Security Crowdsourcing is Here

In an October post I speculated about "crowdsourcing" security to spread mundane, manpower-intensive tasks away from soldiers and onto willing members of the American public. I gave one speculative, half-baked example: what if we put thousands of video cameras along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, plugged them into the Internet, and let anyone in America watch the feeds? The Army could create a website allowing Americans to self-organize into surveillance teams; if these teams saw anything suspicious (i.e. insurgents trafficking arms over the border), they could report it immediately to a US military nerve center that would analyze the event and determine an appropriate response. Mom and pop could do their part to keep Johnny safe in Afghanistan.

I gave my example only to demonstrate possibilities. I never actually expected to see anything like this, at least for a long time. But it turns out the State of Texas is doing exactly what I suggested on the US-Mexico border. Check out www.texasborderwatch.com. Jeff Howe reports briefly on the subject at his Crowdsourcing blog.


According to Howe, the first incarnation of the Virtual Border Watch program failed because of lack of interest. Texas is trying again at a cost of $2 million. Howe is skeptical the program will work. I agree. While the right ideas are there, the project doesn't seem to have the right business model behind it. Just because an idea is "wiki-powered" doesn't mean it will be successful or even remotely interesting. The Wikinomics book and blog frequently discuss the need for business leaders to find creative, innovative ways to squeeze profit out of wikinomic ideas.

Could a crowd-sourced border patrol work? I still think so, but in my original post, I argued the idea needs to be incentivized. I say that with some hesitation, because I'm nervous about the idea of living in a world where someone sitting at home in his underwear gets paid to bag illegal Mexican immigrants or Taliban insurgents. But we live in a crazy world, and that may be a component of future security. Incentives don't necessarily have to be monetary, either. Many web forums award various "flair" like rank pips and medals for active involvement. I've never understood the appeal myself, but this fame/recognition might motivate some people.

A crowdsourced security effort also needs to be communal. Sitting at a computer staring at a camera feed is boring as hell, but people might find purpose, enjoyment, and esprit de corps in being part of an online community dedicated to the task. When I first went to the Air Force Academy my mom found an e-mail group for parents of cadets. I couldn't believe how much time and energy these parents dedicated to talking about the Academy. Right before I started Basic Training my mom printed out 20 pages of e-mails from the group on shoe shining technique. If you can find a crowd willing to do that, you can probably find a crowd willing to help enforce border security. But you have to make a crowd, not just a collection of isolated individuals. A website for virtual border patrol should have communications tools built in, like message forums, user profiles, instant chat, etc.

Technology can also help users target their efforts on vital areas. Because these video feeds are digitized, it should be a simple task to identify motion and flag cameras that are particularly active. Significant events could be recorded in logs associated with each camera (wiki-style of course, maintained by users). Local officials could also intervene to suggest hot areas in need of surveillance. What you want to avoid is the presentation Texas Virtual Border Watch gives you: a long, indiscriminate list of cameras with no effort to steer your surveillance to needed areas.

Finally, the system should be easy. Virtual Border Watch requires users to create an account before they can view a camera. I suspect that leads a large number of users (like me) to simply leave the site. Some form of user identification is probably necessary, but maybe these sites could have limited guest logins to draw in users.

Will this idea ever work? I have no idea. I certainly think it's worth a try, but it has to be implemented smartly. The Texas Virtual Border Watch project has a long way to go. For $2M I expect a lot more. Maybe Texas should crowdsource its R&D. It could save its $2M and give a few $1,000 grants to 19 year-old World of Warcraft players who know how to build websites. Texas would probably get a lot more for its money.

Air Force Language Training: What Works and What Doesn't

Anyone interested in language training programs in the US military needs to read The Dilemmas of Providing Language Instruction for the US Air Force in the issue of Air & Space Power Journal released today. The article was written by Lt Col Jay Warwick (retired), the deputy director for education and training at the Air Force Culture & Language Center at Maxwell AFB. It assesses the language training problem the Air Force faces, lessons learned from Air University's attempts to integrate language education, and recommendations for the future.

