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

Aidan Morrison with “The Cockroach Approach: Bombing Our Own Failed Narrative”

“The cockroach approach also describes a system where the means is the end in itself. Each action is individually satisfying because it expresses our disgust and opposition to something we greatly dislike, not because it brings us closer to a better situation. This really fails the definition of what a narrative is, or should be. News stories delightfully depict the success of individual strikes, meanwhile serious commentators voice sobering assessments that IS could prevail despite our efforts. The cockroach approach highlights that this motivation for continuing operations is morally as well as strategically dubious.”

Dave Mattingly’s book review of Emma Sky’s “The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq” in “Caution: Read Instructions Before Deploying Troops!”

“The Unraveling demonstrates how badly a war can go when a nation does not apply all of its resources to the problem. The U.S. lacked diplomats trained and intimately knowledgeable of Iraq to work alongside the military in rebuilding what we broke. In some areas, military leaders performed the civil affairs duties successfully but in others, the military was the wrong tool to use.”

Will Stanton with “Information as a Weapon: The Real Threat of Privacy and Data in 2015”

“The conversation about privacy, therefore, seems to be a bit misguided. Whether it is the government or another entity; your information, like mine, lives online. The greater the trend to centralize that data, whether to be analyzed by a government agency looking for terrorist threats or by Facebook looking for marketing strategies, the more at risk we are to having that information stolen and used against us — individually or as a society. Privacy has already undergone a profound paradigm shift, though we often fail to or refuse to recognize it. It is foolish to think we can take advantage of technology to ease our daily lives and still guard our secrets in the same manner.”