by other parts of the government, including the Pentagon's national defense strategy.

Obama's new doctrine represents a clear break with the unilateral military approach advocated by his predecessor after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush tempered that guidance toward the end of his presidency, but the Obama strategy offers "a broad concept of what constitutes our national security," the document says.

 

Military superiority must be maintained and "the United States remains the only nation able to project and sustain large-scale military operations over extended distances," the document says. But "when we overuse our military might, or fail to invest in or deploy complementary tools, or act without partners," it says, "then our military is overstretched. Americans bear a greater burden, and our leadership around the world is too narrowly identified with military forces."

 

The strategy cites four "enduring national interests" that are "inextricably linked:" security, prosperity, values and international order.

 

"One of the things we really wanted to do is to have this document represent the appropriate context of our times," Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said in an interview.

 

Reiterating international engagement and collaboration as first options against national security threats, themes that Obama has emphasized throughout his 16 months in office, the strategy emphasizes his commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and combating climate change. Obama previewed elements of the document Saturday, when he told the graduating class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., that "America has not succeeded by stepping out of the currents of cooperation."

 

In a choreographed series of events Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton discussed the diplomatic elements of the doctrine in a speech at the Brookings Institution, while James L. Jones, Obama's national security adviser, was to explain the strategy later at the Foreign Press Club.

 

 

"We are in a race between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration, and we see that every day," Clinton said. "In a world like this, American leadership isn't needed less; it's actually needed more. And the simple fact is that no significant global challenge can be met without us."

At the same time, she added, the United States needs partners to help it tackle common problems. "Leadership means . . . building the coalitions that can produce results against those shared challenges. It means providing incentives for states who are part of the solution, whether they recognize it or not, enabling them and encouraging them to live up to responsibilities that even a decade ago they would never have thought were theirs, and disincentives for those who do not," she said.

 

On Wednesday, John O. Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, discussed homeland security elements, saying the document "explicitly recognizes the threat to the United States posed by individuals radicalized here at home."

 

 

In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan described a "new phase" in al-Qaeda tactics, one in which people who do not fit the "traditional profile" attempt to carry out relatively unsophisticated attacks. He cited the Nigerian suspect in the failed Christmas Day airliner bomb attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani American who allegedly parked a car bomb in Times Square this month.

 

 

"As our enemy adapts and evolves their tactics," Brennan said, "so must we constantly adapt and evolve ours, not in a mad rush driven by fear, but in a thoughtful and reasoned way that enhances our security and further delegitimizes the actions of our enemy."

Implicitly rejecting the antiterrorism rhetoric of the Bush administration, Brennan said that "our enemy is not terrorism, because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not terror, because terror is a state of mind and, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear."

"Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists," Brennan said, because use of these religious terms would "play into the false perception" that al-Qaeda and its affiliates are "religious leaders and defending a holy cause, when in fact, they are nothing more than murderers."

 

 

"The United States is at war," he said. "We are at war against al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates."

The administration "will take the fight" to the extremists "wherever they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond," Brennan said, but "will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer."

"When we know of terrorists who are plotting against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves, and we will do so," Brennan said. "At the same time, an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian casualties can, in fact, inflame local populations and create far more problems -- a tactical success but a strategic failure."

Even as the United States strengthens internal and international defenses, American values and resilience remain the primary U.S. weapons, he said.

"Terrorists may try to bring death to our cities, but it is our choice to either uphold the rule of law or chip away at it . . . to either respond wisely and effectively or lash out in ways that inflame entire regions and stoke the fires of violent extremism. That is our choice. And with the strategy . . . President Obama and the administration offers our answer."

 

 

The administration, the strategy document says, will "do everything in our power to prevent these dangers . . . [but] we also recognize that we will not be able to deter or prevent every single threat. That is why we must also enhance our resilience -- the ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for, withstand and rapidly recover from disruption."

The document repeats Obama's pledge to close the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba, but offers no new details on how and when that will happen. It renews the administration's commitment to "bring terrorists to justice . . . in line with the rule of law and due process" and called for "durable legal approaches consistent with our security and our values."

The strategy restates familiar administration policy on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Iran and North Korea, and reiterates that "our relationship with our European allies remains the cornerstone for U.S. engagement with the world." It nods to strong U.S. partnerships with Asian powers, including Japan and South Korea, and Canada and Mexico as hemispheric allies.

It briefly mentions Israel, citing the importance of maintaining a "strong partnership" and supporting Israel's "lasting integration" into the Middle East. But in the same paragraph, it says that the United States "also will continue to develop our key security relationships in the region" with Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.

A central part of administration strategy, the document says, is expanding U.S. engagement with "other key centers of influence -- including China, India and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia." It notes a previously announced shift in U.S. focus from the Group of Eight industrialized nations to the Group of 20 as "the premier forum for international economic cooperation."

 

The strategy concludes on a somewhat wistful note, saying that both domestic and international progress will depend on "broad and bipartisan cooperation" whose absence "places the United States at a strategic disadvantage."

 

"Throughout the Cold War, even as there were intense disagreements about certain courses of action, there remained a belief that America's political leaders shared common goals, even if they differed about how to reach them," it says. "In today's political environment, due to the actions of both parties, that sense of common purpose is at times lacking in our national security dialogue."

 

Thoughtstream: What a mess

As the founding CEO of Sofcoast, (which is a privately held, investor-backed, forward leaning technology startup, that designs and builds information infrastructure solutions for expeditionary enterprise users in public safety, defense and commercial markets), I am responsible for constituting the business, constituting and holding the vision, developing and executing effective strategies for producing structures for fulfillment to develop and ship product,  produce satisfied customers, investors, partners and other key stakeholders by achieving sustainable revenue growth through efficient operational performance.

As I watch the BP oil spill disaster unfold in the Gulf of Mexico, I simply can't fathom how such a large company with so much cash on-hand and operational expertise can't be better equipped and prepared to respond to this disaster.

As an entrepreneur and business owner, my heart goes out to all of those who's livelihood's depend on the gulf to feed their families and take care of their own concerns,  such as those fisherman in the marine industries or those who depend on recreation & leisure, travel & tourism dollars to provide for their families. 

I can't help but keep thinking about one thing....

British Petroleum's balance sheet - which shows how much cash (yes, it's billions) the company has on-hand (as of March 31st, 2010). (see below, courtesy Google Finance)

                                                Screenshot from Google Finance

For me, it's simply undignified to know that this company has so much money and capacity - while seeing such an ineffective response as we all watch this disaster unfold and harm so many people and living things.

What a mess.

Signals & Drumbeats: On iPads, Femtocells, and Infrastructure

On iPads, Femtocells, and Infrastructure

 

Featured In: Newsletters | Consumer Electronics | The Cutting Edge

By Rupert Baines, Picochip (www.picochip.com) | Friday, May 21, 2010

 

You probably spotted the news that Softbank is going to have iPad and iPhone exclusively in Japan, much to the anger of DoCoMo.   

 

It's not enough to just have must have devices like iPad and iPhone (even on an exclusive basis) without thinking about the bigger picture and ensuring you have the necessary infrastructure to support these devices. Softbank is a great example of an operator doing just this. 

The traffic from these devices is dramatically loading networks, and actually the impact of signaling is even more of a stress (I heard recently that one iPhone with a typical load of always on Apps is the same user of network resource as 1,000 conventional voice phones…)   

As such, it is probably no coincidence that Softbank has launched its femtocell service.

 

http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/special/network/home_antenna_ft/   (it is in Japanese, naturally enough – but Google translate is pretty impressive)   

 

What is especially significant is that this is free. As in zero cost, nada, fully-subsidized.   

It is the first time an operator has done such an aggressive offer as their standard offer. Most operators are somewhat subsiding the femtocell, but consumers still have to pay – however in many cases if you phone to complain of poor coverage and threaten to leave they will give you a free device to keep you happy – but that is not the “list price” in the way that it is for Softbank.  

Josh Adelson of Airvana has written a good blog on the subject of pricing, and concludes there is a lot of scope for interesting models.

 

http://www.femtohub.com/articles/41768/a-radical-approach-to-femtocell-pricing/

As operators appreciate the opportunities femtocells give to improve their network efficiency, I expect we will see a lot more of them following Softbank’s lead and offering some very attractive pricing, and probably some attractive plans too (for example AT&T’s unlimited calls & data from home which do not count against your plan minutes).

Repost: Seth Godin...Surfing is the new career

I'm digging Seth Godin's posts...

check this latest one out...

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Surfing is the new career

Three months ago I wrote about farming and hunting. It seems, though, that the growth industry of our generation is surfing.

Talk to surfers and they'll explain that the entire sport comes down to the hunt for that blissful moment that combines three unstable elements in combination: the wave is just a little too big to handle, the board is going just a little too fast, and the ride could end at any moment.

This makes for a great sport (for some people, anyway) but until recently, it wasn't much of a career path. (aside: Aimless web surfing is a waste of time, and that's not the sort of surfing I'm referring to). That feeling of freedom and risk in equal measure was difficult to find at work, so we sought it out on the slopes or the ocean.

Once we figured out how to get thrills from waves, we could switch to snow, or to stand up paddling, or kiteboarding. Different terrain, same cycle.

More people, though, are finding a way to surf and get paid for it. Freelance projects, joint ventures, entrepreneurial startups are all paying off for people who are hooked on this feeling of plan, launch, cowabunga, repeat. Each time you do it, you get to take on a bigger project, a bigger wave. The cost of wiping out is low (if you plan for it) and so you can do it again and again. You don't even have to be solo... now there are teams and corporations that seek out people who want to surf their way through fundraising or product development or customer delight.

We see successful musicians and writers do this all the time. Now, though, it's not unusual to watch someone surf in their development of shareware, or in the videos they post online or risks they take in their personal blog.

So many of the conversations I have every day could easily be replaced with, "so, where's the next wave? Tell me about your last one..."

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Signals & Drumbeats: Gates calls for significant custs in defense overhead

Worth reading or viewing the remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Abilene, KS, Saturday, May 08, 2010

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Thank you, Congressman Moran, for that kind introduction. 

And thanks to the Eisenhower Library for the honor of being your speaker on this historic occasion – the 65th anniversary of the allied victory in Europe.  I know there are a number of veterans from World War II with us. We are all grateful for what you achieved and sacrificed to make it possible for us to gather as free people in comfort and security today. 

I’m pleased to be here for several reasons.  First, it’s always a treat to be someplace other than Washington, D.C. – the only place where, as I like to say, you can see a prominent person walking down lover’s lane holding his own hand.  Second, it’s even better to return to my home state of Kansas – a place of little pretense and ample common sense.  And, above all, I am honored and humbled to be at this wonderful institution on this occasion, and to be associated in even a small way with the legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  

I should note that this is actually my second visit to the Eisenhower Library and Museum.  My first was with my sixth-grade class from Wichita 54 years ago.

With just under four-and-half decades in government, academia, and the corporate sector, I consider myself a person of few illusions and not all that many unalloyed heroes.  General Eisenhower – whose portrait hangs behind my desk at the Pentagon, and whose life has been a source of wisdom and inspiration – is one of those heroes.  Another is General George C. Marshall, his “Partner in Command” whose portrait fittingly hangs right next to Ike. 

Eisenhower was a low-maintenance leader of simple tastes, modest demands, and small entourages – in stark contrast to what often happens at the upper levels of power in Washington and in other elite settings. 

A newspaper article from December 1944 described a visit by Eisenhower to the front lines in the European Theater of Operations.  The reporter noted that “there is no fanfare, no screaming motorcycle escorts, no fluttering banners” – only a convoy that consisted of three cars:  one for Ike and his sole British aide, one for the press, and one spare.  After arriving, Eisenhower set up his modest trailer right in the middle of what the reporter described as “one of the biggest and sloppiest mud puddles in creation,” despite the presence of an elegant (and abandoned) chateau nearby. 

I should note that even the bureaucratically-wise General Eisenhower was flummoxed by the Pentagon, now referred to as the “Puzzle Palace.”  Soon after the war and returning to Washington, Ike made the mistake of trying to find his office by himself, and got very lost.  He later wrote:  “One had to give the building his grudging admiration; it had apparently been designed to confuse any enemy who might infiltrate it.”

Eisenhower was not alone in that fate.  Newsman David Brinkley used to tell a story of the early days at the Pentagon.  A woman told a Pentagon guard she was in labor and needed help in quickly getting to a hospital.  The guard said, “Madam, you should not have come in here in that condition.”  She answered, “I wasn’t in this condition when I came in.”

The occasion that brings us together this afternoon is, of course, the 65th anniversary of the allied victory in Europe – an achievement that would not have been possible without Ike’s strategic vision, diplomatic savvy, and remarkable skill at managing the personalities of his top generals.  As one historian put it, Eisenhower had to deal with as “fractious and dysfunctional a group of egomaniacs as any war had ever seen.”  Arguably Ike’s greatest achievement was keeping the allied high command focused on killing the Nazis as opposed to each other.