For years I've been baffled by the military's half-hearted strategies for teaching language. I've ranted to anyone who will listen about why Rosetta Stone is a terrible standalone program for learning a foreign language. Rosetta Stone's widespread utility has for more to do with a slick marketing than its utility for actually learning languages. Essentially, Rosetta Stone sells a myth: you can buy a single piece of software (with no grammar required and with convenient bulk licenses for government agencies) to do the hard work of teaching people to communicate with other human beings in a foreign language.

In this article I found the statistic I needed to back up my soapbox rantings: of the 2,677 students at Squadron Officer College who applied for Rosetta Stone licenses, only 67 (2.5%) completed more than 50 hours of instruction. I haven't seen statistics for licenses available to the broader Air Force, but I suspect the completion rate is even lower. Meanwhile, Rosetta Stone is reaping some hefty rewards. In 2007 the Army signed a $4.2 million renewal contract for its licenses. According to this glowing article, we find that Army soldiers have completed 500,000 hours of instruction between September 2005 and October 2007 and 4,000 new soldiers sign up every month. Sounds good at first, but wait... if student enrollment is anything close to 4000/month then 500,000 hours doesn't go so far. Is this worth $4.2 million?

I was also perplexed when Air Command and Staff College began mandating language training for its students. I was glad to see the Air Force taking language seriously, but was skeptical that officers could learn sufficient language with a year of part-time study to be useful--especially given that the primary means of instruction was Rosetta Stone. The feedback I heard from colleagues at ACSC was overwhelmingly negative.

The good news is that Air University has paid close attention to what works and what doesn't, and they've come to the same conclusions. They've identified Rosetta Stone as a weak tool; they've also realized how beneficial it is to have face-to-face instruction with native speakers. They are shifting ACSC away from formal language training; instead they are focusing on cross-cultural competence and language familiarization. They also recognize that language training is a "career-long, progressive language-learning journey" that should begin early in an officer's career. The recommendations in this paper reflect that.

Learning a foreign language is extremely difficult. Developing adequate programs to develop foreign language capabilities across the US military is even more difficult. Because it takes years of dedicated study to develop foreign language proficiency, language training programs demand leadership from the very top. Lt. Col. Warwick argues we can only enact a comprehensive language learning program "if senior leadership makes a commitment to follow through on bringing all the working parts together—education and training, policy, and the personnel system."

Will this happen? I certainly hope so.

Globalization At Work

Today I received this e-mail regarding the software I wrote that links PFPS (Department of Defense mission planning software) with Google Earth:

Hello sir

I M Squadron Leader [name deleted] from Pakistan Air Force. u have done a great job by integrating PFPS and GE.

We live in a bizarre world. Who would have thought? I guess I'm unwittingly doing my part to fight the insurgency in Pakistan.

How to Improve Language Training? Put DLI Curriculum on the Net for Free.

The Case for Open Information

When it comes to disseminating information, the US government and military generally share as little as possible. Information is often overclassified and soldiers are taught to consider even unclassified information "sensitive." The rule of thumb is to not publicly share information unless you have a compelling reason to do so. This makes good sense when operational security is involved. Corporate America has traditionally followed the same rules; companies generally keep a close hold on information for fear of exploitation by competitors. Many business and government leaders don't even question this principle. They take it for granted.

But in our increasingly open information society this paradigm is changing. The book Wikinomics explains that many companies are reaping profits by opening themselves and their products up to society as much as possible. As proprietary information opens up, consumers get more involved, knitting together strong communities around products. R&D work is outsourced--for free--to the crowd. Witness Firefox and Google's Android phone, which are built around active user development. This principle of maximum openness is even extending into universities. MIT has an Opencourseware project that puts materials from 1800 of its courses online for free.

Opening Up DLI

This all got me thinking. What if the Defense Language Institute (DLI) put all of its curriculum online for free? No registration necessary. No fees. Just an elegant website that offers fast, easy access to materials for learning any of the 23 languages that DLI teaches.

Consider with me. DLI has more than 1,100 language teachers, most of whom are native speakers. It has the largest Arabic and Chinese programs in the country and is one of the only schools dedicated to teaching rarer strategic languages like Pashto and Urdu. Curriculum is largely developed in-house. DLI is a government organization, so it does not need to sell its curriculum materials for profit. In fact, its curriculum materials (at least in the Arabic schools, where I study) are not used in any organization outside DLI. The scale of DLI courses are staggering. My Arabic curriculum is eleven volumes, including hundreds of authentic material passages and high-quality MP3s. The curriculum is still in validation and has some problems, but it's the most extensive Arabic curriculum I've ever seen or heard of. I can't speak for other languages, but I imagine other language departments have equally impressive programs.

