http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0516/p03s03-usmi.html?page=1

I’m still figuring out what I learned at the AFRICOM expo. I had brief discussions on STAR-TIDES with a lot of senior people, but placing infrastructure at the center of “winning the peace” is such a radical shift in perspective from the process-heavy approaches which have been at the core of the US govt. thinking on peacemaking for ever and a day.

When you get the tech right, problems go away and there are no processes to speak of. No complicated inter-agency shenanigans about deploying cell phones: the tech is right, it just happens.

I wish more people involved were engineers. Really, seriously, I wish people understood how much of the core situation is about gaps in science, engineering, and product development.

One way of seeing that is to look at strategy and tactics in a wider perspective:

* Science

* Technology

* Politics

* Strategy

* Tactics

The real leverage is science. But if the science marches forwards – and it has – and technology doesn’t come along, you wind up with unapplied science – gaps like the lack of a really good quality, reliable, home solar water pasteurization appliance. Not a solar cooker, a domestic water purification gadget.

If politics doesn’t keep pace with technology… well… that’s too common to even discuss. Look at the lack of a systematic US govt. push behind birth control research. Absurd, obscene medieval ideas about contraception propagated by the Vatican still hold sway over US tech policy in this key area. Just dumb. It’s not that religion has no place in politics: people gotta get their values somewhere, and for some, that will be religion. But that kind of stupid has no place in politics, particularly inside of such powerful organizations.

The strategic and tactical levels ride on the reality created at the other levels. But if a problem exists at the scientific level – let’s take malaria or famine – no amount of scrambling around on the other levels is going to make it right. The science is the key, the core to the whole thing.

The internet did more to protect global freedom of speech than just about anything else the US govt. has done. That’s really the lesson that AFRICOM should have embraced at a fundamental level: pay for the tech to make problems go away, rather than trying to implement political and strategic band-aids. Everything which doesn’t get down to the core is surface.

Scientific research is the ultimate, fundamental, global foreign policy initiative. Everything else is afterthought. Global transformation through targeted research is the foreign policy high-ground of the 21st century. It’s power you can actually use, unlike the obsolete piles of nuclear weapons and “strategic” bombers, tools for destroying enemy bureaucracies, useless against the new generation of bottom-up warfare.

Imagine if AFRICOM primarily saw itself as a vehicle for solving the problems that lead to wars and humanitarian disasters in Africa. It’s not unrealistic, the mandate is clearly given by US DOD Directive 3000.05. But it’s making this jump in the mindset: “solve the problem as far up the ladder as possible.”

In general, I think we’ll find science as foreign policy is the key to aligning the interests of the poorest 75% of the human race with whichever power gets to it first.