But today I’m not going to focus my remarks on what General Eisenhower did to win that war.  Instead, I’d like to discuss the approach he took, and especially the choices he made, to secure what historian John Lewis Gaddis called “The Long Peace” that followed.  Choices that played a major role in keeping America safe, prosperous, and free for nearly six decades.  Choices that, as I will explain, can inform greatly the dilemmas we face today in providing for – and paying for – our national defense.

Six months ago, President Obama addressed the nation from West Point, where he laid out the case for a new strategy to achieve America’s objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The president invoked Eisenhower, speaking of the need to weigh options in [QUOTE] “the light of a broader consideration:  the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

This excerpt was panned in certain quarters for being insufficiently rousing in the Churchillian sense.  But I believe Eisenhower would have approved, and not just because the words were lifted from his farewell address.  Indeed, seeking and maintaining balance – and the choices doing so entailed – infused Eisenhower’s approach to national security, and to statecraft writ large. 

Faced with the pre-eminent security threat of his time, the Soviet Union, Ike was as strong a Cold Warrior as they come.  He had no illusions about the nature of the Soviet adversary, which he once called “Global in scope. . . ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.”   In his famous farewell address he warned: “Our arms must be mighty, ready for resistant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.”

Yet, during his presidency, Eisenhower resisted pressure to intervene militarily in Vietnam and in the Middle East.  This restraint wasn’t just a true soldier’s hatred of war, and all of its attendant costs and horrors.  It came in no small part from an understanding that even a superpower such as the United States – then near the zenith of its strength and prosperity relative to the rest of the world – did not have unlimited political, economic and military resources.  Expending them in one area – say a protracted war in the developing world – would sap the strength available to do anything else. 

Furthermore, Eisenhower strongly believed that the United States – indeed, any nation – could only be as militarily strong as it was economically dynamic and fiscally sound.  He lamented the cost of a large standing defense establishment maintained at a high level of readiness.  As he put it so memorably at the end of his presidency: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”

Eisenhower was wary of seeing his beloved republic turn into a muscle-bound, garrison state – militarily strong, but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent.   He once warned that “we must not destroy from within what we are trying to defend from without.”  This fueled his passionate belief that the U.S. should spend as much as necessary on national defense – but not one penny more.  And with his peerless credentials and standing, he was uniquely positioned to ask hard questions, make tough choices, and set firm limits. 

Thanks to the archives of this library, we have first-hand documentary insight into how probing (and ruthless) this five-star general could be when it came to forcing the military establishment to justify its programs and priorities.  Consider an account of just one White House meeting in March 1956.   Eisenhower sat down with his top defense advisors to discuss the Pentagon budget.  The meeting notes show Eisenhower becoming exasperated that [QUOTE] “no one ever comes up to him and says ‘let’s get rid of something.’”  He then observed that it took the Army 50 years to get rid of horses.  Ike questioned why the new Navy missiles cost so much more than the weapons they replaced and queried why the Army should have a 1500-mile ballistic missile program, since, in his words, “the Army does not have the equipment to see where they are hitting.”  

Eisenhower told his senior defense team that he wanted the Pentagon cut down to a [QUOTE] “Spartan basis,” lamenting that “people he had known all his life were asking for more and more.”  He went on to say:  “I say the patriot today is the fellow who can do the job with less money.”    

Time and again, whenever Eisenhower was asked to fund something his response usually took the form of a question:  where is the money going to come from, and what will the military cut in its place?   The other question was priorities.  In a meeting with defense officials earlier in his presidency, Eisenhower said he was troubled by the tendency to “pile program on program” to meet every possible contingency. 
Looking back from today’s vantage point, what I find so compelling and instructive was the simple fact that when it came to defense matters, under Eisenhower real choices were made, priorities set, and limits enforced.  This became increasingly rare in the decades that followed, despite the best efforts of some of my predecessors and other attempts at reform over the years.

The attacks of September 11th, 2001, opened a gusher of defense spending that nearly doubled the base budget over the last decade, not counting supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Which brings us to the situation we face and the choices we have today – as a defense department and as a country.  Given America’s difficult economic circumstances and parlous fiscal condition, military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny.  The gusher has been turned off, and will stay off for a good period of time.

 On one level it’s a simple matter of math.  The fact that we are a nation at war and facing an uncertain world, I believe, calls for sustaining the current military force structure – Army brigades, Marine regiments, Air Force wings, Navy ships.  This typically requires regular real growth in the defense budget ranging from two and three percent above inflation.  In this year’s budget request, the Defense Department asked for, and I hope will receive, just under two percent – roughly that level of growth.  But, realistically, it is highly unlikely that we will achieve the real growth rates necessary to sustain the current force structure.

Some argue that the answer is to simply press harder for a bigger overall budget.  They point out that defense spending today as a function of gross domestic product – roughly four and a half percent – is relatively small in historical terms at a time of war – just over half of the average during Eisenhower’s administration.  They would be right, and I don’t hesitate to make that point during my trips to Capitol Hill during budget season.  But today we face a very different set of American economic and fiscal realities.

To be sure, changing the way we operate and achieving substantial savings will mean overcoming steep institutional and political challenges – many lying outside the five walls of the Pentagon.  For example, in this year’s budget submission the Department has asked to end funding for an unnecessary alternative engine for the new Joint Strike Fighter and for more C-17 cargo planes.  Study on top of study has shown that an extra fighter engine achieves marginal potential savings but heavy upfront costs – nearly $3 billion worth.  Multiple studies also show that the military has ample air-lift capacity to meet all current and feasible future needs.  The leadership of the Air Force is clear:  they do not need and cannot afford more C-17s.  Correspondingly, the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy do not want the second F-35 engine.   Yet, as we speak, a battle is underway to keep the Congress from putting both of these programs back in the budget – at an unnecessary potential cost to the taxpayers of billions of dollars over the next few years.  I have strongly recommended a presidential veto if either program is included in next year’s defense budget legislation.

Consider another example.  Leaving aside the sacred obligation we have to America’s wounded warriors, health-care costs are eating the Defense Department alive, rising from $19 billion a decade ago to roughly $50 billion – roughly the entire foreign affairs and assistance budget of the State Department.  The premiums for TRICARE, the military health insurance program, have not risen since the program was founded more than a decade ago.  Many working age military retirees – who are earning full-time salaries on top of their full military pensions – are opting for TRICARE even though they could get health coverage through their employer, with the taxpayer picking up most of the tab.  In recent years the Department has attempted modest increases in premiums and co-pays to help bring costs under control, but has been met with a furious response from the Congress and veterans groups.  The proposals routinely die an ignominious death on Capitol Hill. 

The resistance to dealing with TRICARE stems from an admirable sentiment:  to take good care of our troops, their families, and veterans – especially those who have sacrificed and suffered on the battlefield.  This same sentiment motivates the congress routinely to add an extra half percent to the pay raise that the Department requests each year.  Furthermore, the all-volunteer force, which has been a brilliant success in terms of performance, is a group that is older, more likely to have spouses and children,  and thus far costlier to recruit, retain, house, and care for than the Eisenhower-era military that relied on the draft of young single men to fill out its ranks.

Those are the political and demographic realities we face.  To a certain extent they limit what can be saved and where.  But as a matter of principle and political reality, the Department of Defense cannot go to the America’s elected representatives and ask for increases each year unless we have done everything possible to make every dollar count.  Unless there is real reform in the way this department does its business and spends taxpayer dollars.  

For the better part of two years I have focused on the Pentagon’s major weapons programs – to make sure we are buying the right things in the right quantities.  Last year, the Department made more than 30 tough choices in this area, cancelling or curtailing major weapons systems that were either performing poorly or excess to real world needs – about $330 billion dollars worth as measured over the life of the terminated programs.  We also began to overhaul the Pentagon’s processes for acquisitions and contracting.

 Earlier this week at the Navy League, I observed that fiscal realities will preclude the Navy from reaching its goal of 313 ships if each ship is over budget and costs billions of dollars.  Without exercising real diligence, if nature takes its course, major weapons programs will devolve into pursuing the limits of what technology will bear without regard to cost or what a real world enemy can do – a process that over the past two decades has led to $20 million howitzers, $2 billion bombers, and 3 to 6 billion dollar destroyers. And when costs soar, the number of ships and planes the military can buy drops accordingly.   For example, the Navy wanted 32 of the next generation destroyer – the DDG-1000; because of skyrocketing costs, we will build three.   The Air Force wanted 132 B-2 bombers; at $2 billion each, we built 20.  This is unsustainable.

The changes we have made in the procurement arena represent an important start.  But only a start.  More is needed – much more.  The Defense Department must take a hard look at every aspect of how it is organized, staffed, and operated – indeed, every aspect of how it does business.  In each instance we must ask:  First, is this respectful of the American taxpayer at a time of economic and fiscal duress?  And second, is this activity or arrangement the best use of limited dollars, given the pressing needs to take care of our people, win the wars we are in, and invest in the capabilities necessary to deal with the most likely and lethal future threats?

As a starting point, no real progress toward savings will be possible without reforming our budgeting practices and assumptions.  Too often budgets are divied up and doled out every year as a straight line projection of what was spent the year before.  Very rarely is the activity funded in these areas ever fundamentally re-examined – either in terms of quantity, type, or whether it should be conducted at all.  That needs to change. 

Consider the Department’s spending on operations and maintenance, a broad category that encompasses about $200 billion worth of the day-to-day activities of the military – from flight training to mowing the grass.   Over the last decade, spending in this area – not counting expenses directly related to the wars – has about doubled, with large increases in administrative and infrastructure support.  At the same time, the department’s spending on contract services – excluding the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters – has grown by some $23 billion.  The one area of real decline in overhead was in the area where we actually needed it:  full-time contracting professionals, whose numbers plunged from 26,000 to about 9,000.  We ended up with contractors supervising other contractors – with predictable results.

Another category ripe for scrutiny should be overhead – all the activity and bureaucracy that supports the military mission.  According to an estimate by the Defense Business Board, overhead, broadly defined, makes up roughly 40 percent of the Department’s budget.   

During the 1990s, the military saw deep cuts in overall force structure – the Army by nearly 40 percent.  But the reduction in flag officers – generals and admirals – was about half that.  The Department’s management layers – civilian and military – and numbers of senior executives outside the services grew during that same period.   

Almost a decade ago, Secretary Rumsfeld lamented that there were 17 levels of staff between him and a line officer.  The Defense Business Board recently estimated that in some cases the gap between me and an action officer may be as high as 30 layers.

The private sector has flattened and streamlined the middle and upper echelons of its organization charts, yet the Defense Department continues to maintain a top-heavy hierarchy that more reflects 20th Century headquarters superstructure than 21st Century realities.  Two decades after the end of the Cold War led to steep cuts in U.S. forces in Europe, our military still has more than 40 generals, admirals, or civilian equivalents based on the continent.  Yet we scold our allies over the bloat in NATO headquarters.
Consider that a request for a dog-handling team in Afghanistan – or for any other unit – has to go through no fewer than five four-star headquarters in order to be processed, validated, and eventually dealt with.  This during an era when more and more responsibility – including decisions with strategic consequences – is being exercised by young captains and colonels on the battlefield. 

A telling example of how difficult it is to make even modest adjustments.  The Department commissioned a study a few years ago to assess the flag-officer requirements of the services.  The study identified 37 positions – out of more than 1,300 active and reserve billets – that could be reasonably converted to a lower rank.  None were downgraded. 

Going forward, some questions to be considered should be:

• How many of our headquarters and secretariats are primarily in the business of reporting to or supervising other headquarters and secretariats, as opposed to overseeing activity related to real-world needs and missions?
• How many executive or flag-officer billets could be converted to a lower grade, with a cascading effect downward – where two-star deputies become one-star deputies, assistant secretaries become deputy assistant secretaries – to create a flatter, more effective, and less costly organization?
• How many commands or organizations are conducting repetitive or overlapping functions – whether in logistics, intelligence, policy, or anything else – and could be combined or eliminated altogether?

In considering these questions, we have to be mindful of the iron law of bureaucracies – that the definition of essential work expands proportionally with the seniority of the person in charge and the quantity of time and staff available – with 50-page power point briefings being one result.

Finally, this Department’s approach to requirements must change.  Before making claims of requirements not being met or alleged “gaps” – in ships, tactical fighters, personnel, or anything else – we need to evaluate the criteria upon which requirements are based and the wider real world context.  For example, should we really be up in arms over a temporary projected shortfall of about 100 Navy and Marine strike fighters relative to the number of carrier wings, when America’s military possesses more than 3,200 tactical combat aircraft of all kinds? Does the number of warships we have and are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies and partners?  Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?       

These are the kinds of questions Eisenhower asked as commander-in-chief.  They are the kinds of questions I believe he would ask today.  And they are the kinds of question that we must all – civilian, military, in government and out – be willing to ask and answer in order to have a balanced military portfolio geared to real world requirements and a defense budget that is fiscally and politically sustainable over time.

Therefore, as the Defense Department begins the process of preparing next’s years Fiscal Year 2012 budget request,  I am directing the military services, the joint staff, the major functional and regional commands, and the civilian side of the Pentagon to take a hard, unsparing look at how they operate – in substance and style alike.  The goal is to cut our overhead costs and to transfer those savings to force structure and modernization within the programmed budget.  In other words, to convert sufficient “tail” to “tooth” to provide the equivalent of the roughly two to three percent real growth – resources needed to sustain our combat power at a time of war and make investments to prepare for an uncertain future.  Simply taking a few percent off the top of everything on a one-time basis will not do.  These savings must stem from root-and-branch changes that can be sustained and added to over time.  