Now imagine we put all this online for free. What benefits would we reap?

First, we would put a wealth of resources in the hands of independent language learners. When a soldier wants to learn a language now, he generally can get only one resource from the military: a Rosetta Stone license. As I've written before, Rosetta Stone is a good supplement but it's a terrible standalone language tool. Licenses are also expensive and the military only purchases a limited number of them. Beyond that, a student is on his own. Now imagine that any student in the world could log on to a single website and find thousands of pages of free resources. Imagine the effect this would have on independent learners.

Second, a public release of DLI curriculum would improve language education programs in other universities. It would put more resources and tools in the hands of educators developing their own language training programs--particularly for languages where resources are scarce.

Third, releasing DLI curriculum might develop a larger pool of foreign language speakers outside the military. Independent learners or university students would have more resources available to learn from. Students of strategic languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Pashto are likely to have an interest in the military or intelligence agencies anyway, so the government could expect to hire many of these students in the future. By becoming one of the world's biggest providers of foreign language materials, DLI would also build a good relationship with internationally-minded students in a variety of communities.

Fourth, it would spread the benefits of American tax dollars across the entire country. This is a good thing for its own sake. You can't do that with many military technologies, but when you can, the benefits can be immense. Consider the benefits the US military brought to the world with GPS.

What are the obstacles to such an ambitious project? Profit is not an issue. DLI does not sell its courseware. OPSEC is not an issue; nothing sensitive is being discussed. Yes, we study vocabulary for military topics, but I highly doubt Al-Qaeda will care that I learned the words for "division" and "tank" in chapter 5 of my curriculum. The biggest obstacle I see is a failure of vision. A public release of curriculum that took thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop will strike most people as absurd. Building the necessary bureaucratic momentum will be extremely difficult. Someone at the top of the chain will have to embrace the vision and fight to sell it.

Publicly releasing the DLI's foreign language materials would be an extraordinary investment in American language education. Our civil and military leaders have been talking for years about creative ways to increase the linguistic competency of our force. This would be one easy, actionable way to do that.

Google and Information Transparency

A few days ago, Jonathan Rosenberg posted an article on Google's official blog that is worth reading. He speculates on the future of the Internet and Google and identifies several important trends. I found two of his points especially interesting, because their implications for building a better world are seismic.

"All the world's information will be accessible from the palm of every person." I never thought of it this way before, but it's true. The simultaneous digitization of information and global proliferation of cell phones means that every person in the world could soon have a portal into almost all the world's information. That is a dizzying thought. As information becomes more available, average citizens win. Governments become more transparent. Markets become more efficient. Good ideas get sifted from the bad. People gain freedom to network and cooperate. We take these benefits for granted in the US, but I am excited to see what effects they will bring to the developing world. And the revolution still has a long way to go. Google has the ambitious goal of digitizing all the world's information. With its Kindle device, Amazon.com is striving to make every book in the world available in under 60 seconds. It is amazing we live in a time when such ambitious goals actually seem attainable.

"When data is abundant, intelligence will win." Rosenberg observes that information transparency puts more facts into the hands of average people, leading to better decisions and more civil discourse. Transparency of information allows citizens to hold their politicians accountable and distinguish truth from falsehood. It also empowers consumers. It's hard to imagine I ever lived in a time before Amazon.com customer reviews. How did I ever make informed decisions about new purchases prior to that? When information flows freely, society collectively becomes smarter.

To be sure, this torrent of information brings challenges as well. We face vital questions of how to mine useful ideas from the deluge of garbage, how to verify sources, how to protect intellectual property rights, and how to manage the mob-like volatility of a wired community. But on the whole, information transparency brings more benefits than costs. I am eager to see the bewildering future that lies in store.

Why I am Writing

Now that I have a modest but consistent stream of readers, it is time I say a few words about why I am writing.

