Unified Electric Global Smart Grid

click to enlarge Fuller's Dymaxion Map

Communication and transportation grids are secondary in importance when creating a Type 1 civilization. Proper digitally controlled unification of major continental electrical grids is the essential physical foundation of a truly global society.




Gross world product increased an estimated 530% in the 19th century and grew an average of 5.3% annually between 1800-1900. World wealth then grew an exponentially greater 3,600% in the 20th century (even when taking into account damage from conflicts) at an average of 36% per year. This astounding increase was made possible due to automation, effective fossil fuel exploitation, periodic rapid war recovery reconstructions, and consumer culture for the masses.

Then there has been a noticeable paradigm shifting slowdown in world's wealth generation towards the end of the 20th century, primarily in the western world. Slowdown in recent decades has been substantial enough that even with Eurasia coming online in the 1990s, the average annual gross world product growth has been only 2.2% on average annually between 2000 and 2012.

Obviously much of the world product is unaccounted for due to the size of the black market and unreported/non-quantifiable activity. But to make 21st century exponentially more productive than the previous one (the way 20th was to 19th) and to successfully and rapidly pull 9 billion projected humans towards dramatically better standards of living, a couple things need to be considered. These are unified energy and communication grids that function as public utilities. These would provide the foundational base on which globalization can continue evolving more evenly, smoothly, and equitably.

Even with solid transnational transport systems, markets will remain fragmented if synchronous grids of different regions remain disconnected from each other. Recent efforts by US authorities and private interests (General Electric, T. Boone Pickens, etc) are promising since they are pushing for electrical unification in North America that would copy and build on European experience. On the one hand, these efforts are due to economic profit based needs requiring US to use cutting edge tech to incorporate scattered steadily growing renewables (just look at the recent exponential efficiency growth in solar that is finally becoming competitive) as well to incorporate the explosion in non-renewable sources from fracking. On the other hand, efforts towards an American supergrid are also driven by existential necessity: alarming regional climate related calamities and increasingly third world nature of the continent's electrical infrastructure.

click to enlarge

Unitary planetary energy SuperSmart Grid and its characteristics

Efforts to unify largest electrical grids in the world are ongoing and largely unreported due to their rather mundane technical nature. Recently, power entities responsible for control of 70% of world's grid capacity met to discuss standardization, interconnections, and unification. Well respected experts have described an eventual ultimate goal of the world becoming just a giant room with wiring. One where any family, business, or country can add an electric socket and into which new diverse energy sources can be added on a plug and play basis. The entirety of energy on the global grid at any given time would be measured continuously as well as all major expenditures and additions. The recent breakthroughs in high voltage DC circuit breakers and US funded GE smart grid research allows energy to be properly circulated, redirected where needed, prevent cascading shut down failures, deal with massive energy influxes and influxes from semi constant supplies (wind/solar), and to store excess energy in energy reservoirs to be fed back into the system as needed. Emergence of a global common electrical grid before our very eyes also requires an emergence of almost a "secondary Internet" to regulate the energy flow. As we keep hearing more and more about the emerging "Internet of Things", this secondary energy regulating Internet will naturally become a major factor for discussion, promotion, and implementation.

To become a water type utility in popular global consciousness, electrical grid needs to become a sort of rough giant continuous "energy trough" constantly collectively added to and taken from.

To effectively move away from a future annual monetary income stipend (that would be introduced to mitigate disruptive social effects of automation) and onto an annual electrical energy consumption stipend, the grid needs a few things:

1) A minimum of doubling of world's energy production and a minimum of doubling of efficiency of current energy systems (in energy transport and use). This would quadruple energy as human population grows from 7 billion to eventual stabilization point of around 9 billion and maintain annual energy growth well above annual birth rate.

2) Transparent, real time, easily publicly accessible energy data within the system for every locality. So if a person wants to check real time consumption of electrical energy by Chicago or Kyoto or a small town in Argentina he or she would be able to do so. Personalizing electrical streams within a global "trough" would create same psychological connection to energy that people are currently developing towards Internet broadband (dealing with broadband via a similar "global broadband trough"/global Wi-Fi is also a good complementary idea).

Energy, transport, and communication are essential factors for creation of a smoothly functioning world technological and social organism. These issues stand above all other issues in this regard. Even proper evolution of political institutions is not possible without addressing these factors. Breakthroughs in hardcore circuit breakers for long distance HVDC underwater cables will allow connections thousands of miles in length between low power and high power grids and thus propel SuperGrid emergence (see current HVDC cables turning Europe into an energy nexus on the right).