What is required going forward is not more study.  Nor do we need more legislation.  It is not a great mystery what needs to change.  What it takes is the political will and willingness, as Eisenhower possessed, to make hard choices – choices that will displease powerful people both inside the Pentagon and out.

I say this fully aware of the fact that I am not the first in this office to make this case and or call for this effort.  Indeed, one of my predecessors said the following:  “A person employed in a redundant task is one who could be countering terrorism or nuclear proliferation.  Every dollar squandered on waste is one denied to the warfighter.”  That was Secretary Rumsfeld on September 10th, 2001.  Some progress has been made since then, as well as since the days of $800 hammers.  But the proverbial wall has been brought to our back.  What might have been considered a noble or worthy endeavor in the past is now a task that can no longer be denied or postponed.

It is a task, in the final analysis, to defend the security, prosperity, and freedom of the American people in this complex and dangerous new century.  It is a calling to uphold the spirit of sacrifice of the men whose service and triumphs we honor.  And it is a mission worthy of the son of Kansas who led our forces to victory 65 years ago, and whose legacy continues to sustain and protect us today.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Repost: Ben's Blog: The Scale Anticipation Fallacy

I'm becoming a big fan of Ben's blog....I think it's some of the most useful information for founding CEO's, their executive management team, Angel investors and early stage company board members on the web today.

In addition to the fantastic gift Ben gives by sharing his knowledge, his tone is just right.  Ben, thanks for your no-nonsense, down to earth tone.  As an entrepreneur and founding CEO myself, I have no interest in listening to  know-it-all-look-down-their-nose personalities that eagerly give me ungrounded advice about how I should do what they did (or saw someone else do).

Ben has repeatedly demonstrated his knowledge and expertise in the marketplace and provides people like me the much needed voice of a real human being who is passionate about entrepreneurs, start ups and as Seth Godin says, "Shipping".

Enjoy!

John

The Scale Anticipation Fallacy bhorowitz | May 5, 2010 at 4:53 pm | Categories: Best Practices, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management | URL: http://wp.me/pSsBB-6

I spit what I feel

Like a n*&^@#! reading Braille

Am I rappin’ or talkin’ s$&^)!t

I can’t even tell

—Kinfolk Kia Shine

The other day I was talking to a couple of friends of mine, one a VC and the other a CEO. During the meeting, we were discussing one of the executives at the CEO’s company. The executive in question performs exceptionally, but lacks experience managing at larger scale. My friend the VC innocently advised the CEO to carefully consider whether the executive would scale to meet the company’s needs in the future. I responded swiftly, aggressively, and loudly saying “that’s a horrible idea and makes no sense at all.” Both of my friends startled at my outburst. Normally, I am disciplined enough to refrain from letting my feelings pass straight through my mouth without stopping at my brain for review. Why the outburst? Here is my answer.

As CEO, you must constantly evaluate all of the members of you team. However, evaluating people against the future needs of the company based on a theoretical view of how they will perform is counter-productive for the following reasons:

• Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability—Nobody comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a thousand people. Everybody learns at some point.
• It’s nearly impossible to make the judgment in advance—How do you tell in advance if an executive can scale? Was it obvious that Bill Gates would learn how to scale when he was a Harvard drop out? How do you go about making that decision?
• The act of judging people in advance will retard their development—If you make a judgment that someone is incapable of doing something such as running a larger organization, then will it make sense to teach them those skills or even point out the anticipated deficiencies? Probably not. You’ve already decided that they can’t do it.
• Hiring scalable execs too early is a horrible mistake—There is no such thing as a great executive. There is only a great executive for a specific company at a specific point in time. Mark Zuckerberg is a phenomenal CEO for Facebook. He would not be a good CEO for HP. Similarly, Mark Hurd does a terrific job at HP, but he would not be the right person to manage Facebook. If you judge your team in advance and have a high sense of urgency, you will bring in executives that can manage at high scale in advance of needing them. Unfortunately, you will probably ignore their ability to do the job for the next 12 months, which is the only relevant measure. As a result, you will swap out good executives for worse ones.
• You still have to make the judgment at the actual point in time when you hit the higher level of scale—Even if you avoid the trap of hiring a scalable executive too early or retarding the new executive’s development, you still haven’t actually bought yourself anything by making the pre-judgment. Regardless of what you decided at point in time A, you still have to evaluate the situation with far better data at point in time B.
• It’s no way to live your life or run an organization—Deciding (with woefully incomplete data) that someone who works their butt off, does a terrific job, and loyally contributes to your mission won’t be with you three years from now takes you to a dark place. It’s a place of information hiding, dishonesty, and stilted communication. It’s a place where prejudice substitutes for judgment. It’s a place where judgment replaces teaching. It’s a place where teamwork becomes internal warfare. Don’t go there.

So, if you don’t prejudge people’s ability to scale, how do you make the judgment? You should evaluate your team at least once a quarter on all dimensions. Two keys can help you avoid the scale anticipation trap:

• Don’t separate scale from the rest of the evaluation—The relevant question isn’t whether an executive can scale; it’s whether the executive to do the job at the current scale. You should evaluate holistically and this will prevent you from separating out scale, which often leads to a prediction of future performance.
• Make the judgment on a relative rather than an absolute scale—Asking yourself whether or not an executive is great can be extremely difficult to answer. A better question is: For this company at this exact point in time, does there exist an executive who I can hire who will be better? If my biggest competitor hires that person, how will that impact our ability to win?

In summary, predicting whether or not an executive can scale corrupts your ability to manage, is unfair, and doesn’t work.

Thoughtstream: Redux: Put it on a tether

I've spent quite a lot of time working with Small Unmanned Aerial Systems.  I've worked with extraordinarily bright end users, engineers, scientists and program managers to improve system designs and performance. I have also worked diligently to increase awareness and to develop new area's to operate these systems. 

I gave a talk to the AUVSI San Diego Chapter in November and decided to post the core thesis of the talk when I could.

The primary issue was, is and remains to be "low altitude access for small unmanned aerial systems".

I believe this is a national issue and of great importance and interest to every American.

I've spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours working unmanned systems issues in my career both as a military member and now as a civilian.  The most difficult set of issues that I have personally dealt with (and still deal with) are unmanned systems access to the national airspace in the United States.

My professional assessment is that the United States is at least five years (yes, I said FIVE years) away from any meaningful remedy that will enable rapid, ad-hoc, low altitude national airspace access for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS).

So, what does this mean to you or I as American's and taxpayers?

Imagine that a Police Officer has a small drone in the trunk of his or her car.  He or she receives a call that a person is lost in the woods.  They respond by driving to the approximate last known location of the lost person and park their vehicle.  They pull out their small drone system with a camera onboard, launch the system and begin a hasty search of the area. 

I'm not a Law Enforcement expert.  I'm not an expert in conducting searches. (although I've conducted a few searches in my life for lost gear....including a few lost small unmanned aerial systems...which is another story...)

It seems to me, in this situation, an effective and swift response might make a difference.

Today, this Police Officer probably wouldn't have the equipment because no administrator or councilmember or city manager in their right mind would (or perhaps could?)  approve purchasing equipment that is illegal to operate in the United States.

When I say "illegal" I am describing the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) regulations that specify and permit equipment to be operated in the United States National Airspace System every moment of every day at every altitude everywhere in the United States. 

To wit, in large part,the FAA does a fantastic job, considering all of the complexities and issues that they deal with minute by minute with regards to ensuring a safe aviation transportation system. 
 

Put simply, the US national airspace management system (designed in the  1940's) that the FAA uses to keep America's skies safe actually limits and restricts our safety in other ways.

When filing a Flight Plan isn't an option

It doesn't help that police officer may not know specifically where or when he or she might need to begin a hasty search for that lost person.

Presently, in order for that Police Officer (end user) to operate equipment (e.g., Small Unmanned Aerial Systems) in the National Airspace, they are required to have a Certificate of Authorization (COA) Waiver, which is a license of sorts that allows  "specific persons with specifically certified and approved equipment with specified and special permissions to deviate or depart from existing FAA regulations for a specific period of time at a specific location".

Currently, the FAA prefers that all Unmanned Aerial Systems operations (Small, Medium and Large) be confined to Warning Area's and Restricted Area's airspace, Non-Joint use Military Class D airspace and in some cases Class G airspace for "low altitude" access provided that that airspace is owned/controlled by the Federal Government.

Again, unfortunately, this doesn't do the lost person or the first responder much good.

Put another way, Imagine filing a flight plan that takes two years to be approved.

The problem is that it can and does take years to be granted these permissions. (If you can get them).  If you live in area's that are "unsuitable" from the FAA's perspective, your request will be denied or rejected.

Again, unfortunately, this doesn't do the lost person or the first responder much good.

The present regulatory requirements for having pre-approved (Certificate of Authorization Waivers) COA's essentially eliminates the possibility for "rapid and ad-hoc" access to low altitude airspace in the US.  These requirements also eliminate certain US citizens from the value and benefit to a) compete in a burgeoning industry and b) benefit as tax payers and citizens from the protections and capabilities these systems can provide to all of us.

Another time we'll talk about additional consequences of such restrictions such as the impact of lost business opportunities, job creation, industrial diversification and innovation.

I and most of my peers have accepted this to be the present situation for now and into the foreseeable future that we find ourselves in.

Put it on a Tether

The primary reason I decided to design and build an inflatable wing on a tether is a very practical one.

The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) allow moored and tethered equipment (e.g., lighter than air balloons) to operate at or below 500 ft. above ground level (AGL).

So we're developing a new product category that on one hand is an interim solution that can serve to provide "rapid and ad-hoc access" to low altitude airspace in the US.  On the other hand it's also a capability that has merit in that it just might democratize the very undemocratic process of accessing  low altitude airspace in the United States.

One of the biggest benefits of the ASAP product category is actually being able to easily (and legally) get payloads airborne, thereby allowing for low altitude airspace access for numerous reasons, one of which might be searching for that lost child in the woods.

Our early beta customers such as Murray State University and The Department of Justice's Rural Law Enforcement Technology Center and the Border Region Technology Center agree.

Cheers,

John Surmont

Founder/CEO

Sofcoast, Inc.

I've spent quite a lot of time working with Small Unmanned Aerial Systems.  I've worked with extraordinarily bright end users, engineers, scientists and program managers to improve system designs and performance. I have also worked diligently to increase awareness and to develop new area's to operate these systems. 

I gave a talk to the AUVSI San Diego Chapter in November and decided to post the core thesis of the talk when I could.

The primary issue was, is and remains to be "low altitude access for small unmanned aerial systems".

I believe this is a national issue and of great importance and interest to every American.

I've spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours working unmanned systems issues in my career both as a military member and now as a civilian.  The most difficult set of issues that I have personally dealt with (and still deal with) are unmanned systems access to the national airspace in the United States.

My professional assessment is that the United States is at least five years (yes, I said FIVE years) away from any meaningful remedy that will enable rapid, ad-hoc, low altitude national airspace access for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS).

So, what does this mean to you or I as American's and taxpayers?

Imagine that a Police Officer has a small drone in the trunk of his or her car.  He or she receives a call that a person is lost in the woods.  They respond by driving to the approximate last known location of the lost person and park their vehicle.  They pull out their small drone system with a camera onboard, launch the system and begin a hasty search of the area. 

I'm not a Law Enforcement expert.  I'm not an expert in conducting searches. (although I've conducted a few searches in my life for lost gear....including a few lost small unmanned aerial systems...which is another story...)

It seems to me, in this situation, an effective and swift response might make a difference.

Today, this Police Officer probably wouldn't have the equipment because no administrator or councilmember or city manager in their right mind would (or perhaps could?)  approve purchasing equipment that is illegal to operate in the United States.

When I say "illegal" I am describing the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) regulations that specify and permit equipment to be operated in the United States National Airspace System every moment of every day at every altitude everywhere in the United States. 

To wit, in large part,the FAA does a fantastic job, considering all of the complexities and issues that they deal with minute by minute with regards to ensuring a safe aviation transportation system. 
 

Put simply, the US national airspace management system (designed in the  1940's) that the FAA uses to keep America's skies safe actually limits and restricts our safety in other ways.

When filing a Flight Plan isn't an option

It doesn't help that police officer may not know specifically where or when he or she might need to begin a hasty search for that lost person.

Presently, in order for that Police Officer (end user) to operate equipment (e.g., Small Unmanned Aerial Systems) in the National Airspace, they are required to have a Certificate of Authorization (COA) Waiver, which is a license of sorts that allows  "specific persons with specifically certified and approved equipment with specified and special permissions to deviate or depart from existing FAA regulations for a specific period of time at a specific location".

Currently, the FAA prefers that all Unmanned Aerial Systems operations (Small, Medium and Large) be confined to Warning Area's and Restricted Area's airspace, Non-Joint use Military Class D airspace and in some cases Class G airspace for "low altitude" access provided that that airspace is owned/controlled by the Federal Government.