This blog is about my intellectual journey as a junior military officer who cares deeply about building a better collective future. I am not writing as a subject matter expert; I am writing as a student of the world. These writings are not my attempt to lecture. They are a record of my efforts to learn, to grow, to prepare myself for the hard work I anticipate in my future. I hope that by sharing them others can benefit as well.

On the evening of September 11th, as a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I staggered to my desk and wrote a brief reflection that was later published in Checkpoints magazine. In it I quoted our commandant, who told us, "I know you're all itching for a fight, but this isn't your war. It's our war. Yours is coming." As hard as it was at the time, I took that message to heart. Later in the essay I wrote, "At the Air Force Academy, cadets are studying. Listening. Watching so that, when it’s our turn, we will give our nation’s enemies something to fear... And when my turn comes, when national defense passes to my generation, we will be ready. I can promise you that."

The essay sounds quaint and naive now. Years of grueling warfare, failed foreign policy, and strategic miscalculation have ground down my triumphant idealism. I was appalled by preventable mistakes our country made. I've written before about my loss of faith in many of my leaders by 2006, which was only salvaged when a new breed of civilian and military leaders took the reins. While I was insulated from the worst of the fighting as a C-17 pilot, I still learned to despise war--even as I recognized its necessity. I flew blood and medical supplies into Afghanistan and Iraq and flew out soldiers so terribly wounded that one nearly died on my aircraft. I gave passage to a young bride who had just learned her husband was killed in Fallujah, and I flew home the remains of numerous soldiers killed in action--one shot by a Taliban fighter who was using his own wife as a human shield. In my International Relations courses I studied humanity's collective moral failure in Rwanda, Sudan, and a dozen other countries most of us can't point to on a map. I learned about AIDS, about boiling ethnic hatred and violence, about leaders who are willing to starve hundreds of thousands to cling to the feeble shards of power left in their shattered countries. I took these issues personally. Rightly or wrongly, I felt the weight of responsibility for them. While I've lost the idealism of my September 11th essay, my personal confrontation with war and foreign affairs crises only hardened my original promise: when my turn came to lead, I wanted be ready.

That promise set me on a journey. I vowed to gain the wisdom, knowledge, and competence necessary to lead effectively in the messy arena of foreign affairs. I earned a Master's Degree in International Relations and worked extremely hard to compete for an scholarship to learn Arabic and live in the Middle East. I immersed myself in news, analysis, and books. I traveled whenever possible and searched out opportunities to cross cultures. I also began this blog as a chronicle of my journey.

That is why I write.

I am not on this journey alone. I'm thrilled beyond words that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have forged a generation of intellectually rigorous officers with the determination, competence, and realism necessary to lead in today's world. My own voice is lost in the thriving online community where they learn, debate, and grind out ideas. That is a good thing.

Now, a word on what you can expect from this blog in the future. The blogosphere already has a vibrant counterinsurgency community loaded with experts on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. That is not my specialty and I intend to offer something different. I plan to focus on other areas that are of special interest to me.

First: my chief interest is building peace in the broadest sense of the word: integrating national instruments of power to build a stable, prosperous future--for both the United States and the world abroad. Anything even tangentially related to this goal is fair game for the blog.

Second: I have a special interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Western relations with the Arab world. During my 2+ years in Jordan I hope to develop as much expertise as possible in these areas and hope I can offer unique insights here.

Third: I have a deep, personal concern about the moral dimension of statecraft. Moral questions hardly register in the foreign policy community, which largely takes for granted that the pragmatic answer is the moral one. I constantly wrestle with foundational moral questions. To what extent are national and moral interests intertwined? To what extent can the United States realistically use its influence for moral ends?

Fourth: The Air Force is largely disengaged from the counterinsurgency community and has only a small online presence. In fact, as a matter of policy, it continues to firewall blogs entirely. Because of the deficit of Air Force voices online, I will write from time to time about Air Force issues.

Fifth: I am concerned about the limited interaction between various communities that have a stake in foreign affairs issues, such as national security professionals, development experts and NGOs, business leaders, environmentalists, and religious leaders. For example, the COIN community is fantastic, but it is a tight-knit community where most people read the same news, blogs, and books. To whatever extent it is possible, I hope to draw from all these different communities, bringing fresh perspectives into the military. I am less interested in saying anything new than in identifying and propagating the best ideas already out there.