The HVDC cable lengths keep breaking
their own records and are rapidly being
constructed as we speak, it is already
doable to connected Iceland to
North America and Siberia to Alaska

[insert alarmist melodrama here]: "These are all ridiculous and obvious platitudes! There are insurmountable political obstacles to all of this! First there's the banking cartels that have been carefully stifling physical industry to not overproduce so as to keep profit rates up for over 100 years in the Western world. Now that systemic sabotage system has been globalized. Plus even if the banking leash was removed from generating industry for socially useful ends, the sheer influx of energy use talked about will ruin us through ruining our environment!"

Panic and resignation make some amount of sense given the full spectrum kaleidoscope of obstacles but we need to approach this using numbers.

It was estimated in the 1930s, that if all the buildings in America were demolished and rebuilt with cutting edge energy efficient buildings in their place, the energy savings would break even in 20 years with the entire energy amount taken for this gargantuan effort.

Nothing that drastic needs to happen now that solar is becoming competitive with fossil fuels (see the massive deflation in solar panel products) and now that China is leading the global nuclear energy renaissance. Roughly half of 60 third generation nuclear power plants being constructed around the world right now are located in China and the country is well on track to making a breakthrough in economies of scale production when it comes to fission reactors. It is also worth mentioning that every successive generation of a particular industry (from making cars to making computers) becomes more energy efficient in terms of electrical input to product output. This means that the reindustrialization in the Western Hemisphere that The Pragmatist keeps mentioning will not be as exponentially more energy intensive as currently thought. The impact on the environment will be smaller than previous waves of industrialization and it is important to keep in mind that true clean up of polluted regions of the planet will only be possible by the large scale machinery of reindustrialization. 

The popularity of going off grid in North America has created progress in plug and play modular connectors for solar panels that are easy to operate for the average person. This nicely combines with recent rapid emergence of overcapacity in Chinese solar panel production and German efforts to remain competitive with China through solar subsidies.

It is hard to say whether Hydraulic Fracturing, Nuclear, or Solar will become the primary driver behind supersmart grid emergence. What is clear is that the process towards it is moving full steam ahead, is inevitable, and that eventually we will see energy "too cheap to meter" as a whole planet gets access to a trough to take from and fill with easy tracking of the entire process.

World citizenship and world passport

Globalization can be better structured through reward of world citizenship upon completion of qualified technical and scientific institutes. This creates cadres for international infrastructure management and aspirations to join such cadres.





Currently, it appears that the next step in globalization will be transnational government owned corporations in energy, transport, and various other very capital intensive production. This stage would naturally evolve from the current system of transnational and mostly private financial-corporate rule that is heavily subsidized by state governments. The deepening of the global crisis (yes it is still there) will be responded to via eventual large scale re-industrialization in the northern hemisphere. This will require government assistance in every stage of the process from providing demand to ensuring rapid heavily regulated implementation. The current Western corporate system of fully privatizing the profits and semi socializing the costs will thus transform into one where costs are fully socialized and profits are semi privatized. The Gazprom structure of half the profits going to fund the state is the minimum starting point for similar Government Transnationals (lets call them transgovcorps) in railroads, large ships, nuclear reactors, etc. Barring very rapid collapse of major bond and stock markets (accompanied by mass social in instability), shareholders will only allow states to take control of the majors via this gradualist approach. I've already roughly outlined why pushing for anything like this becomes increasingly necessary in decades to come.

Even transnational finance may go public via merger of development banks and/or cooperation of sovereign wealth funds. Recent decision of BRICS to start a joint development bank and even US president pushing for one is early indication of this tendency. Public control of financing and capital provision for large and long term projects may seem absurd given existing oligarchic power dynamic but there appears to be an elite shift towards it. The death of Margaret Thatcher was very revealing with many key perception forming media outlets calling the current crisis the result of Thatcherist neoliberalism.

Under these conditions (and the threat of globalization stalling and melting into revived regionalisms), reviving globalization with transgovcorp entities operated by a growing body of world citizenry makes functionalist sense. Some observers may say that it makes more sense for "soft" transgovcorp structures to arise first. For example, through merger of already unprofitable enterprises of US postal service with German, French, Russian, and Japanese postal services. However it makes even more sense to start with heavy industry that requires constant cross border professional human capital flows. This is due to such capital intensive projects allowing official government sanctioned global workforce to emerge. A professional yet non-elite "world worker" and "world citizenship" starts a certain chain reaction of functionalist solidarity that can complement UN action. Barriers to human migration are the most persistent roadblocks to further peaceful planetary consolidation (or at least such political consolidation within the Northern Hemisphere where most of the war reduction benefits from such action would be located anyway). World citizenship as applied and rewarded to actual technical personnel does substantially more for international cooperation than current cultural and elite top down efforts. The natural sphere where to start growing a body of world citizens is resource exploitation of the arctic circle, creating intra and interregional high speed transport links, and various (often profitable!) efforts to fight climate change via terraforming deserts, bolstering coastal areas, etc. The neo-feudal menace of current transnational corporations can be flipped on its head without deconstructing them substantially. With challenges of exponential technological change in the background, we need to work with what we have. Engineering and science are even more cosmopolitan ways of communicating than food, music, and film.

