You want gloom? We got gloom. Block out eight minutes to watch David Murrin here (video below the fold). David’s talking about his new book.
Fun moment: Watch the female CNBC interviewers bristle when David points out that an excess of males (he’s talking about China) means an excess of testosterone, which means an excess of risk-taking.
[If you got snagged on that phrase “network-centric warfare” towards the end, here’s a story.
The first time I heard the phrase it was from the lips of Mr. Naval Strategy himself, Norm Friedman. Norm produces about a book a year — humiliating for us average-productivity authors (read: procrastinating sluggards), but darn impressive in a field that needs a lot of research. I’ve known Norm for some years but had never read one of his books till last fall. Then, with a book of my own coming out, we got chatting about the book biz in general, and I resolved to buy and read Norm’s latest. I now own a signed copy of Network-Centric Warfare, which I’m willing to bet was translated into Chinese and circulating in staff colleges in the People’s Republic before the printer’s ink was dry on the U.S. edition.
The second time I heard “network-centric warfare” was at NYMEX the other day. Our guide around the trading floor told us that a unit of the U.S. Marine Corps showed up one day, eager to learn how floor traders do what they do — i.e. swiftly process, sift, correlate, and act upon floods of fast-changing data presented to them on multiple screens and yelled in their ears. That’s basically what network-centric warfare is all about. The military thought they could learn something from the traders. I bet they were right.]