Again, unfortunately, this doesn't do the lost person or the first responder much good.

Put another way, Imagine filing a flight plan that takes two years to be approved.

The problem is that it can and does take years to be granted these permissions. (If you can get them).  If you live in area's that are "unsuitable" from the FAA's perspective, your request will be denied or rejected.

Again, unfortunately, this doesn't do the lost person or the first responder much good.

The present regulatory requirements for having pre-approved (Certificate of Authorization Waivers) COA's essentially eliminates the possibility for "rapid and ad-hoc" access to low altitude airspace in the US.  These requirements also eliminate certain US citizens from the value and benefit to a) compete in a burgeoning industry and b) benefit as tax payers and citizens from the protections and capabilities these systems can provide to all of us.

Another time we'll talk about additional consequences of such restrictions such as the impact of lost business opportunities, job creation, industrial diversification and innovation.

I and most of my peers have accepted this to be the present situation for now and into the foreseeable future that we find ourselves in.

Put it on a Tether

The primary reason I decided to design and build an inflatable wing on a tether is a very practical one.

The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) allow moored and tethered equipment (e.g., lighter than air balloons) to operate at or below 500 ft. above ground level (AGL).

So we're developing a new product category that on one hand is an interim solution that can serve to provide "rapid and ad-hoc access" to low altitude airspace in the US.  On the other hand it's also a capability that has merit in that it just might democratize the very undemocratic process of accessing  low altitude airspace in the United States.

One of the biggest benefits of the ASAP product category is actually being able to easily (and legally) get payloads airborne, thereby allowing for low altitude airspace access for numerous reasons, one of which might be searching for that lost child in the woods.

Our early beta customers such as Murray State University and The Department of Justice's Rural Law Enforcement Technology Center and the Border Region Technology Center agree.

Cheers,

John Surmont

Founder/CEO

Sofcoast, Inc.

Thoughtstream: Ben's Blog repost "Why we prefer founding CEOs"

Why We Prefer Founding CEOs

“You're just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maid

I'll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade”

—Rakim, Follow the Leader

When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO.

The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built

At Andreessen Horowitz, our primary goal is to invest in the great technology franchises. As we looked at the history of great technology companies, we discovered that founders ran an overwhelming majority of them for a very long time, including:

• Acer—Stan Shih
• Adobe—John Warnock
• Amazon – Jeff Bezos
• AMD—Jerry Sanders III
• Apple – Steve Jobs
• DEC—Ken Olsen
• Dell—Michael Dell
• EA—Trip Hawkins
• EDS —Ross Perot
• Hewlett-Packard—Dave Packard
• IBM—Thomas Watson
• Intel—Andy Grove
• Intuit—Scott Cook
• Microsoft —Bill Gates
• Motorola—Paul Galvin
• nVidia—Jen-Hsun Huang
• Oracle—Larry Ellison
• Peoplesoft—Dave Duffield
• Salesforce.com—Marc Benioff
• Seagate—Al Shugart
• Siebel—Tom Siebel
• Sony—Akio Morita
• Sun—Scott McNeely
• VMware—Diane Greene

In addition, founders run today's most promising new companies such as Zynga (Mark Pincus), Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), Twitter (Ev Williams), Workday (Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri) and Fusion-io (David Flynn).

Two more quick data points before I move on to explain why this happens.

First, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business just published an analysis of recent exits for high technology companies such as BlackBoard, BladeLogic, Concur, Danger, Liveperson, LogMeIn, and Netsuite. Looking across these nearly 50 companies, the study finds that founding CEOs consistently beat the professional CEOs on a broad range of metrics ranging from capital efficiency (amount of funding raised), time to exit, exit valuations, and return on investment.

Second, for folks keeping score at home, this phenomenon appears to extend beyond high-technology companies. Felix Salmon, for instance, points out that Fortune’s editorial staff considered twelve other candidates including Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, and Martha Stewart before naming Steve Jobs the best CEO of the decade in November 2009. Salmon points out that “not a single one of the 12 [candidates] is a CEO who was hired to run a company by its board of directors.”

There are certainly exceptions to this rule, most notably Google and Cisco (I will address both exceptions later in this post), but the evidence is one-sided and overwhelming.

The underlying reasons

From a pattern matching perspective, it makes sense that we’d prefer founding CEOs, but as I said in an earlier post, pattern matching is not knowledge. So, why are great technology companies so often run by their founders? And why do professional CEOs sometimes succeed?

The innovation business

The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business. Etymologically, the word technology means “a better way of doing things.” As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies. Technology companies are born because they create a better way of doing things. Eventually, someone else will come up with a better way. Therefore, if a technology company ceases to innovate, it will die.

These innovations are product cycles. Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Our experience shows—and the data supports—that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle.

The reason is that innovation is the most difficult core competency to build in any business. Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebody would have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.

Steve Jobs’ return to Apple provides an excellent example. At the time Jobs regained control of Apple, the conventional wisdom said that Apple was getting killed by “PC Economics” and had to separate the operating system from the hardware. Specifically, Apple couldn’t compete with Microsoft unless it became more horizontal and let commodity hardware manufactures compete while Apple focused exclusively on the OS. The professional CEO who preceded Jobs (Gil Amelio) took the conventional wisdom to heart. He set out to create an ecosystem of Mac cloners who would provide the commodity hardware complement to Apple’s famous OS.

When Jobs came in and reversed those decisions, most industry analysts thought Jobs was insane. Jobs not only killed all the commodity hardware and the horizontal strategy; he went radically vertical. In addition to the basic hardware and operating system, he added applications (iLife, iWork) and peripherals (like the iPod). He even added retail stores.

Today, people would let Steve Jobs make such a radical turn at nearly any company because of the outcome he's achieved at Apple. But remember that when Jobs returned to Apple in 1986, he was doing so as the co-founder and CEO of NeXT computer, a marginal computer workstation company which Apple purchased for less than $500M. Let’s just say he didn’t have the benefit of the doubt. What he did have: the founder’s courage to innovate despite the doubters.

Innovator’s requirements – what does it take to find the product cycle?

So where did Jobs get this “founders courage” and what is it? In addition to general brilliance, we see three key ingredients to being a great innovator:

• Comprehensive knowledge
• Moral authority
• Total commitment to the long-term

Great founding CEOs tend to have all three and professional CEOs often lack them. Here’s why.

Comprehensive knowledge

To create the original innovation to start a company, founders must exhaustively understand the technology required, the likely competitors (past, present, and future), and the market in all its variations and segmentations.  This knowledge becomes the foundation on top of which a gigantic knowledge pyramid gets built which includes:

• Knowledge of every employee who gets hired and why
• Knowledge of every product and technology decision that gets made
• Knowledge of all customer data and feedback generated from day one
• Knowledge of exactly what’s strong and weak about the code base
• Knowledge of exactly what’s strong and weak about the organization

This pyramid of knowledge enables new, unique innovative thinking. This knowledge is nearly impossible to replicate. Without it, thoughtful people lack the courage to bet the company on entirely new directions.

In retrospect, it seems totally natural that Larry Ellison transformed Software Development Labs from a consulting business into a software company called Oracle. But would a professional CEO have understood enough about the team, the market and the competition to make such a radical change?

Moral authority

Often, true innovation requires throwing out many of the foundational assumptions of the company. If the company is significant, doing so may be extremely difficult for the professional CEO. The company’s core belief system is often entangled in those assumptions. Since the founding CEO made the assumptions in the first place, it is much easier for her. An excellent example of existing, invalid assumptions paralyzing a whole set of companies recently played out in the music industry.

The music business has been continuously disrupted and revolutionized by the underlying technology since the outset. In fact, it’s still widely referred to as the “record industry,” because the entire business was created by the invention of the vinyl record. For the first few decades of the industry, songs were never longer than 3 minutes due to a technological limitation (the record would skip if the grooves were too thin). The album itself is a construct that originated with the total number of songs one could fit on a 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) vinyl record. In the 80s, the invention of the CD completely revitalized the industry and led to (literally) record-breaking sales.

Despite this dynamic history, modern record company executives badly missed the most sweeping technical innovation—the Internet.  How was that possible? By the time the Internet arrived, all of the original founders of the record companies had been bought out, retired, or died. The new, professional CEOs were unwilling to let go of the most basic assumptions driving the cost structure of their businesses. Specifically, they wouldn’t give up their stranglehold on distribution and the value they placed on owning the recording.

They were proficient at running the current business, but lacked both the courage and the moral authority to jeopardize the old business model by embracing the new technology. The transition would have been far easier if these executives running the companies had invented the old models. The founders of the music industry likely would have ditched old assumptions, because they would have been nuts to do continue believing an assumption that no longer makes sense.

Conversely, Netflix, run by founder Reed Hastings, provides an excellent counter-example. Faced with a similar transition (from distribution of the physical recording to electronic distribution of the bits), Netflix let go of its old assumption that customers wanted DVDs mailed to them, invested in innovation and produced a series of brilliant new offerings (streaming video to Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, Tivo, Wii, connected DVD players, and a host of  devices) that are enabling them to transition smoothly. Hastings wasn’t married to the old distribution model precisely because he invented it.

Total commitment to the long term

Founding CEOs naturally take a long view of their companies. The company is their life’s work. Their emotional commitment exceeds their equity stake. Their goal from the start is to build something significant. They instinctively know that big product cycles come from investment and that even the biggest product cycles will eventually fade. Professional CEOs, on the other hand, tend to be driven by relatively shorter-term goals. They are paid in terms of stock options that vest over 4 years and cash bonuses for quarterly and yearly performance.

Investments in innovation do not pay out in the current quarter. Typically, they don’t even pay out in the current year. If you care about your bonus this year, you are directly incented not to make investments in new inventions as you will incur the expense, but reap no profits.

Any serious innovation requires a heavy investment. Beyond the up-front cash, costs may include lower growth, bad publicity, and internal grumbling as existing features atrophy. Recently, we’ve seen Facebook’s founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg make a series long-term bets. He’s radically revamped critical features such as the feed used by hundreds of millions of people. He’s made bold changes to key policies such as privacy and platform. For years, he’s avoided taking any revenue inconsistent with optimizing the user experience.

By committing to the long-term, he put himself under tremendous pressure in the short-term. The press broadly questioned his business acumen and Facebook’s ability to generate any meaningful revenue. Bottom feeding publications such as Valley Wag even went so far as to call for his resignation. Employees leaked to the press that they thought he should sell the company, and some quit due to temporary declines in page views and user growth. We now know these critics were wrong and Zuckerberg was right, but would a professional CEO have taken these risks and endured such vicious attacks for unseen, long-term benefits?

In theory, any professional CEO can rise to the challenge of being a great long-term CEO, but they have to commit to innovation and adopt the three characteristics above. We’ll now take a look at two professional CEOs who have done just that.

Understanding the exceptions – why do professional CEOs succeed?

Two spectacular exceptions to the founding CEO rule are John Morgridge at Cisco and Eric Schmidt at Google. Let’s look at how these two overcame the issues illustrated above and massively triumphed.

Eric Schmidt–Getting the goodness of the founders and combining it with the know-how of the professional

Eric Schmidt has been a spectacular success at Google. He hasn’t just maximized the original product cycle (which was built around search—although he’s done a brilliant job of accomplishing that feat), but he has also overseen the creation of important new product cycles such as Android and Google Apps. Interestingly, he did so by teaming with the founders and gaining the benefits of their knowledge, moral authority, and long-term vision. This may seem like an obvious strategy, but shared leadership and control are incredibly difficult to achieve. Doing so involves intense communication, deep humility, and some hard compromises. Almost nobody ever pulls it off. And that’s why Eric Schmidt is such an important exception.

John Morgridge—All by himself

Unlike Eric Schmidt, when John Morgidge took over at Cisco, the founders had been fired. He had to take a nascent initial product and build the amazing franchise that Cisco would eventually become. How did he do it? In speaking to many Cisco employees over many years and observing the dynamic, innovative product and M&A strategy that enabled them to defeat fierce competitors such as Wellfleet and Synoptics, I believe John Morgridge may have been the greatest professional CEO in the history of the high tech industry. He worked tirelessly to develop the characteristics outlined above as well or better than any founder. He was smart, knowledgeable, tough, innovative, courageous, and, unlike most professionals, legendarily cheap. He once said that if you can’t see your car from your hotel room, then you are paying too much.  As a result of this magical combination of qualities, he achieved complete moral authority. He is proof positive that a professional CEO can build a great technology company. At the same time, he is the ultimate exception.

In the best case, you may find the next John Morgidge. If you do, hire him! Otherwise, here is our general rule of investing. If you hire a professional CEO into a company that has found a large product cycle, the professional will be able to maximize that product cycle, but likely won’t find the next one. If you hire a professional to find the product cycle, get the jelly, because your company will soon be toast.

Are all founders CEO material?

The simple answer is “no.” Being CEO requires a tremendous amount of skill. The larger the company becomes, the more skill that’s required. Steve Blank does an excellent job of illustrating many of these required skills in his outstanding Scalable Start-up series. We almost never meet a founder who has these skills at the time they found the company.