The title of "world citizen" does not have to be a cliche and functionally meaningless hippy catchword for a well traveled and globally minded person. Neither does it have to be a description for a member of an exclusive informal club of most interconnected and powerful planetary elites. Making world citizen into an increasingly functional and institutionalized title that is awarded can create a sort of transparent and democratically controlled meritocratic bridge (or human buffer) between bottom up globalist efforts and top down globalist efforts. Lets not yet speak of them being a safety buffer between the haves and have nots in the more distant future.

Previously I have discussed a number of tendencies already present which could accelerate globalization in the future: universal themes for global cinema rooted in biological needs rather than cultural archetypes, international police reform, and expansion of UN extraterritorial areas like heritage sites. World passport as a reward rather than as a right goes the furthest.

World passport and world citizenship tackles a number of key issues:

1) It counters mass technologically induced social fragmentation via creating solidarity and an anchor of stability for diverse societies and subsocieties within them.

2) Tapping into inquisitive restlessness and international travel of Western youth to guide them towards contact with planetary infrastructure creation and to provide them with larger sense of purpose beyond sensory experience.

3) Controls immigration by providing a guiding channeling framework for migratory flows of educated non-Westerners

4) Augments tangible soft power of United Nations (if citizenship is extension of UN or if there is cooperation with it).  People will associate blue helmets with not just guns, food, medicine, and blankets but with transport, energy, airplanes, and actual permanent arrival of progress and civilization. UN acquires greater legitimacy by seeing an emergence of a parallel virtual "country without a country".

5) Help build an infrastructural global community of technocrats as a future hedge and counterweight to financial, lawyer, and merchant technocrats thus... (see 6)

6) Takes a step towards eventual UN owned infrastructure such as UN power grid and certain other future utility functions (I'll get to futuristic provisions in later articles) under organically grown legitimacy.

I have covered the growing tendency within global industrial development to create competition between 2-3 regional super clusters. This phenomenon is based solely on growing physical continental links in energy and transport that will eventually merge into a unified standardized global energy grid and high speed rail grid. Large amounts of engineers, scientists, and various supporting technical personnel will be required to service these grids. It is in the best interests of regional actors to support financing and creation of this transnational personnel. World passport and citizenship is one great way to do so. Many of the "world citizen" cadres will still find themselves serving the home countries due to inertia.

The process mentioned above does not truly threaten great powers within each regional cluster since they will acquire leadership role within them. Thus we see US in North America, Brazil in SA, Germany in EU (and whatever EU evolves into following the crisis), Russian Federation in Eurasian Union, China in east Asia, etc. Some short term and often desperate intraregional struggles are inevitable as currently seen between secular Arab nations (Egypt, Syria) and traditionalist Arab monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar) for control over who leads in providing the political culture and ideological substance to a regional block. Eventually, each region will have settled with a center of force guiding it, most likely the most industrialized country. Hopefully that industrialized power will engage in empirically proven methods of reducing poverty and inequality (Venezuela for instance has made serious progress in reaching all its UN development goals: Venezuelan strategy infecting Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, and India will do wonders). The Schengen area equivalents in each continent and region will do preparatory work to further enable global citizenship.

"I bet Brangelina will get to have a world passport?" says the jaded reader? Ok that's actually a great idea to reward it to a few celebrities as marketing. In the 21st century, the developmental and nuclear war preventing integration should be aggressively sold by whichever means are effective. Obviously rewarding a certain number of various athletes, entertainment personalities, and heroes creates necessary buzz for the passport (primarily given for achieving relatively dull technical expertise). Besides the benefits the citizenship may start with, eventually additional benefits can be added to get people around the world to get into fields they may overlook. The number of passports given at first may number in just a few million but be expanded depending on how the merger of public services into transgovernmental services continues.

Increasing Redundancy in Government and Technological Systems

There are dangers in seeking efficiency above all other values in social and material engineering. Redundancy and efficiency are often two sides of the same coin.

Here at The Pragmatist, we really value efficient government and energy distribution systems. Going as far as to promote a special branch of police under the executive to make periodic efficiency audits and raids on various organizations and key institutions to see how they could be streamlined (a 21^st century throw back to the efficiency movement of 100 years go).

