New Rules of War

[marct]

Hi Firn,

Packaging, labeling, marketing are all part of the game, be it a wine (-glass) or idea business thus the phrase of the old wine in new bottles. The author of the article relies greatly on the shiny wordbottles to reinforce some of his better ideas and to create attention for them, but he sadly fails to support his arguments. He still benefits through this article, but not so the target audience, as he may harm the good ideas.

Okay, I going to play scholarly pissant here, the but best translation of the phrase (meme actually) is "old wine in new skins" *not bottles). The reference, IMO, goes back to the absolute stupidity of anyone who would take something good (old wine) and put it into a new container that will make it less good, especially since the new wine skin will change the flavour and, quite possibly, split. It's not a reference to the presentation of the wine, it's a reference to the storage of the wine .

Now, on the presentation front, I am all in favour of crystal, especially for good reds. You can ruin the taste of a good wine by using a presentation vessel that changes / destroys its taste; like using a silver goblet for anything but a very sweet red or mead .

P.S: Wine or beer, can or glass, it all depends on the METT-T.

Nah, never drink beer from a can unless it's already in the making love in a canoe category !

[wm]

Okay, I going to play scholarly pissant here, the but best translation of the phrase (meme actually) is "old wine in new skins" *not bottles). The reference, IMO, goes back to the absolute stupidity of anyone who would take something good (old wine) and put it into a new container that will make it less good, especially since the new wine skin will change the flavour and, quite possibly, split. It's not a reference to the presentation of the wine, it's a reference to the storage of the wine

From one pedantic pissant to another--
I think the original reference is at Mark 2:22:

And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.

The problem is that new wine has not yet finished fermenting. Thus, it could give off more gas, causing the wineskin to expand. An old wineskin, having dried out, is less likely to be able to expand. To relieve the additional pressure, it will split instead.

Maybe, on this analysis, my difficulty with design is that I am indeed trying to put new wine in an old skin--my old conceptual framework (the old wineskin) may be unable to grok the material that is expressed in FM 5.0 under the rubric of design (the new wine).

[marct]

From one pedantic pissant to another--
I think the original reference is at Mark 2:22:

Drat, knew I should have tracked the reference down rather than rely on insufficiently caffeinated memory! Thanks for the correction, WM.

Maybe, on this analysis, my difficulty with design is that I am indeed trying to put new wine in an old skin--my old conceptual framework (the old wineskin) may be unable to grok the material that is expressed in FM 5.0 under the rubric of design (the new wine).

Maybe, but from what I am seeing, it's not "new wine" at all. I'm still slogging through on a line by line read right now....

[William F. Owen]

It took an e-mail of a lurker to remind me of a central point I made recently while speaking in the UK, in reference to Tet.

The flow down effects of the Tet Offensive were because they really happened, not because they got reported and photographed on TV. Media cannot make decisive events "more decisive," in any way that it can make irrelevant events decisive. Media is NOT instrumental. It's merely illustrative.

The only way it can be instrumental to policy is when it actually misleads the policy maker, as the relevance of an event. - something policy makers should not let happen. Accurate reporting can only report real events with real effects.

[Fuchs]

I think the point wasn't about reporting, it was about propaganda and the Americans have their own Dolchstoßlegende that asserts that their own media & Jane Fonda became propagandists for the enemy.

Propaganda, of course, can influence will quite apart from real events.

[Gnaeus]

Apparently, when writing his article and proposing his theory of the "New Rules of War," Arquilla overlooked the Marine Corps' base unit for conducting war...the MAGTF. Rule 1 leads readers to the conclusion that the military has a rigid and inflexible structure that is only suited to fight using large maneuver elements such as divisions. The flaw in Rule 1 becomes especially apparent when examining it next to the MAGTF structure. Arquilla states the the military has a "scaling problem," even though the MAGTF is built around the principals of task-organizing forces based on its mission and scope of operations. The ground combat element of the MAGTF could be a division, if it was required, but the GCE could even be scaled down to company-size if the situation dictated. What I find even more misleading in this article is that Arquilla states "the Marines now routinely subdivide their forces into "expeditionary forces" of several hundred troops each." This further implies that the expeditionary construct of Marine forces was a knee jerk reaction to the current counterinsurgency environment, even though the MAGTF concept has been around and applied since the 1960s. I would think that a Naval Postgraduate School professor would have a better understanding of the composition and doctrine of the Marine Corps.