Therefore, the founder must learn the skills required to run the company on-the-job. Doing so is often a miserable, debilitating experience. I can attest first hand to the frustration and exhaustion associated with being responsible for hundreds of employees while learning how to do the job. I constantly made mistakes a more experienced CEO wouldn’t make. These mistakes can be costly in terms of money and jobs.

So, why would any founder want to learn to be CEO on-the-job? Because doing so is the most sure fire way to build a great company.

How does one know if they have what it takes to be the long-term CEO of the company? In our experience, there are two required characteristics:

• Leadership as described in my early post Notes on Leadership.
• Desire—not necessarily the desire to be CEO, but the burning, irrepressible desire to build something great and the willingness to do whatever it takes to get there.

If the founder has these characteristics, then we would encourage them to give it a try. If they fail, we will help them look for the next Eric Schmidt or John Morgridge.

Footnote

Special thanks to Yujin Chung (LinkedIn, Twitter), MBA ’10 at the Wharton School, for his analytical and research support.

Repost: Ben's Blog "why is it hard to bring big company execs into little companies"

Why is it Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies?

bhorowitz | April 12, 2010 at 8:04 am |

Categories: Best Practices, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, People | URL: http://wp.me/pSsBB-64

“You’re a small fry and I’m a Big Ma­­c.”

—The Bingo Boys

So you’ve achieved product market fit and you are ready to start building the company. The board encourages you to bring in some “been there done that” executives who will provide the right financial, sales and marketing expertise to help you transition from a world-class product to a world-class business. You see a few candidates that you like, but the VC on the board says: “You are under shooting. This is going to be a huge company. We can attract better talent.” So you aim high and bring in a super accomplished head of sales. This guy has run huge organizations with thousands of employees. He has stellar references and even looks the part. Your VC loves him, because he has an awesome resume and even looks the part.

Six Months Later...

Fast-forward six months and everyone in the company is wondering why the sales (or marketing or finance or product) guy who has produced nothing got such a monster stock option package. Meanwhile, the people doing all the work have much fewer options. Even worse than not getting your money’s worth, now the company is in trouble, because you’ve been missing the numbers as your super expensive executive sits on his butt. What the frak just happened?

The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett Packard (after the sale of Opsware), there were an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of me. Little companies wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me, people in my organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help, customers wanted my attention, and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than 3 new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven.

In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take 8-10 new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

So what happens?

Once you hire one of these big company executives, there are two dangerous mismatches that you will face:

1. Rhythm mismatch—Your executive has been conditioned to wait for the emails to come in, wait for the phone to ring, and wait for the meetings to get scheduled. In your company, he will be waiting a long time. If your new exec waits (as per his training), your other employees will become suspicious. You’ll hear things like “what does that guy do all day long?” and “why did he get so many options?”
2. Skill set mismatch—Running a large organization requires very different skills than creating and building an organization. When you run a large organization, you tend to become very good at tasks such as complex decision-making, prioritization, organizational design, process improvement, and organizational communication. When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at running a high quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are personally responsible for quality control), know how to create process from scratch, and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.

How can you stop things from going horribly wrong?

There are two key steps to avoiding disaster:

1. Screen for devastating mismatches in the interview process
2. Take integration as seriously as interviewing

Screen for mismatches

How do you tell if the rhythm mismatch or the skill set mismatch will be too much to overcome? Here are some interview questions that I found very helpful:

• What will you do in you first month on the job?
  • Beware of answers that over emphasize learning. This may indicate that the candidate thinks there is more to learn about your organization than there actually is. More specifically, he may think that your organization is as complex as his current organization.
  • Beware of any indication that the candidate needs to be interrupt-driven rather than setting the pace personally. The interrupts will never come.
  • Look for candidates who come in with more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign.
• How will your new job differ from your current job?
  • Look for self-awareness of the differences here. If they have the experience in what you need, they will be articulate on this point.
  • Beware of candidates who think that too much of their experience is immediately transferable. It may pay off down the line, but likely not tomorrow.
• Why do you want to join a small company?
  • Beware of equity being the primary motivation. 1% of nothing is nothing. That’s something that big company executives sometimes have a hard time understanding.
  • It’s much better if they want to be more creative. The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running vs. creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.

Aggressively integrate the candidate once on board

Perhaps the most critical step is integration. You should plan to spend a huge amount of time integrating any new executive. Here are some things to keep in mind:

• Force them to create—Give them monthly, weekly, and even daily objectives to make sure that they produce immediately. The rest of the company will be watching and this will be critical to their assimilation.
• Make sure that they “get it”—content-free executives have no value in startups. Every exec must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market. Force your newbie to learn these things. Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new exec. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about every thing they heard that day, but did not completely understand. Answer those questions in depth; start with first principles. Bring them up to speed fast. If they don’t have any questions, consider firing them. If in 30 days, you don’t feel that they are coming up to speed, definitely fire them.
• Put them in the mix—Make sure that they initiate contact and interaction with their peers and other key people in the organization. Give them a list of people that they need to know and learn from. Once they’ve done that, require a report from them on what they learned from each person.

Final thoughts

Nothing will accelerate your company’s development like hiring someone who has experience building a very similar company at larger scale. However, doing so can be fraught with peril. Make sure to pay attention to the important leading indicators of success and failure.

Signals & Drumbeats: Push on to Protect new troops from IEDs

Push on to protect new troops from IEDs

4-19-2010

Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is scrambling to provide the latest handheld mine sweepers and observation balloons to detect makeshift bombs for the thousands of additional troops President Obama has ordered to Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates assigned Under Secretary Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's top acquisition official, and Marine Lt. Gen. John "Jay" Paxton to identify what troops need and get it to them by the peak of the summer fighting season. By June, the last of the 30,000 new troops Obama ordered will arrive and are expected to be part of an offensive to secure Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city.

"Jay and I are not focused on next year, long programs, finding the perfect technical solution," Carter said in an interview with USA TODAY. "We're focused on the here and now."

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) continue to be the No. 1 threat to kill or wound U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.

Critical equipment being rushed to Afghanistan includes:

• Handheld mine and explosive detectors. Commanders in Afghanistan issued an urgent request for devices that can be used quickly and easily by troops who leave the protection of their armored vehicles. About 3,500 mine detectors are in the process of being shipped to Afghanistan..

Another device being fielded is the Sherlock, which helps troops detect explosives made from fertilizer, the primary component of bombs in Afghanistan.

• Balloon-mounted cameras, known as elevated line of sight surveillance. "These are large airships like the balloon that's over the ball game," Carter said. "The soldier that looks up there knows that that's protecting him, the townsman knows that that's protecting him, the Taliban knows that that might be looking at him. That's a way of providing eyes in the sky when we just don't have enough of the fancy (drones)."

The military is doubling the number of balloons by summer, said Navy Cmdr. Wendy Snyder, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

• Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles designed specifically for rugged terrain and poor roads in Afghanistan. The vehicle's raised chassis allows the blast to dissipate before hitting its V-shaped hull, which deflects the force.

There are about 1,000 all-terrain MRAPs in Afghanistan, and thousands more will be shipped there as quickly as possible, Carter said.

Another key to reducing bomb attacks is stemming the flow of fertilizer — the primary ingredient — from Pakistan, Paxton said.

"What we're expecting to do, particularly along the border is to make the transshipment of it more difficult, to make the detection of it more positive and earlier and to do all those things where we can to interdict or identify and narrow down and close the supply chain," he said.

The Counter-IED Senior Integration Group's mission is to accelerate the work of task forces and organizations also charged with a portion of the Pentagon's IED effort, Carter said. Task forces already exist for MRAPs and intelligence gathering and surveillance. JIEDDO, the principal counter-IED agency, will have a budget of $3.4 billion in 2011.

"We're not a new bureaucracy," Carter said.

Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said Carter's group can help if it expedites critical equipment to Afghanistan, though he wondered if another task force was needed.

"I wouldn't want a gap to go unfilled, but this does seem a little late in the game," he said.

Wavetops: Secretary of Defense Gates Naval Academy Remarks

Remarks by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Annapolis, MD, Wednesday, April 07, 2010….with reference to LCDR Roy Boehm; a must read.

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It’s a pleasure to be back at the Naval Academy – my third visit since becoming defense secretary.  In a normal speech I would thank you all for coming, but I know this evening is not exactly optional for you.  I am also keenly aware that this address is strategically placed between a high-calorie dinner and some well-deserved rack time.  So I’ll do my best to keep you all awake – and I haven’t forgotten about you guys in the back row.

Of course, falling asleep in a class or here is one thing.  Falling asleep in a small meeting with the president of the United States is quite another.  But it happens.  I was in one Cabinet meeting with President Reagan where the president and six members of his cabinet went down at one point or another.

The first President Bush even created an honor to award the American official who most ostentatiously fell asleep in a meeting with the president of the United States.  This was not frivolous.  The president evaluated candidates on three criteria: first, duration – how long did they sleep?  Second, the depth of the sleep; snoring always got you extra points.  And third, the quality of recovery – did one just quietly open one’s eyes and return to the meeting, or did you just jolt awake – and maybe spill something hot in the process?  Well, the award was named for Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, who was President Bush’s national security adviser.  He was, as you might suspect, the first awardee, and, I might add, won many stars.

Of course, much has changed since those days, when our consuming national security problem was dealing with either the threat posed by the Soviet Union or the aftermath of its implosion.  The world has become more complex, unpredictable, and arguably more dangerous – from global terrorism to ethnic conflicts; from rogue nations to rising powers.

This evening I want to talk about the implications of these changes and challenges for you, the next generation of Navy and Marine Corps officers – above all, the qualities necessary for you to be successful as military leaders in the 21st century.

Above all, I want to talk to you tonight:

•About learning from the experiences and setbacks of the past;

• About being open to ideas and inspiration from wherever they come;

•About overcoming conventional wisdom and the bureaucratic obstacles thrown in one’s path; and

• About candor and speaking truth to power.

Consider first the story of Victor Krulak, Class of 1934.

In the late 1930s, the Marine Corps was still grappling with how to move troops from ship to shore under hostile fire.  At the time, and after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of the First World War, such a maneuver was considered foolhardy at best, and suicidal at worst.  In 1937, Marine 1st Lieutenant Krulak was stationed in China and observed the Japanese amphibious assault on Shanghai using a new kind of landing craft with a ramp.  Lieutenant Krulak sent some photos and an accompanying report back to Washington.  The report gathered dust in a cabinet with a note that read: “the work of some nut in China.”  Krulak eventually returned to Washington, and doggedly pursued his idea until a Marine general hooked him up with an eccentric New Orleans boat maker named Higgins.  The result was the landing craft used to carry Allied forces to liberate Europe and much ofAsia.

Krulak would go on to win the Navy Cross in World War II, became a leading counterinsurgency expert, and later commander of Marine Pacific forces during the Vietnam War.  Some choice words to President Lyndon Johnson about his Vietnamstrategy arguably cost Krulak his fourth star and the post of Marine commandant.

You’ve probably studied the exploits of Chester Nimitz, Class of 1905, hero of the Pacific.  Less is known about his early career – which was hardly by the book.  Three years after being commissioned, Nimitz ran his ship aground in Manila Bay.  His career survived what would be a death sentence today and he was later tasked with building a submarine base at Pearl Harbor.  The problem was that he was given no building material.  So then-Lieutenant Commander Nimitz led nighttime raiding parties on other units’ WWI surplus to get what was needed – and successfully finished the base.  I wouldn’t advise that today.

During the 1920s, the U.S. Navy was caught between aviation enthusiasts convinced that aircraft carriers would negate the need for all other ships, and traditionalists devoted to the battleship.  Eschewing these dogmatic and parochial positions, Nimitz had the vision to recognize and promote the potential of the circular formation – carriers protected by battleships – for integrating the two capabilities.  This insight was largely ignored for 20 years, but was later employed to great effect in World War II, and remained the basic template for carrier formations for decades afterward.

Few graduates of this institution were as brilliant, iconoclastic, and yes, difficult as Hyman Rickover.  He demanded efficiency and hated waste in all forms, the kind of person who first pilfered and then horded the little bars of soap from the airline and hotel bathrooms.  When interviewing young officers, he used to cut the legs of chairs short to see whether or not the interviewee could stay seated – not a technique that will endear you to your future subordinates.

In the 1950s the conventional wisdom was the nuclear reactors were too bulky and dangerous to put on submarines – diesel would have to do.  It was through Rickover’s genius and tenacity that those objections were overcome, producing a submarine fleet that included the most stealthy and feared leg of America’s nuclear triad.  Rickover was a stickler for safety in all phases of submarine production and operations – he was even accused erroneously of causing the U.S. to fall behind the Soviets.  But he had the vision to see that even one nuclear disaster might well kill the program altogether.  His legacy is that to this day, there has never been a nuclear failure in a US submarine.

My final example didn’t attend this institution, or attend any college for that matter.  Roy Boehm enlisted as a diver at age 17.  He was in just about every major battle of the Pacific theater during the Second World War – from retrieving the fallen at Pearl Harbor to surviving 13 hours in shark infested waters to ferrying supplies to guerrillas in the Philippines.  Drawing on those experiences, he would later design and lead a commando unit that became the Navy SEALs.  In his efforts to get his men the equipment they needed, Boehm was nearly court-martialed at one point for modifying official gear and buying the weapons from commercial sources.  White House intervention helped keep him out of court and out of jail.  In 1962, Boehm was called toWashington to brief President Kennedy on the progress of the Navy’s new commando unit.  When Kennedy walked in, the first thing Boehm said was, “Mr. President, I didn’t vote for you, but I’d die for you.”  After a long pause, Kennedy said “We need more guys like that.”