Having said that, we must keep in mind a few things:

1) Increasingly high tech advanced planetary civilization has very elaborate hierarchies fed by ever more complex energy feeds, human capital feeds, and resource production/distribution chains. This makes many of said hierarchies (and institutions they oversee) more fragile than they appear and this fragility will continue to increase. The amount of various environmental and social shocks will continue to increase as well and exert unexpected devastating ripple effects. For example, the recent Japanese earthquake/tsunami has made many machine part assembly lines go offline for months causing ripple effects in large economies oceans away. Considering that many of the advanced countries on earth are and will continue to be plagued by gerontocracy (US and Japan spring to mind), these shocks will be even more severe. That is, since the effectiveness of government institutions in the 21st century will be measured by how rapidly they absorb, comprehend, and meaningfully respond to new and novel stimuli. Just like a biological body of a young athlete versus the one in a nursing home.

2) Greater societal efficiency is not incompatible with having larger government as this Pragmatist piece has shown. Technology allows dramatically more government services, more redundancy (more on that later), while raising overall societal efficiency. The false artificial monetarist dichotomy between "spending and cutting" is no longer relevant as will soon be discovered by popular consciousness. The effectiveness and quality rather than the quantity of government red tape is at issue. Systems alongside expansion/contraction of the money/debt token supply system can also co-exist without a problem.  Even the popularly hated neoliberal propaganda outlet, The Economist, begrudgingly acknowledged the successful expanding statism of Norway that is acquiring leaner/efficient characteristics while also preserving and expanding human autonomy:

"And as the Asians introduce welfare states they too will look to the Nordics: Norway is a particular focus of the Chinese."

 [ sidenote: There are also other very macro institutional efficiency creating political mechanisms that were mentioned by The Pragmatist. These are to be addressed at the highest levels of nation states and political subunits. We wont go into into this again presently.]

3) We also recognize that human beings have physiological and affective needs of safety, security, and that their sole purpose is not subservience to keeping mechanical and social arrangement at being maintained at “peek efficiency”, "equilibrium","stasis", "calculated material expansion within narrowly defined band", etc. 

Very often when you hear theorists talk of making the economy or society more efficient they are really talking of streamlining financial flows to the controllers and top tiers of society. A good and rather ridiculous argument from the side of efficiency is the concept of “natural unemployment” within 3-4% range. Proponents of such inhuman and relatively recent bourgeois concept say it makes economy as a whole more "efficient" with competition among wage slaves fluid and dynamic bringing the best fit for the job. In this case, it is not really the entire economy that is being made more efficient but efficiency applied to streamlining the profit generation of stockholders, management, and well to do controllers.

The recent news of the United States Post Office deciding to stop mail delivery on Saturdays by August 2013 is a good example of how some societal functions should not be subject to overall efficiency/for profit standards (obviously new technologies should be implemented and efficiency increased on a micro level without losing sight of the larger picture). Efficiency would really not be cutting overall reach of post office but expand it to operate 24/7 by robotics at 2/3 of current electrical energy and material expense.

The value of Redundancy in the Societal Sphere

Sometimes the safety of society and human welfare requires extra efforts towards redundancy, reliability, predictability, and multiple non-profit driven fail safe guards.

Efficiency: accomplishment of an ability to accomplish a job with minimum expenditure of time and effort

Redundancy: the provision of additional or duplicate systems, equipment, etc., that function in case an operating part or system fails, as in a spacecraft

Let's take for instance a jumbo jet passenger airplane. Many people feel fear at absolute psychological lack of control when sitting in an enormous metal whale with tiny wings. They have to put total trust in computer navigation systems and the engineering behind the giant engines and the plane's tail (most plane crashes result due to the stabilizing tail falling off).

A redundant transport jumbo jet system would look at the concept of A-10 Thunderbolt 2 (warthog) military plane that is an armored tank and is designed to fly even if 1 of 2 engines, 1 of 2 plane tails, and half of one wing is missing. Redundancy is absolutely compatible with human welfare while efficiency often isn't. The enormous airbus A380 only has 4 engines and 1 tail while the new Boeing 787 also has 1 tail and only 2 giant engines overall regardless the giant size. Perhaps a lesson can be learned from Antonov An-225 Mriya that has 3 engines on each wing, two tails, as well as ability to accommodate an additional engine on top of its tail intersection and on its back (it carried a space shuttle on its back once so not a big deal).

