The Bridge Week in Review

July 26-August 2, 2015

Greetings Bridge Reader,

Here’s who you might have missed this week on The Bridge…

Eric Michael Murphy’s book review of P.W. Singer and August Cole’s novel in “#Reviewing Ghost Fleet”

“The most fundamentally frightening thing about this novel is less the dangerous future it purports to show and more the wild misrepresentation of risk implicit in it. The initial and evolving technological conditions presented in the novel involve a collection of substantial asymmetries — asymmetries in cyber capabilities and vulnerabilities, asymmetries of information, asymmetries of will and intent, etc. It is the accumulation of these that sets the initial conditions necessary to the novel’s plot — tactical, operational, and strategic disaster for the United States. (The subsequent recovery is a matter of deus ex machina and MacGuffinry…)”

Ajit Maan and James Sisco in “Conflict Analysis: A Paradigm Shift to a Population-Centric Strategy”

“There has been a dramatic increase in the number of local and regional conflicts in the past five years. Fifteen conflicts have erupted or reignited, including eight in Africa and three in the Middle East. If not addressed, the number of conflicts will continue to escalate and cause greater demands for resources, which is not sustainable….The solution exists within the non-combatant populations in areas where conflicts occur. There has been a gradual shift by some organizations to support grass-roots initiatives that focus on delivering benefits to individuals and local communities. These programs counter top-down approaches that attempt to build government capacity in the hope that resources will trickle down to the population. This concept has also been adopted by militaries that employ counterinsurgency techniques.”

This coming week on The Bridge, we are pleased to feature articles from Eben Treviño, Chris Zeitz, and Ben Hernandez.

Thanks for reading (and writing)!