Boehm sent his SEALs into prisons to learn lock-picking, safecracking and hotwiring cars – which could become handy behind enemy lines.  In Vietnam, the price on his head rose from $50 when he first arrived to more than $400,000 when he left.  He never made it higher than Lieutenant Commander, but his legacy is at work every night, tracking down our country’s most lethal enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.

The qualities these legends embody have been important and decisive throughout the history of warfare.  But I would contend that they are more necessary than ever in the first decades of this century, given the pace of technological changes, and the agile and adaptive nature of our most likely and lethal adversaries – from modern militaries using guerrilla tactics to terrorist groups with advanced weapons.  As a result, America’s military will need the maximum flexibility to deal with the widest possible range of scenarios and adversaries.  And our military leaders – like those great men I just described – will have to be as flexible and agile, as resilient and determined, and have real moral courage.

What strikes me about figures like Krulak and Nimitz, Rickover and Boehm, is not that they were always right, nor that they should be emulated in every way – to put it mildly.  What is compelling about these leaders is that they had the vision and insight to see that the world and technology was changing, understood the implications of those shifts, and then pressed ahead in the face of often fierce institutional resistance.  Indeed, one of the key reasons they were successful was because they were willing to speak truth to power – willing to tell superiors what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear.

At this point I hope you’ll forgive me for citing a towering figure from another service: George Marshall.   In late 1917, during World War I, U.S. military staff in France was conducting a combat exercise for the American Expeditionary Force.  General “Black Jack” Pershing was in a foul mood.  He dismissed critiques from one subordinate after another and stalked off.  But then-Captain Marshall took the arm of the four-star general, turned him around and told him how the problems they were having resulted from not receiving a necessary manual from the American headquarters – Pershing’s headquarters.  And the commander said, “Well, you know, we have our problems.”  And Marshall replied, “Yes, I know you do, General . . . but ours are immediate and everyday and have to be solved before night.”  After the meeting, Marshall was approached by other officers offering condolences for the fact he was sure to be fired and sent off to the trenches.  Instead Marshall became a valued adviser to Pershing, and Pershing a valued mentor to Marshall.

Twenty years later, then-General Marshall was sitting in the White House with President Roosevelt and all of his top advisors and cabinet secretaries.  War in Europe was looming, but still a distant possibility for an isolated America.  In that meeting, Roosevelt proposed that the U.S. Army – which at that time ranked in size somewhere between that of Switzerland and Portugal – should be of lowest priority for funding and industry.  FDR’s advisors nodded.  Building an army could wait.

Then FDR, looking for the military’s imprimatur to his decision, said: “Don’t you think so George?”  Marshall, who did not like being called by his first name, said: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.”  The room went silent.  The treasury secretary told Marshall afterwards: “Well, it’s been nice knowing you.”  It was not too much later that Marshall became Army chief of staff.

There are other, more recent examples of senior officers speaking frankly to their civilian seniors.  Just before the ground war started against Iraq in 1991, General Colin Powell, then-chairman of the joint chiefs, met with the first President Bush.  I was there in the Oval Office.  Colin looked the president in the eye and said words to this effect:  “We are about to go to war.  We may suffer thousands of casualties.  If we do, are you prepared to drive on to victory?”  General Powell wanted the president to face reality.  The president gave the right answer.

I can say that a similar spirit of candor suffused discussions about major troop increases with the second President Bush in Iraq, and then with President Obama in Afghanistan – discussions shaped importantly by independent military advice from General Peter Pace and Admiral Mike Mullen – from the Classes of ‘67 and ‘68 respectively.  Both presidents, again, gave the right answer.

In addition to speaking hard truths to your superiors, as a leader you must create a climate that encourages candor amongst your subordinates, especially in difficult situations.  During World War II, Nimitz was in a plane that had crashed, and found himself caught in the middle of sailors swarming the scene to rescue the wounded.  Finally, an exasperated 18-year old crewman yelled, “Commander, if you would only get the hell out of the way, maybe we could get something done.”  When the crewman realized he had just chewed out a four star admiral, he tried to apologize.  But Nimitz’s response was: “Stick to your guns, sailor, you were quite right.”

Even in less urgent situations, all those in senior positions would be well-advised to listen to enlisted troops, NCOs, and junior officers.  They are the ones on the front line, and will often know the real story – whether the issue is equipment needed for the mission, or stress on families back home.  A story that is often different from what’s on the power point slide back at flag headquarters or the Pentagon.  Being open to advice, and even criticism, will take some confidence and self-assurance.

On trips to the front lines, I have made it a priority to meet with and hear from small groups of troops ranging from junior enlisted to field-grade officers.  Their candid observations have been invaluable and helped shape my thinking and decisions.  I recall having lunch in a combat post in Afghanistan with a dozen young enlisted guys.  They told me that the crotch of the field uniform pants is ill-equipped to deal with climbing over walls and fences…that they tore out easily.  As one of the specialists helpfully explained, it’s a welcome feature in the summer – but it gets pretty chilly in the winter.  Now that’s a perspective I would never get in a Pentagon office.

I should add that, in most of the cases I’ve cited this evening – from the highest ranking to the lowest – straight talk, integrity and courage were usually rewarded.  In a perfect world, that should always happen.  Sadly, it does not, and I will not pretend there is not risk.  But that does not make taking that stand any less necessary for the sake of our country.

I say this because on the larger, strategic scale, the need for candor is not just an abstract notion.  It has very real effects on the perception of the military and of the wars themselves – as well as an operational impact.   World War II was America’s last straightforward conventional war that ended in the unconditional surrender of the other side.  The military campaigns since – from Korea to Vietnam, Somalia, and Iraq and Afghanistan today – have been frustrating, controversial efforts for the American public and our American armed forces.  Each conflict has prompted debates over whether senior military officers were being too deferential or not deferential enough to civilians, and whether civilians, in turn, were too receptive or not receptive enough to military advice.

Here, again, I’d reference Marshall, who has been recognized as a textbook model for the way military officers should handle disagreements with superiors and in particular with the civilians vested with control of the armed forces under our Constitution.

Consider the situation in mid-1940.  The Germans had just overrun France and the battle of Britain was about to begin.  FDR believed that rushing arms and equipment to Britain, including half of America’s bomber production, should be the top priority in order to save our ally.  Marshall believed that rearming America should come first.  Roosevelt overruled Marshall and others, and made what most historians believe was the correct decision – to do what was necessary to keep England alive.

The significant thing is what did not happen next.  There was a powerful domestic constituency for Marshall’s position among a whole host of newspapers and congressmen and lobbies, and yet Marshall did not exploit and use them.  There were no overtures to friendly congressional committee chairmen, no leaks to sympathetic reporters, no ghostwritten editorials in newspapers, no coalition-building with advocacy groups.  Marshall and his colleagues made the policy work and saved England.

In the ensuing decades, a large permanent military establishment emerged as a result of the Cold War – an establishment that forged deep ties to the Congress and to industry.  This is not completely new in the history of our republic.  Henry Knox, the first secretary of war after the American Revolution, was charged with building the first American fleet to help combat, overseas pirates. To get the necessary support from the Congress, Knox eventually ended up with six frigates being built in six different shipyards in six different states.  So some things never change.

Over the years, senior officers have from time to time been tempted to use these ties to do end runs around the civilian leadership, particularly during disputes over purchase of large major weapons systems.  The first secretary of defense, for whom this lecture is named, after World War II had to contend with a navy that didn’t even want to work for him – preferring to stay an independent cabinet department.  In the “Revolt of the Admirals” that followed, the Navy and the Air Force went at each other – first in private, then in public – over which service was better suited to deliver the new atom bomb.  These parochial tendencies are to be avoided.  They are also in this day and age outdated, evidenced by the fact that there are more sailors ashore than on ships in the Central Command, all in support of our ground forces and the overall war effort.

Just over 50 years ago, Admiral Arleigh Burke wrote of his beloved service:  “The Navy believes in putting a man [– and, today, we would add “woman” –] in a position with a job to do, and let him do it – and give him hell if he does not perform.  We capitalize on the capabilities of our individual people rather than make automatons out of them.  This builds the essential pride of service and sense of accomplishment.  [And] if it results in a certain amount of cockiness, I am [all] for it.”  Looking to the challenges America’s sea services will face in the years ahead, you have reason to be confident – in your own abilities and in the traditions of leadership and excellence of this great institution.

Here at the Naval Academy, as at every university and company in America, there’s a focus on teamwork, consensus-building, and collaboration.  Yet make no mistake, the time will come for each of you when you must stand alone in making a difficult, unpopular decision; when you must challenge the opinion of superiors or tell them that you can’t get the job done with the time and resources available; or when you will know that what superiors are telling the press or the Congress or the American people is inaccurate.  There will be moments when your entire career is at risk.

To be ready for that moment, you must have the discipline to cultivate integrity and moral courage from here at the Academy, and then from your earliest days as a commissioned officer.  Those qualities do not suddenly emerge fully developed overnight or as a revelation after you have assumed important responsibilities.  These qualities have their roots in the small decisions you will make here and early in your career and must be strengthened all along the way to allow you to resist the temptation of self before service.  And you must always ensure that your moral courage serves the greater good: that it serves what is best for the nation and our highest values – not a particular program nor pride nor parochialism.

For the good of the Navy, for the good of the armed services, and for the good of our country, I urge you to reject convention and careerism.  I urge you instead to be principled, creative, and reform-minded – to be leaders of integrity.

A final thought.  All of you entered military service in a time of war, knowing you would be at war.  Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The trumpet call is the most inspiring of all sounds, because it summons men to spurn all ease and self-indulgence and bids them forth to the field where they must dare and do and die at need.”  You have answered the trumpet call, and the whole of America is grateful and filled with admiration.  I salute you and I thank you for your service.  For my part, I consider myself personally responsible for each and every one of you as though you were my own sons and daughters.  When I send you into harm’s way, I will do everything in my power to see that you have what you need to accomplish your mission – and to come home safely.

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Remarks by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Annapolis, MD, Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Signals & Drumbeats: At the Edge with Todd Huffman

Postings from Sofcoast Advisor, Todd Huffman...

WORLD BRIEFING | ASIA;

Afghanistan: Taliban Destroy Cell Towers

By TAIMOOR SHAH

Published: March 4, 2008
The Taliban knocked out two cellphone towers near the city of Kandahar over the weekend, carrying out a threat they made last week against all four cellphone companies in Afghanistan. The Taliban demanded that the companies stop operating at night.

(Credit: Todd Huffman)

"A wireless tower with a guard around it. The wireless spectrum is a contested terrain... Taliban attack the towers frequently." (Todd Huffman)

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Mobile Phones Combat Taliban’s Afghan ‘Information Wastelands’

March 22, 2010, 3:52 PM EDT

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- One morning last summer, U.S. officials meeting in Afghanistan on the rooftop terrace of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s Kabul residence had an “aha” moment.

Rear Admiral Greg Smith spread out two maps. One highlighted pockets of insurgent control; the other marked mobile-phone towers. Where the Taliban’s presence was strongest, phone coverage was weakest, crippled by Taliban sabotage of the towers, recalled Smith and U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke in separate interviews about the July 27 meeting.

“We found that Afghans in the most-troubled, insurgent- held areas lived in information wastelands dominated by militant propaganda,” Holbrooke said March 17. “We are fighting back with a revamped strategy that puts the people and their ability to communicate at the forefront of our effort.”

The U.S. is betting about $263 million in 2010 that winning this campaign will help it prevail on the battlefield. The effort aims to turn public opinion against the Taliban and develop a network that lets Afghans contact government officials and authorities talk to each other, said Brigadier General John Nicholson, who runs the Joint Staff’s Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination unit at the Pentagon.

If villagers and security forces can’t communicate, that “allows terrorist safe havens to thrive,” said Vikram Singh, a Holbrooke defense and communications adviser in Washington.

Electronic Wages

Mobile phones also have the potential to fuel economic development by helping Afghans receive wages electronically and access services such as banking. Telecom Development Company of Afghanistan Ltd., which operates under the name Roshan, is piloting a program in Parwan province that sends commodity prices through text messages, Chief Operating Officer Altaf Ladak said in an interview.

The Kabul-based company’s investors include Monaco Telecom International, 49 percent owned by Cable & Wireless Communications Plc in London, the U.K.’s second-biggest fixed- line telephone company; and Stockholm-based TeliaSonera AB, Sweden’s largest phone company.

Smith, head of public communications strategy for U.S. and international military forces in Afghanistan, has a budget of almost $150 million for 2010. The U.S. State Department has $113 million to spend this year for civilian communications. The money will pay for new towers and projects such as developing community media outlets and supporting educational radio.