This is a good visualization and example of efficiency suffering at the hands of extra physical redundancy (in additional to existing triple module redundancies practiced on planes) yet less efficiency in this case extends the lifespans of thousands upon thousands of humans and cargo. Governments can subsidize the extra fuel for these extra engines by cutting down on plane sorties over many primitive occupied territories.

ISS uses more major redundant systems and subsystems than
many hurricane prone areas even though far less humans
and money is on the line

If one could visualize a technologically complex 21st century civilization as being a heavy duty airplane (the airplane in this comparison, regardless of whether it is the Shuttle, is still a lot less complex than human society), then we need to make our society the Antonov An-225 Mriya with additional engine on the tail, on the belly, and on the back. This means redundancy in agricultural production systems (vertical farming), parallel self sustaining seats of government in cities designed to govern from scratch, satellite cities to experiment with mass producing ways out of systemic shocks, research and development clusters, and many others. In a globalized world that is increasingly functioning as one giant country, we can't put all our eggs in one basket/country whether the basket produces electronics, food, human capital, or raw materials. There needs to be more so called eggs, they need to be smaller, they need to be more decentralized (and tastier and more energy rich, you get the point). Same goes for the baskets.

Redundancies can be expanded into many territories of society in both material and intangible realms. This would keep economic costs from repair and from disruption down. 

Other redundancies should naturally be scrapped. Rather than having 15 intelligence/police agencies all performing similar tasks and poorly sharing information and time in the limelight due to ego concerns, it often makes sense to consolidate certain government agencies and institutions as much as possible. As written previously, with sufficient technology a modern policeman may do the job of 5+ policemen from the late 20th century. Many economists on both sides of the political isle often argued for public transport to be free and not rely on profit due to the enormous range of total social and GDP benefits of unlimited flow of human capital. Eliminating the redundancy of various subway and metro controllers and ticket checkers while doubling the number of repairmen and actual railroads (more parallel railroads are redundant yet better than the most efficient one after another train scheme on just one) will do a lot more for smoothing the functioning of not just transport but the human herd at large.

We will return to proper balance between redundancy and efficiency in later articles. We are beginning to see that these are sides of the same coin. A society is perhaps less than an airplane but even more like a body. An increasingly overburdened, sickly, and ever more connected and skilled body may require a couple extra kidneys, another heart, another liver, more eyes as well as a hyper efficient new cybernetic/neural circulatory system to keep all of this feel the lightness as if only 1 or 2 organs exist at all!

Enough with the examples, I think we're done here.

Military Lessons from Syrian Civil War

It is still too early to say whether the alliance of Western, Turk, Saudi, Qatar funded mercenaries and foreign Al-Qaeda fighters will "liberate" Syria the way they did Libya. 

But 2 years gives us some time for observation on modern civil wars.




Observers trying to be neutral in seeing what is happening in Syria start off with a customary disclaimer. "Assad regime is rather shady and vicious, we don't support it but perhaps chaos that will replace it will be worse".

We will do the same. By all means, Assad government is a lot less benign than was the genuinely popular government of Gaddafi. Libya, a country of 6 million (with half of it lasting and maintaining military operations for 7 months under constant NATO bombardment), demonstrates this fact along with the objectively high social/infrastructural spending on the population. Without direct NATO bombardment of Western Libyan infrastructure, Gaddafi's forces would have easily occupied and pacified eastern Libya within 1-2 months and neutralized destabilizing foreign mercenary, special forces, and terrorist elements. In fact, during battle for Misurata, Gaddafi's troops attempted precision targeting of hostile elements rather than current Assad strategy of neighborhood isolation and blanket bombardment. That show of humanitarian tactics ultimately hastened Libya's slide into current sectarian decentralized chaos.

Assad father's semi-reactionary coup within the Baath party in the 1960s greatly moderated socialist factions and allowed current batch of corrupt business elites to ultimately emerge. Assad dynasty has also mismanaged its influx of funds from recent partial opening to globalism and neoliberal theory. Libya mismanaged funds as well but to a lesser degree. History shows us that cold war attempts to find a third way between socialism and capitalism (such as Baath party's fusionistic ideology of socialism, nationalism, pan-Arabism, state capitalism) gradually degrades towards something blatantly fascistic, stagnant, and opportunist due to lack of ideological clarity.

One constant in secular nationalist modernizing Arab republics appears to be strong state and military apparatus that inevitably partially "sells out"/merges with the Western-phile business classes. To be fair, occasionally they genuinely do create social progress via emulating parts of previous experiments (ex: Nasserist, Peronist, Kemalist, Leninist, and FDRist practices).

