With our troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and our Navy doing heavy lifting as it patrols the seven different seas, (as well as duty off New Orleans)  at 7.30 am on a hot Washington Wednesday morning this week, Donald Winter was sitting in  a bland Pentagon room shooting out questions.  Winter's long experience at  Northrup Grumman, TRW and and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plus assorted high grade university degrees,  gave him the firepower to grill his tutor, Tom Barnett.

Backwards and forwards it went for two hours on strategic, economic and military issues. Forces here. Intervention there. Size, shape, design of the Navy, the Military. Barnett said this; Winter asked that, they argued points together. 

Why? Well, Don Winter is going to be the next Secretary of the US Navy and Barnett was briefing him on the issues before he gets started. Briefing: as in, getting up to speed. Giving him the low down. Doing the download.

Besides Winter and Barnett, there was just a military attache to Winter in the room. And, oh yes, the colonel who escorted Barnett through Pentagon security hovering around.

It was an interesting briefing. We know Barnett told Winter that the US had regularly committed forces over the last few years, say a generation, into areas where globalization had missed the mark. That the US military was used when usually thick networks of economic ties between the first world and second or third world economies didn't exist.

Had intervened (invaded, made war, etc) where nation states acted outrageously or were weak, such as in Southwest Asia/Greater Middle East, Asia Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean Rim/ Central America/ northern Andes region.

But Barnett also tells Winter that increasingly we are waging war on bad actors and not states. That interventions were necessary for the stability of the world economic and security framework. And that the US was winning the battle for new freedoms around the world. He cites examples like Egypt, Syria, Libya.

Barnett suggests to Winter that the US Navy might have to assist to keep sea lanes clear between Japan and China  Asserts that casting China as our inevitably warring enemy is not good. And that "Japan's Right is hot to do this, as is their military. Too many of our own defense establishment is hot for this.(too)"  And lots of other really really good stuff.

We know this exactly........... HOW?   Yeah, How! 

Well, Tom Barnett writes a blog. Now let that sink in.

Barnett is a prolific writer, thinker and strategist and consultant who advised Rumsfield in the first George W. Bush administration. He worked for the Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2 admins. Thinks invading Iraq was  a great idea. Totally necessary. So "in there" And if there is a "war machine" in the US,  he's part of it.

He says about Winter. "Don't know much about the guy prior, but came away impressed. He has a big job ahead of him dealing with a Navy that sees itself increasingly as a Leviathan trapped in a SysAdmin world. I was pretty blunt with him, as always, although I thought it was kinda cute that the colonel bothered to tell them that my remarks in this room were off the record.

"I blog," I replied, "so there is no such thing as off-the-record for me." "

Cool.

"I blog" 

I wish we could have all seen those military type faces right then, at that exact moment, as the concept of "blog" dawned on them.... dawned along the lines of; this cat writes his stuff on the web. Do you think they thought, "oh my god.?" 

But.  BUT!  Stop. Think again.

The people who asked Barnett, like the people in the Secretary for Defense's office, Don Rumsfield's high command, must have known. They know Barnett writes down what he says. They know he argues publicly his strategic assessments.

In doing so, they know Barnett is propagating his arguments  thinking and strategy to the whole world. Barnett wants people to know what he's thinking and doing......its part of the way he's working now. He wants the wider public to understand US military strategy. Read his blog . It's all there.

In contrast, why is it that we have all suffered and worked with people and companies where the name of the bosses secretary is a secret, the internal telephone directory kept under lock and key and if there is a strategy its in Fort Knox to most employees.. 

Yet here, here at the heart of America's defenses, during a time of war, we all know what the advice is going to the Navy supremo, when, how and by who. Chapter and verse.

Moral. Never let a corporate manager ever say, again, ever, that corporate information is "too sensitive" for a company to run a blog. That a blog is "problematic". That you can't control what will appear and "that's the problem"

Ask Donald Winter. He knows it isn't. After all, he was briefed by a blogger. About the only thing that would have made this even more perfect?  If  Don Winter had a blog as well.