Texting Afghans

Afghanistan, with 29 million people, had as many as 12 million cellular-service subscribers in December, according to the Afghan government. Fifty-two percent of the population has access to a mobile phone at home, 65 percent of users send text messages and more than half listen to FM radio through their phones, based on data in a 2009 survey by the San Francisco- based Asia Foundation. Afghans have formed message groups on road conditions, crop prices and cash-for-work opportunities.

While coverage is growing in most places, a Taliban push since February 2008 to bomb or shut off power to phone towers at night has affected more than 200 of the 6,000 the U.S. military monitors, according to U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale, a spokesman in Kabul for North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led forces. This has isolated communities in extremist-dominated areas, especially in the south and east, he said.

The Taliban use towers “as a weapons system,” said U.S. Army Major Eric Johnson, a psychological-operations officer working for Smith in Kabul. “If you control the communications of a population, you can control their thoughts.”

Power Up

Security is improving since a U.S.-led offensive concentrated in the south began last year, so disabled towers are being powered up. At least 24 in Kandahar and Helmand provinces are working again, according to Holbrooke aide Ashley Bommer in Washington. The U.S. military plans to construct as many as 50 towers on Afghan and international bases and put another 20 on wheels in remote areas, Johnson said.

The Taliban will resist the effort, said spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. Foreign troops have been “misusing the cell towers for their intelligence works,” and if they are restored, “we can easily” shut them down at night, Mujahid said in a telephone interview.

Roshan, Afghanistan’s leading cellular-service provider, has sought community cooperation to protect the structures, Ladak said. It has also introduced mobile health care in Kabul and Bamian province, allowing medical workers to transfer X-rays and reports over phones.

Police salaries are being paid by phone in a pilot project in two southern provinces supported by NATO and the U.S. Treasury Department. Absenteeism is down because police don’t have to go home to give their families money, and pay has risen about 30 percent now that supervisors can’t skim off the top, Singh said.

War of Words

Joanna Nathan, author of a 2008 report on Taliban propaganda for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, cautioned that expanding mobile-phone capacity isn’t enough to counteract the Taliban. They have dominated the war of words by exaggerating victories and fueling conspiracy theories, she said.

“There will always be enormous upset over civilian casualties, night-time raids and seemingly arbitrary detentions” by U.S. forces, she said. Transparent investigations are essential when mistakes are made, and listening to Afghans is as important as “messaging” to them, she added.

Afghan officials are cautiously optimistic about the American efforts.

“It’s not the words, but how credible is your message,” said Said Jawad, Afghan ambassador to Washington. The U.S. must not only “respond to propaganda but deliver and make a difference in people’s lives.”

--With assistance from Eltaf Najafizada in Kabul. Editors: Edward DeMarco, Melinda Grenier.

To contact the reporter on this story: Indira Lakshmanan at in Washington or ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Kirk at in Washington or jkirk12@bloomberg.net

=======

12:58 PM ET

Fighting the Taliban, one text message at a time

WASHINGTON  - As the U.S. military and its NATO allies intensify their campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Obama administration also is revamping its messaging in the region with a robust strategic communications strategy employing new technologies to fight extremism.

For years the Taliban and al Qaeda owned the airwaves with strong anti-American propaganda, which was met with a weak U.S. effort to counter it.

"We found that Afghans in the most-troubled, insurgent-held areas lived in information wastelands dominated by militant propaganda," the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said last week. "We are fighting back with a revamped strategy that puts the people and their ability to communicate at the forefront of our effort."

The new strategy, Holbrooke's advisers say, attempts to control the "narrative," rather than respond to the extremist version of events, as part of a new approach to empower Afghans and Pakistanis with 21st century media technologies.

In Afghanistan, that means building capacity for communications, investing in infrastructure - including construction of radio stations and setting up cell phone and television towers.  

"If there are ways to communicate, there will be a diversity of communications, there will be different narrative, there will be a variety of ideas," said Vikram Singh, a senior communications advisor to Holbrooke.

The United States has also begun training journalism students and funding community radio for agricultural programming, to help farmers to learn about the best time to plant crops that could replace the poppy crop which fuels the insurgency.

Singh and Ashley Bommer, another senior advisor to Holbrooke, stress the United States is trying to foster debate, not micromanage it.

"These aren't American stations, these are Afghan stations to be run by the local people," Bommer said. "We are taking the debate away from us and the militants to the people. It's about how we can leverage technology and communications to give them the tools to be able to be the architects of their own destiny and speak out about the extremists and what they are saying. And improve the socio-economic fabric of Afghanistan as well."

In Afghanistan, Singh said, there is a direct link between communications infrastructure and development. As cell phones spring up in various areas that either didn't have them before or where they were destroyed by the Taliban, he said, commerce has increased and people are using mobile phone messaging to move around the country and spread information about the movement of the insurgents. Currently, between 10 million and 12 million afghans have cell phones, he said.

"Farmers are using cell phones to see what prices are in the market before making the trip into town. People are building confidence with local security forces. Cell phones really do transform areas.

The United States has also created a mobile banking project to pay Afghan police via cell phones. Bommer and Singh note an expansion of the program could both eliminate the need to build new banks and reduce widespread corruption in the country's current cash system.

The State Department also hopes to take advantage of the growth of new media technologies, such as social networking and cell phones within Pakistan, funding a new mobile messaging system. It paid for the first 24 million messages last year, but Bommer points out that more than 120 million texts were sent and about 8,000 new people are signing up daily.

Although officials dislike the term "propaganda," another major component of the U.S. plan involves more efforts to articulate the U.S. message and correct misperceptions and lies about America.

That means ensuring more information is accessible to the local audience.

While the United States for the most part has relied on the international media to explain the U.S. side of the story, there is a new focus on taking the case directly to local journalists and getting press releases out in local languages.

The ambitious strategy comes with an equally weighty price tag of $263 million for 2010 and will require more public diplomacy staff in both countries. David Ensor, a former CNN correspondent, has been tasked with implementing it.

 

Post by: CNN State Dept. producer Elise Labott
Filed under: Decision: Afghanistan • Life and Culture • Pentagon

=======

Afghan Cell Carriers Follow Taliban Rules

Posted by Alex Sundby

(Credit: CBS)

Afghanistan's cell phone companies and the Taliban have formed a kind of detente in the southern and eastern parts of the wartorn country. The phone companies shut down their cell towers at night, preventing local residents from discreetly calling coalition military tip lines. In exchange, Taliban militants don't target the costly cell towers with explosives.

It's a part of day-to-day life The Wall Street Journal explores at length. The deal between the phone companies and the Taliban isn't a secret to the Afghan government with the country's communications minister telling the newspaper, "We understand that in some areas, unfortunately, there is no other way ... We don't have security to protect the towers."

Complete Coverage: Afghanistan

In several provinces, the country's major cell carriers — MTN Afghanistan, a unit of South Africa's MTN Group; Roshan, part-owned by Great Britain's Cable & Wireless and the Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera group; AWCC; and Etisalat Afghanistan — switch off their towers at 5 p.m. and keep them idle until 6.30 the next morning.

The 13-and-a-half hours of wireless blackout can take a serious toll on the everyday lives of Afghans, especially in remote communities.

The newspaper interviewed a teenager whose father had the misfortune to become ill during the blackout, preventing the family from calling a taxi to transport the man from their village to a hospital in Kandahar city.

"We had to carry my father on the back of a donkey," lengthening the travel time to close to four fours, the man's son told the newspaper. "The doctors told me that it was just appendicitis. But we almost lost him."

The phone companies defend their actions by saying their joint decision to turn off the towers means fewer Afghans are at risk of dying in a Taliban attack.

The chief operating officer of Roshan, which serves 3.5 million Afghan customers, told the newspaper it powers down at least 60 of its 800 Afghan towers in Afghanistan every night.

"We play by their rules; we don't like to play around when people's lives are at stake," the executive said about the Taliban's threats. "From a political perspective, it's quite a coup for them."

Tags:

cbsafghanistan

Topics:

In The News , Afghanistan

Thoughtstream: Who's watching?

Todd Huffman shared this graph that depicts water consumption in Edmonton the day prior to the Gold Medal Hockey Game (green) and the day of the Gold Medal Hockey Game (blue).

The point for me is a counter intuitive one.  Evidently the viewing audience is lower during high stakes games and period changes than one might have expected.

So, the question is....who's watching the commercials if everyone's in the bathroom?

Cheers!

John

Signals and Drumbeats: First Responder Communications Challenges

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/88425-police-fire-chiefs-say-plan-will-not-improve-communications-system

Police, fire chiefs say plan will not improve communications

By Kim Hart
The Hill

Police and fire chiefs from around the country are calling on Congress to make sure public safety agencies have access to enough wireless airwaves to form a nationwide communication network for first responders. 

Public safety executives say the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Plan undermines their ability to build a network that would allow federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to talk to each other during national disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

The National Broadband Plan, which the FCC delivered to Congress last week, makes several recommendations intended to allow paramedics, police officers, port authority patrols and other emergency workers to create a national network to replace the current patchwork of networks that use different technologies, making it difficult for different jurisdictions to communicate.  

The biggest point of contention is over the FCC’s recommendation to auction off a chunk of spectrum previously set aside for public safety. During emergencies, public safety officials would have priority access on commercial networks. 

But top police commissioners and fire chiefs say that system will not be reliable enough. Instead, they want the FCC to give a larger piece of spectrum to the first responders, who would then lease excess capacity to commercial providers when it is not needed.

“We don’t object to public-private partnerships as long as public safety is in charge of the process,” said Charles Dowd, deputy chief of the New York City Police Department, in an interview. “Commercial networks simply aren’t built to the standards we need.”

New York’s technology dilemma illustrates the problems faced around the country. Police officers’ wireless network runs on different frequencies than that used by the Port Authority. The Metropolitan Transit Authority that monitors the subway system uses yet a different set of frequencies. Devices that can communicate on all those frequencies cost upward of $8,000 and do not have broadband capabilities, Dowd said.

Developing a nationwide network for public safety has been discussed for more than a decade but has yet to come to fruition. 

In 1997, Congress directed the FCC to give public safety agencies access to airwaves being vacated by TV broadcasters. In 2007, the FCC adopted rules to create a mandatory partnership between public safety agencies and the private sector with a section of the airwaves — known as the “D Block” — to be auctioned off. But during the federal auction in 2008, the block of spectrum failed to attract the minimum required bid.

Congress then directed the FCC to auction it to the private sector. In its broadband plan, the FCC recommended giving the proceeds of that auction to the public safety community to build an interoperable network. And the FCC would provide 10 megahertz for public safety’s own network.

“Reaching some kind of understanding is very important,” said Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. “Public safety keeps saying they need more spectrum, but I have said they really need to talk about the funding as a key part as well. Without the federal funding, there will not be a national network because people will not be able to afford to get it to all the places we need it to be.”

The broadband plan suggests the public safety network will cost between $12 billion and $16 billion over 10 years. The FCC is recommending that Congress set aside $6.5 billion over that time period for a grant program to build the network. By assessing a fee on all U.S. broadband users, an additional $6 billion to $10 billion would go toward operating and upgrading the system. 

The plan asks Congress to authorize the FCC to collect the fee, which would likely be less than $1 per month per user.

The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, respectively, expressed support for the FCC’s plan in a statement, saying it “offers a clear roadmap” for finally creating a national public safety network. 

The FCC’s Barnett said the national network needs to go into development very soon in order to take advantage of the commercial roll-out of 4G wireless technologies—the latest in wireless broadband.

“I know they have some distrust of the commercial carriers and they worry they won’t be able to get priority when they need it,” he said. “But we worked so hard to make this technologically sound.”

If the public safety community continues to fight the recommendations, Barnett said he worries they could lose the opportunity to receive the funding for the nationwide network.

“I’m afraid public safety will walk away without the D Block and without the funding,” he said. “It’s not just about cost savings. If we don’t grab this right now, we won’t get the interoperable network we need.”

Harlin McEwen, chairman of the Public Safety Spectrum Trust, said having the full block of spectrum is the only way to ensure first responders will have the capacity they need for the coming years. Auction proceeds, he said, will not make up for the loss of the extra piece of spectrum. 

“We have a strong difference of opinion with the FCC chairman,” Harlin told The Hill. “We’d been led to believe that he would support our efforts, but he’s aggressively going forward with the plan.”

The Police Executive Research Forum held a conference Friday in which FCC officials and public safety executives met to air their differences, but little was resolved.

Public safety groups are recommending that Congress pass a law to allocate the full block of spectrum directly to public safety agencies. Then they would invite commercial carriers to partner with them to build out the network.

McEwen said he has the support of a number of commercial firms interested in sharing the spectrum, including Motorola, Alcatel Lucent, Northrop Grumman, Harris, Verizon Wireless and AT&T. 

California officials are especially ardent about changing the FCC’s mind. Massive forest fires rip through the state every year, but evacuations are complicated by the inability of first responders to talk to one another.

“It’s mission-critical for us to have absolute control of the spectrum bands to be able to talk effectively,” said San Diego Police Chief Bill Landsdowne. “The information we put on there is not only critical, it’s confidential. We can’t have that information going over commercial airwaves.”

Thoughtstream: Leadership is knowing when to punt and when to go for it.