Another constant is that due to strong nationalist military tradition of these ungodly "third way" hybrid regimes, they prove difficult for the neighborhood. They are just too willful, independent, too sovereign for current process of globalization. Thus we see today's opportunism of neighboring states (local hereditary mafia monarchies, neoliberal Turkey, and Western governments) to ride/redirect the protest wave and overthrow third way regimes to better exploit them. A pattern emerges that when a third way state tries to create a peaceful outreach and make new friends, they get stabbed in the back (watch the interview of Assad by Charlie Rose and note the experience of Libya giving up chemical weapons and becoming more normal only to be stomped).

But it isn't easy. If you fear you may be targeted by ambitious vultures who want to use social unrest in your country to forment regime changing unrest, then you should keep some lessons in mind. Because there is nothing worse than an artificial civil war that doesn't follow the will of the majority (think about alternate history outrage of UK intervening on the side of the Confederacy during American civil war and having Confederates win and occupy the north, makes the blood boil don't it? Or if China was stirring secession unrest among American tea party types with generous funding and advanced weapons, unthinkable!).

However if you got a genuine civil war on your hands that is strictly indigenous and if you got the support of Western capital and weapons and you still don't seem to be winning, then you're definitely on the wrong side of history. You may want to call on French/Saudi/etc military to help you out and take chances with that.

Lesson 1: Outcome depends not on domestic factors but either interference or non-interference of global and regional powers.

The global media bubble of disinformation that Western governments can achieve around a targeted country is monstrously powerful and very difficult to breech. If you are on the wrong side of the transnational slander campaign, you best get powerful friends.

UN is split into faction A) [US, France, UK] that disregards basic UN premise of national sovereignty in favor of corporate transnational neo-feudal police state and faction B) [China, Russia] that fight to protect UN status quo and thus perhaps even UN's legitimacy with a statement of  "what happens inside a country's borders is not NATO's/UN's business". Eventually of course, during UN's evolution we may first see some global police apparatus develop but it'll be more along lines of multilateral government agreements, continental security/economic blocks, and not just one security block arbitrarily browbeating UN to cater to its needs. It may even be possible to have various large security alliances have their own representation in UN as a collection of global gendarmes with their own respective neighborhoods to patrol.

Lesson 2: Military installations deep inside a country need to be better defended since many don't plan on being attacked by well armed civilians or foreign mercenaries/adventure seekers pretending to be civilians.

Many military bases are located in dangerous zones such as by forests or by hills that allows them to be bombarded. This applies to all military bases including the ones inside powerful states like France, UK, US as well. The bases are not civilian proof (due to expectation of civilian areas being safe) and thus could be rapidly surprised and looted. A country fearing attack by NATO pirates and their proxies (Algeria you're next considering France is picking up the war on terror torch) best double cement wall their bases, clear nearby brush, and prevent construction of residential areas in the vicinity. Even a large big name base is ridiculously vulnerable to 100-200 well armed people storming it to grab even bigger guns. Thus installations in countries vulnerable to civil war should copy base protection methodology employed in Afghanistan.

Lesson 3: Give in to protester demands early. :)

Now not just any protester demands (not the demands of the bourgeois children who want free flow of capital, privatization, and "free speech" for their capital) but those demands concerning economic freedom of the poor. Thus, any government in fear of "being next" should make overtures to the local communist party apparatus, secular/socialist community organizers, etc to co-opt them and then use these connections to route out foreign infiltrators and create community support. Rationing should occur immediately to create popular dependence of the poor sectors of society on government for subsistence. This means, bread, sugar, petrol, basic children supplies, etc. Make an economic outreach to Cuba, they may send some help over.

Lesson 4: Determine early whether it genuinely is a civilian protest that can be handled by combination of political outreach and police action or whether it's total national security threat requiring major mobilization to secure strategic areas with triple rings of defenses. Do not gradually escalate and allow insurgents to adjust. If threat is serious and Western hyenas/neighboring government jackals are beginning to side with protesters go to Lesson 5.

Lesson 5: Protect the main cities first to maintain illusion of normalcy, maintain popular support, and create large safe havens from those fleeing the countryside. Gradual isolation of enemy infected neighborhoods in the city of Homs was a success but it shouldn't have come to that. An ounce of prevention (military quarantine of a city) is better than a pound of cure.

As tempting as it is to use all your might to chase a bunch of dangerous religious rednecks across the country and attempt to maintain security across the whole country, that is often is simply not possible. Major cities (and substantial buffer zones around the cities) should be first priority in order to prevent emergence of a center of power for an alternative government (that can then rely on drawing educated cadres within the city). Military installations, borders, arms factories, and energy supplies should obviously come second.

