100 Days Later

About 100 days ago, on Inauguration Day, Michael Tanji's Threats in the Age of Obama (published by Nimble Books) hit the bookshelves. I am privileged to have been included in this veritable "who's who" of security theorists and bloggers.

My chapter (entitled "Blurring the Lines between War and Peace") was not "prescriptive", but rather a description of conditions concomitant with the empowerment of non-state actors and the devolution of warfare from state-v.-state.

So far, the Obama administration has made every gate I identified: acknowledgement of counterinsurgency as a principal mission space for our conventional military forces (a process set in motion pre-election by DoD Directive 3000.05); reorganizing the National Security Council to be a more-powerful arbiter of disputes across Cabinet departments and agencies (albeit bordering on micromanagement, as cited by Zenpundit); enhancing the responsiveness of local communities through a set of decentralized standards vice mandated responses (q.v. DHS Secretary Napolitano's wholesale review of the Incident Command System and National Incident Management System currently underway); and Defense Secretary Gates's admonishment for "new institutions" (cf. the fate of the F/A-22 RAPTOR, which will end production after this fiscal year).

Another co-author (and editor of a forthcoming Nimble publication on 5th Generation Warfare), Dan at TDAXP, has offered a provocative dual assessment of Obama's foreign policy ("a high A") and economic policy ("F"). Check it out.