For me Football was my first love.  To say I thoroughly enjoy the game of football might be an understatement.  I'm not sure why I am so deeply drawn to the game of football. 

Some of the fondest memories of my life center around football season. Whether it be my memories of the intense focus and attention to be ready each and every down, to the sweet smell of fresh cut grass.  Maybe it was my memory of those grueling two-a-day (and sometimes three-a-day) practices and my sense of accomplishment and self-improvement after each practice session or game.

Maybe it is simply that these are memories of the sounds of my youth. 

I remember like it was yesterday, coaches yelling instructions to my teammates and I who were of course eager to play and demonstrated this in our earnest responses to the gruff cacophonic sounds of barked corrections from somewhere just out of view. 

Maybe it was that I began to discover and unearth my own competitive zeal and physical abilities as I learned about myself and how to work with others in the field of sport.

"Cover!"

"Finish!"

These were words that I remember hearing almost constantly. Maybe that's because I wasn't "covering" well or "finishing" the play well - I'd be willing to bet that that's the case.  Nevertheless, I remember fondly the joy of joining others in a concerted, unified, concentrated and focused effort to accomplish something that I believed to be important.  Playing to win.

The point is that I have, and continue to, draw many parallels between football and other experiences throughout my life.  After watching the NFL's AFC showdown this weekend between Indianapolis and New England, I think every entrepreneur can draw parallels between Football and starting (founding) a business, building and launching a new product or entering a new market.

Here's an article that while it may be speaking specifically about a game, the message is clearly about more than the game of football.

So, what's the life lesson for you?

Cheers,

John

===================================================

What's So Great About Punting?
Belichick's Decision Draws Fire, But Number Crunchers Are in His Corner; the Blackjack Table

By DARREN EVERSON and REED ALBERGOTTI

In the past 24 hours, Bill Belichick has been ripped and ridiculed, caricatured, called a fool and even accused of falling asleep on the job. "I seriously think he might be losing interest," wrote one fan.


New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick moments before deciding not to punt in Sunday night's loss.
But before we run the head coach of the New England Patriots out of town for the tough decision he made in Sunday night's 35-34 loss to the Indianapolis Colts, let's look at the nature of his crime.

Faced with a fourth down in his own territory late in the game with a vulnerable lead, Mr. Belichick decided to let his offense try to win the game with one play. If the Patriots had gained two yards, they would have had a first down and likely been able to run out the clock. The other option, of course, was to punt and, by doing so, leave the outcome of the game in the hands of quarterback Peyton Manning and the Colts.

Put simply, Mr. Belichick is taking flak because he decided, in the middle of a close, hard-fought and emotionally charged game against a major rival, to throw caution to the wind. In other words, he's being pilloried for not being a wimp.

Somehow in American football, the punt—a clear and unambiguous symbol of surrender and retreat—has become the hallmark of sensible coaching.

After the game, many football traditionalists—even some of Mr. Belichick's former players—rushed to denounce the move. Former Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi wrote a column about how the decision showed a lack of confidence in the team's defense, and former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison said afterward that it was the worst coaching decision he'd ever seen Mr. Belichick make.

"I thought it was our best chance to win," Mr. Belichick said at a news conference on Monday.

At the same time, however, football statisticians and the coaches who lurk on the game's cerebral fringe thought Mr. Belichick's decision was heroic.

"I would've thought about [going for] it too," says Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, a law-school graduate who is renowned for his counterintuitive approach to football. "Who cares what people think?"

"Of course I thought it was the right decision," says Kevin Kelley, a high-school football coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark., who has become famous for his strategy of virtually never punting. "If anybody was going to do it, it had to be Belichick. What went through my head was, 'I hope he makes it, because if he doesn't, all the naysayers will say they were right.' But they're still wrong."

The truth depends, of course, on how you slice the numbers. Brian Burke, a statistician who has studied the results of fourth-down situations in the NFL, says a team in the Patriots' situation had a 79% chance of winning by going for it (either by converting the fourth-and-two or stopping the opponent thereafter). That compares favorably to a 70% probability of preventing a foe from driving down the field for a touchdown following a punt.

The human factors can cut both ways. Given that New England's worn-out defense had just allowed a 79-yard touchdown drive to the Colts in under two minutes, Mr. Belichick's gamble made some intuitive sense, too. But at the same time, a punt would have forced Mr. Manning—who'd thrown two interceptions already—to direct his team down the length of the field with two minutes left.

Above all, though, the essence of Mr. Belichick's "crime" may be something simpler than all this: His decision went against the natural instincts of all human beings when they're forced to make high-stakes decisions. In a recent study, researchers from Duke and UCLA found that when faced with a decision involving risk, people have an overwhelming tendency to make the supposedly safe choice—to err on the side of caution—even though doing so may lead to worse results.

By studying thousands of hands of blackjack played by random people, the researchers found that when they strayed from the "book" or the optimal strategy, those players who did something aggressive were more successful than those who did something passive.

In fact, the subjects made four times as many passive mistakes as they did aggressive ones. And these passive mistakes—holding on a 16 when the dealer has a king showing, for example—were more costly: They cost $2 for every $1 won, versus $1.50 for every $1 won on aggressive mistakes.

Why do people embrace caution? "It's because of the regret that people face when they take an action and it doesn't turn out well for them," says Bruce Carlin of UCLA's Anderson School of Management, who worked on the study.

At issue, it seems, is the very idea of what constitutes gambling. If going for it gave the Patriots a statistically better chance of winning—and if aggressive deviations are often better than passive ones—then the gamble would have been to punt, even though that was the seemingly safe play.

"I thought it was nice to see somebody go for it rather than going for it only when it's a no-brainer," says David Romer, a Cal-Berkeley professor of economics who has studied fourth downs in the NFL. "I'm disappointed it didn't work out."

"I'd like to think I would have had the courage to do what Bill did," says NFL Network analyst and former coach Mike Martz.

—Carl Bialik, David Biderman and Phil Izzo contributed to this article
Write to Darren Everson at darren.everson@wsj.com and Reed Albergotti at reed.albergotti@wsj.com

Thoughtstream: Traveling Light

 The past few weeks have been a very exciting time for our business and as a team we’ve been incredibly active in making new sales both hardware and software.  We had a fantastic meeting with Mike O’Shea and his folks in Coronado, CA.  I also attended portions of the AUVSI User Interoperability Conference in Coronado, CA, which I found to be worthwhile as well.

 

The recurring theme that I keep hearing is the desire for interoperable communications at all times in all situations in all environments.  This is a “heavy” requirement that I remember dealing with back in the early part of my SEAL career. 

 

For the majority of the first ten years of my career, I specialized in communications. In the teams we call SEAL’s with a communication specialty, “SEAL Communicators”. As a SEAL communicator, I found that as technology improved, my life improved.  In the early days of my career the equipment that I carried for my platoon was heavy, complicated with cables everywhere.  On long patrols, it wasn’t unusual for the communicator to be one of the heaviest members of the patrolling element, regardless of the nature of the mission.  I also remember having it drilled into my head as a new guy that there were two situations that were taboo for any SEAL.

 

• Loss of equipment or weapons
• Not being able to effectively communicate or “making comms” while in the field.

 

In one of my first training events as a new guy SEAL we were conducting a “swimmer op”, the point here is that we were in the water.  I was the communicator for this event, therefore I had communications equipment in the water with me. The mission profile was for us to be swimming through pier pilings and crossing some pretty difficult water obstacles to perform the tasks we needed to get done.  Needless to say, as a new guy, my methods for securing the communications equipment to my body were lacking and I lost a radio. 

 

This mistake was minor and I recovered from it, however what I discovered was that I didn’t like drawing the kind of attention to myself that one draws when they lose equipment as a SEAL.  Not a happy time for the new guy. 

Forevermore, I vowed that I would never lose anything ever again.  I also vowed that I would never be “that guy” again.  I wouldn’t be the guy who couldn’t “make comms” either. 

 

So as my career progressed, I developed a bit of a following and reputation as a communicator who “made comms” first time, every time.  Today it might be difficult to imagine having difficulty in establishing communications (“being able to contact someone or have some able to contact you.”) but it really was difficult, believe me.

 

“Making comms” became what amounts to be an obsession of mine.  I was determined to ensure contact and connectivity at all times for my unit, and I was successful.  Even if it required me to rewire a cellphone in the middle of the gulf of mexico and access the private cell network owned by the Shell Oil company….to this day I appreciate the anonymous operator who patched my call through as my team was out of gas drifting out to sea and I was able to establish communications in order to change the location we were extracted because we didn’t have the fuel to make our extract point.

 

For me I learned that communications was truly a lifesaving system.  I also believe that I probably carried a bit more equipment than most other communicators, simply because I was always concerned that I might not have something I might need and for me not being able to establish communications was unacceptable.

 

I’m learning that as technology advances, the burden of being a “strongback” to carry stuff diminishes, but the critical importance of being able to rapidly establish and maintain communications anywhere is even more important.

 

We’ve taken additional steps to target and meet this need with the our latest ASAP design.  This next system, code named “Eager Talent” will be even more disruptive than the previous ASAP X4C design some of you have seen.  We will be unveiling “Eager Talent” in the next couple of months.

 

I’ll leave you with a clue.

 

 

I’ve started to enjoy Cliff Bars quite a bit lately, especially the White Chocolate Macadamia Nut flavor!  While enjoying my tasty treat, I glanced at the back of the package and found some remarks from the founder, Gary Erickson.  I’ll quote what’s on the White Chocolate Macadamia Nut package:

            “While trekking Nepal, I met up with an expedition about to climb Dhaligiri, one of the world’s highest peaks. I figured that with more than 200 porters the expedition must have been traveling with at least 20,000 pounds of stuff Expeditionary climbing takes an enormous amount of energy, equipment, and people, to put just a handful of individuals on top of a mountain.  My friends and I prefer to climb alpine style, we move quickly, carry light packs, and leave no waste behind.  Each campsite is a beautiful destination in itself, not simply a means to an end.  I don’t believe in reaching the top at any cost – in climbing or business.  Clif Bar’s journey resembles alpine climbing.  We try to travel light and are committed to keeping our company, products, people, community, and the earth healthy.”  Gary Erickson, Founder and Owner of Clif Bar & Company.

 

 

With the “Eager Talent” system we are doing much of the “heavy lifting” for our customers in enabling them with a “travel light” capability that moves them closer to establishing and maintaining interoperable communications and information flow at all times in all situations and in all environments.

 

Cheers,

 

John Surmont

Founder, CEO

Sofcoast, Inc.

 

Wavetops: Invictus & Forged Clothing

I'm stoked.  I purchased a hoodie sweatshirt from some fellow frogs over at Forged Clothing a while back and enjoyed wearing it quite a bit.  I left it in an airport bar in a rush to grab a plane after having a couple more scotch's than I'd planned for....

Anyway, I finally got around to purchasing a new hoodie and I also decided to buy a couple of "invictus" T-Shirts. Most comfortable shirts I've ever worn. Congrat's guys on putting together such fantastic product!

I would strongly encourage all of you to stop by their website and check them out.

The real reason for this post (and no, it's not to pimp out Forged!) is to share the inspiration for one of their lines of clothing called "Invictus".

(From the Forged Clothing website about this name)...

"The poem (INVICTUS) was originally written by William Henley in 1875 and has been used in countless instances of people overcoming adversity, including being read to the Country after 9/11 in a national address by then Secretary of State Colin Powell. In our shirt of the same name, the entire poem runs horizontally across the chest between the wings, and the eighth line of the poem “Bloodied, but unbowed” is framed across the back of the shirt."

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever Gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of Circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Henley 1875

Wavetops for October 5th, 2009

I thought I'd share links to stories & blogs from the web that are of interest to me as a former Navy SEAL.

Flooding in the Philippines
CTV.ca
AP Photo / Aaron Favila In this photo released by the US Embassy in Manila, US Navy SEAL members and medical personnel assist in rescue efforts in Cainta, ...

US - Face of Defense: Longest-serving Navy SEAL Retires
The longest-serving Navy SEAL was piped ashore for the last time during a retirement ceremony Sept. 25 at Naval Special Warfare Group 4 on Naval Amphibious ...

Paws Up, Paws Down
SHSU Houstonian Online
"Paws UP" to Navy veteran and SHSU alumnus Marcus Luttrell who will share his experiences as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan today at 11 am in the Killinger ...

Series: Five Knots Of The Navy SEALs – Part 6: Becket Bend Knot
US Navy SEALs Blog; Information (blog)
In the last four articles of this series, “Five Knots Of The Navy SEALs” we have covered the following knots: the square knot (reef knot), the bowline knot, ...

Transonic Hulls, Inspired by Racing Yachts, Could Add Stealth To ...
Popular Science
By Marshall Louis Reaves Posted 09.28.2009 at 10:25 am 0 Comments An undercover team of Navy SEALs isn't worth much if their transport boat's wake betrays ...

The Way I see It: Back to the Basics
By Gunnar Hanson
Gunnar Hanson: Gunnar Hanson is the pastor of Valley Baptist Church in Valley Center, CA. Prior to the ministry, he served as a US Navy SEAL for twelve years. His background definitely brings a unique perspective to the pulpit. ...