Create rural pockets where insurgents can operate and herd them into those pockets. If some cities developed an infection already, isolate the neighborhoods and starve them out. Religious extremists are similar to zombies from a bad Hollywood movie only they feed off people's broken hopes and their radicalization once infrastructure and the economy have been destroyed.

Lesson 6: Pay large amounts of money to PR firms of a neutral country so they run ads on news channels of Western countries if possible, wage prolific Internet campaigns. In the era of declining American empire, even a monolithic media offensive will have cracks in it.

Lesson 7: Maintain refugee camps within areas of government control and use the dispossessed males for recruitment. It is not helpful to have them sitting in a neighboring country without supervision or being indoctrinated into the opposing camp. Plan for creation of refugee camps on your own territory in advance, preferably in urban areas where they can provided with physical needs, security, and propaganda umbrella of the government.

Lesson 8: Invest in cheap decoy tanks, airplanes, helicopters which have their own heat signature. Western governments may be feeding satellite information to insurgents and decoy tanks used by Serbs during NATO Yugoslav bombardment were very effective at confusing the enemy. Set up fake targets to attack as traps. Religious insurgents are not too bright to begin with considering their devotion to self-sacrifice and superstition so tricking them will be easier than secular insurgents.

Lesson 9: Maintain illusion that all government facilities are functioning normally but store all vital records underground or in other locations to prevent fire damage from car bombs. Record keeping is essential to maintain food/supplies rationing mechanisms running in a hearts and minds campaign. Relocate some essential government offices to more secure military bases if possible.

Lesson 10: Set up a transnational intelligence sharing center on potential threats from Western powers and their lackeys. Create a database of known mercenary networks. Set up a multi-billion dollar assistance fund in faction B country to use for aid if a foreign backed civil war should happen to you. Don't allow New York Times, BBC, or any Western media agents into your country, they are affiliated with intelligence services. Use Chinese or Russian media channels from Faction B.

Any country may find themselves in danger even if so much time has passed that they think they're safe. Cuba, Venezuela, Algeria, Iran, and every strategic willful country in Africa/Central Asia/Middle East should collaborate on how to prevent humanitarian catastrophe from foreign physical and informational infiltration and NATO bombs from falling on their territory.

P.S. Having said all of this, not all civil wars are created equal. Some governments simply have a more difficult time accommodating opposition due to their feudal structure. Entities such as Saudi Arabia perhaps deserve to be destabilized as these feudal theocratic absolutist monarchies are not a force for human progress by any objective measure. Neither are the other vicious caste based monarchies. Karma will have their way with them when their "subjects" wake up and turn republican or when Saudi extremists refuse to go abroad and turn their attention inwards. Considering that the entire region is similar to pre-WW1 Europe, it is better for all nations in the region to be on the same republican level of understanding and progressing towards greater secularization, fertility lowering education, and modernization. Secular educated people are less likely to sign up to fight in wars and more likely to demand socialist leaning style of development.

And here is an interview with Assad just a couple years ago after he was visited by senator John Kerry and after he made outreaches to Turkey, Qatar, and the West.

Converting Military-Industrial Complex for Civilian Use

Large military contractors can continue to make a killing (no pun intended) for their shareholders if half of their military hardware and development was converted towards social benefit.




Previously, The Pragmatist covered the need to utilize the high tech assembly lines, research and development labs, and sophisticated blue collar job creation potential of the current American military-corporate behemoth. Reasons were given.

Now perhaps it is time to look at a few general things that can be accomplished by the declining American empire to avoid the mistakes that Soviet military-industrial complex experienced. This means setting certain long term civilian procurement goals for the American complex that:

1) keep current technical/industrial personnel in place and employed
2) gently push the personnel towards reorientation and training of others
3) make use of existing assets and existing assembly lines
4) require minimal retooling of assembly lines
5) take advantage of economies of scale and export opportunities
6) create new interesting synergies with civilian corporations and civilian personnel
7) create opportunities for technology transfers from abroad
8) require merger with domestic and foreign civilian corporations to aid in economy of scale creation
9) ultimately improve national infrastructure through raising electrical output, transport efficiency, etc
10) maintain/increase employment within R&D departments so as not to lose scientists abroad yet systematically refocus them towards greater civilian purpose
11) ultimately assist in transfer of non-sensitive scientific research and prototypes to civilian corporations, universities, and start ups with minimal red tape

In other words, the 600 billion a year high tech sword maker is partially remade into a high tech plow maker and assistant/trainer of additional plow makers. Every military branch up as well as exotic weapons development can  be made useful. Ultimately a DARPA equivalent for infrastructure should come into existence to complement and work together with DARPA itself. Some examples:

A fleet of floating federally owned nuclear reactors to power coastal cities and those regions hit by near future super-hurricanes

