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Friday, 22 April 2005

Comments

Valdis said...

John blogs... "Frankly, a CEO is an excellent strategic target. "

Yes, look at this web page: http://www.orgnet.com/decisions.html
From Figure 1 we see that a hierarchy is just a hub-and-spoke network... remove the center hub and the network fragments maximally.

From Figure 2 we see that removal of the hub may not be as bad as imagined... but a key node is gone nonetheless and the emergent shape of the organization is different. Organizations are not like Legos, you cannot easily replace the missing brick.

gmoke said...

The reports I saw about the masss of deaths at a feeding station in Iraq a few months ago led me to believe that the incident was exacerbated by the policies of the private contractor, a Halliburton subsidiary, which felt that it was easier to pack groups of soldiers into the place and keep them there to eat rather than comply with existing military policy of dispersing personnel as quickly as possible so as not to provide targets.

Here's an analysis from issue #12 of _Outlaw Nation_ , a DC Vertigo comic, published in August 2001. On page 14, the villain gives this speech:

"Gloves [one of the villain's agents] did good work in WW3, trashing all those piss-ant countries for democracy, fun and profit. Heh! Nothing that boy liked better than to shit in a peasant's well and then sell him Coca Cola.

"But a one-trick pony like him just couldn't make the evolutionary jump from cold warrior to new world orderly. He blamed me when the collapse of socialism didn't roll out the absolute state of America called for in the grand design..

"But the finance bombs of world war 4 make all the established conspiracies redundant."

"World war 4...?" the hero asks.

"Global capital's viral assault on the nation state. Don't tell me a smart kid like you hasn't noticed?"

Federalist X said...

John: is it possible that the one-man risk then is too high and corporations should start decentralizing CEO power again?

andrew said...

This isn't suprising at all. What I find interesting is that this phenomenon conicides with the privitization of military and security forces. If corporations are percieved as allies of the state, then wouldn't it make sense for those that supply services to states at war to provide their own security forces as well? It is out of the question to see a corporation execute para-military operations in the future considering that large untapped markets exist in the unstable, non-intergrating gap? It may not as far out as it seems. The bigger question looming over all this is what happens to the legitimacy of the state's monopoly on force?

jughead said...


This is the second post that I've seen referring to private security companies as the 'second largest' force/ally in Iraq.

This is true only in numerical terms. Without air support, etc from the US, how long would these groups last in Iraq? My guess is about a fortnight before they effectively ceased to exist.

A good example would be the fate of the triads and other private forces at the hands of the japanese after the fall of Nanking. A fearsome reputation and thousands of small arms held by groups motivated almost entirely by money are no match for a properly organised and ideologically motivated foe. Imagine Blackwater security and the rest trying to defeat the British army in Iraq? Size isn't everything.

john mcneils said...

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