Back from Vacation

My apologies for not writing much lately. With my move to Jordan less than two months away, I have tried to buckle down and really work on my Arabic, which means less time to write. The irony of studying Arabic at DLI (and most other schools in the US) is that students learn formal Modern Standard Arabic and hardly touch the dialects actually spoken in the Middle East. To learn the necessary dialect I've had to hire a private tutor and spend extensive hours outside of class. I'm essentially learning two difficult languages. Throw a six-month old into the mix, and life is busy.

My other excuse: I had last week off school. Friday afternoon I asked my wife, "What do you think about trying to Space A to Hawaii?" At 6:00 am the next morning we were on a KC-10 bound to Hickam AFB. I spent a wonderful week with my family lounging by the pool drinking Mai Tais and trying extremely hard not to think about foreign affairs. I didn't really succeed. My vacation reading consisted of a novel about an Iranian Jew arrested and tortured during the Iranian revolution, and Aaron David Miller's excellent but depressing account of American peacemaking efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Still, that was lighter fare than my usual daily intake. I stayed away from the news, my RSS reader, and my own blog. I can't say I missed any of it. Between the storm clouds gathering over Afghanistan and Pakistan, the political despair in Israel over its recent elections, and the economic death spiral at home and abroad, it's a depressing time to care about the world.

In any case, I'm back now. Arabic remains the top priority but I will try to write more soon.

Insights from Three Cups of Tea

I'm only a couple years behind, but I finally read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin. The book lives up to the hype. It is a remarkable story about a remarkable man, written in an engaging and even captivating way. You can read a more detailed summary at the Amazon link, but in a nutshell, the book is about a former mountain climber who has built 78 schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I wrote briefly about the book after reading Nicholas D. Kristof's July editorial about it, but actually reading the book has given me some fresh insights.

First, I still wholeheartedly agree with Kristof's assertion that Mortensen's brand of "soft power" is the only long-term hope for peace and prosperity in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Education, health care, economic development... these are the ingredients of healthy societies. Of course military force plays a vital role in providing security, but no amount of firepower will ever build peace. Much of the US government and military would agree with that idea these days, but our institutions don't reflect it. We continue to pump billions of dollars into next-generation weapons systems while our feeble non-military institutions scrape by.

Second, I don't believe any government agency or bureaucratic NGO can replicate what Mortensen is doing on a broader scale. At least, not as effectively. As much as I would love to eliminate a single F-22 from next year's budget and use the money to build 10,000 new schools (a figure consistent with the expenses Mortensen reports in his book), things don't work like that. You can't just hire more contractors to build more cookie-cutter schools all over the region. Mortensen has succeeded because he's learned to work within the host culture, to play by its rules--and those rules don't resemble America's. Mortensen's work is truly grassroots, resting on the strength of his good reputation and his relationships with locals. For Mortensen, building schools required hours of sipping tea and haggling over prices for nails and plywood, navigating his way through Islamic courts with the power to decide for or against his projects, and managing complex local politics and power struggles. Mortensen's respect, courage, and goodwill also earned him credibility that no US government agency could possibly match. I was surprised to discover that the Pentagon actually offered Mortensen money but he turned it down, knowing US military dollars would devastate the credibility he depended on.

Third, grassroots peacebuilding operates by totally different rules than national foreign policy, but both are necessary. I suppose I'm stating the obvious, but maybe not; both communities contain members who cannot possibly conceive that the other makes useful offerings to the world. I often wonder how much is lost because the two communities cannot even communicate. Most of my reading and networking is in national security and policy circles, where practitioners speak a cold, amoral language of national interest and power. Idealism is considered dangerous and moral concern foolish, because both fail to see the world as it is. According to the silence in my International Relations textbooks, individuals like Greg Mortensen play no meaningful role on the world stage. They are below our professional attention. And yet, men like Greg Mortensen do exist, and they are outpacing us in building a world worth living in. Their idealism and moral courage inspire hope and loyalty, and they achieve astonishing results, a little bit at a time. I believe we ignore them at our peril. We should talk to them. Maybe even learn from them. Of course, this goes both ways... grassroots movements have plenty of misguided idealists who need to learn a thing or two about the world.