Large government orders (from companies responsible for design and construction of small fission reactors for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers) for 30-100 floating nuclear reactors and Alaska bound icebreakers. This ensures not just a continual development of small (and hopefully modular) fission reactors but a way to compete with Russians in this area when it comes to exploiting the north pole. A big export opportunity is of course also created. When the inevitable second wave of the financial crisis arrives, it is vital that key fission reactor core companies are locked into long term contracts of concrete social use (since construction of most submarines, aircraft carriers, battlecruisers, and destroyers will be cancelled/halted). This will preserve the essential core within the physical assembly and nuclear research workforce. Electrical energy will always be needed especially if it is clean and relatively portable the way modular 50-250 MW range fission is. There are of course more uses other than energy such as nuclear desalination and floating material processing.

Older cruisers and destroyers can be converted into floating power plants rather than decommissioned, sold, and/or scrapped. They are well protected and armored. Unfortunately, older aircraft carriers are too function specific and are better off sold.

When it comes to airplanes, Lockheed-Martin's converted C-130J Super Hercules airplane can even be a flying power plant that lands to serve emergency hit areas. In case of plane failure, the bathtub fission reactor can disengage and land by parachute. Once again, the assembly lines have been there for decades, retooling will be minimal. Joining corporate forces with makers of the enormous Antonov transport planes is a good idea.

Using General Dynamics built tanks as high speed rural workhorses to keep the plants from shutting down

It is possible to create giant small fission reactor powered tracked transport platforms by splicing multiple M1-Abrams tank platforms into one. Transport of ore from mines or of very large objects such as additional fission reactors and infrastructure parts comes to mind. General Dynamics need not stop mass production of their war machines, just retool for speedy rural tracked platform development in coordination with John Deere company. Conversion of tanks into heartland workhorses will be psychologically pleasing to large segment of the American population. In fact, synergy can be created in terms of tracked platform production between military and civilian assembly lines, each adding its own unique capabilities.

Clothing and accessories

The unfortunate and corrupt trend of police militarization has already created a tendency for the military to equip local police, even when it is ridiculous overkill. With eventual end of the tyrannical drug prohibition and dramatic scaling down of American empire, the military oriented corporations can still continue to mass produce uniforms, bulletproof vests/ceramic armor, helmets, and gear for police units of the North American continent and of those around the world. Russia has recently began a process of large scale conversion of uniforms to meet American standards and there is no reason for American companies to not make money off that. There is also the issue of eventually equipping of international police forces. No other government spends (wastes) as many resources per soldier as US and all that needs to happen is to take advantage of economies of scale for anything ranging from boots to shovels to wearable computer systems. Nothing stops United States from becoming a companion to China in terms of being a "factory of the world" in certain areas. Equipping the entire world's police with cheap, quality, cutting edge equipment also goes further towards standardizing policing practices and making US the global gendarme than current crude aggression. A high tech police state of 310 million people can also flood the market with such mundane things as latest civilian construction helmets, firefighter attire, mining equipment, etc.

Army Corps of Engineers to aid in deconstruction of suburbia, jump starting infrastructure development, and rapid training of civilian cadres for domestic nation building

The current government tendency to reduce youth unemployment and civil unrest through AmeriCorps will take on an intensified desperate form as robotic automation and national rot speeds up. Use of military engineers for crack training serves to empower civilians and provide a real sense of "nation building" while power boosting  infrastructure development. Although it is tempting to hire cheap Chinese labor, rural American peasants have shown an amazing tendency to tirelessly work patrolling streets of Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries. They exert themselves again gladly if given actual domestic programs and empowering teaching/work positions as an "elite" labor class. Army Corps of Engineers should be dramatically expanded with those in the army retrained for it.

Systems Engineering for national renewal

Just the way a map of an occupied country can be broken up into problem areas and stable areas, North America can be broken up into areas needing additional electrification/water supplies/employment/terraforming. A corrupt to the bone declining rotting oligarchic society needs a systems approach for tangible rebirth to start occurring. Only this approach will reduce span of renewal by 1-2 decades rather than extend it into the 2040s. All efforts must be made to prevent Chinese style fascist model from becoming a role model for the world. As noted, US military is the last bastion of national elites that are the most technically competent and that are the least parasitic on the whole social body (surprising as this may sound considering they are also the biggest budgetary burden and physical protector of the banking establishment). Instead of gutting and starving them, making use of them and their functional abilities stands to make the transition period a lot more pleasant.

These are some of the examples that come to mind. We will return to more uses for this gargantuan death machine in the future (over 50 countries killed in the last half a century making US government biggest serial killer in the world since WW2).