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Education Reading Vietnam War

Pentagon Papers Volume IV-c-9(b)

The Pentagon Papers Volume IV.c.9(b) is labeled “Direct Action: The Johnson Commitments, 1964-1968 and tells how difficult the relationship between Washington D.C. and Saigon was leading up to the Tet Offensive. After 40 years as a classified document, the only clarification in this volume was our investment in men and money didn’t mean a damn in the war against the north.

Pentagon PapersThis volume was written right on the heels of Diem and Kennedy’s assassinations. It was a telling story: The war was not going to get any easier for either the US or the South Vietnamese against their determined enemy:

There seemed to be no compelling requirement to be tough with Saigon; it would only prematurely rock the boat.  To press for efficiency would be likely, it was reasoned, to generate instability. Our objective became simple: if we could not expect more GVN efficiency, we could at least get a more stable and legitimate GVN. Nation-building was the key phrase.  This required a constitution and free elections.  Moreover, if we could not have the reality, we would start with appearances. U.S. influence was successfully directed at developing a democratic GVN in form. Beginning in September 1906, a series of free elections were held, first for a Constituent Assembly and later for village officials, the Presidency, House and Senate. U.S.-GVN relations from June of 1965 to 1968, then, have to be understood in terms of the new parameters of the liar.  Before this date, our overriding objective had to be and was governmental stability, After the Diem coup, the GVN underwent six changes in leadership in the space of one and a half years. From June 1965 on, there was relative stability.

At the same time:

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Education Vietnam War

How we NEVER could have won in Vietnam

We never won in Vietnam. Over the weekend I found a November 2009 Newsweek issue about how the could have won in Vietnam.  The headline addressed historical lessons regarding current US military goals in Afghanistan.
never won in VietnamThe lead was an attempt at revisionism regarding the war.  It may be a trend to boast we could have won fighting the NVA and VietCong.  To be honest the Pentagon Papers are now proving to be the ultimate trump card against revisionist history.

So far I have pushed through about half of the Pentagon Papers 7,300 pages. The early volumes alone provide clear evidence we NEVER could have won in Vietnam.

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Education Watergate

Robert Bork’s Saturday Night Massacre

Robert Bork died this week. While many recall his failed US Supreme Court nomination I will always remember his actions as Nixon’s hatchman during the infamous Saturday Night Massacre. Please jump to the 4:43 mark of this video:

At the time Nixon’s Watergate affair was spinning out of control. Archibald Cox, appointed as the Watergate Special Prosecutor demanded access to newly revealed White House tapes after Alexander Butterfield, the President’s Deputy Assistant acknowledged a taping system was installed by Nixon.

Nixon refused to comply with a court ruling that indeed he turn over his tapes and then ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and was fired. Nixon then ordered Richardson’s Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox but he also refused and was also fired by Nixon. Next in line was Robert Bork, then Solicitor General. He did comply with Nixon’s order and fired Cox.  Within hours Nixon ordered the FBI to seal off the offices of the Special Prosecutor, The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General.

It was a clear and last act the Imperial President and it was a watershed moment in our constitutional.  The next day tens of thousands of Western Union telegrams flooded Congress by the American public insisting on impeaching Nixon.

Bork’s role in the Massacre, firing Cox sealed his fate fourteen years later when President Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Google Innovation Milwaukee Network Technology

University cloud computing contracts

Did you hear about the university professor signed up for a cloud service and unknowingly left his department on the hook for two years of service beyond his grant….or the university who had more than 500,000 student records (social security, addresses and grades) hacked? Cloud computing poses special demands upon Universities who can no longer employ the same procurement process used to acquire computers and software since the 1980s.

Are you aware that today many Universities (and K12 School districts) use a popular email marketing program that sells contact information of students to vertical marketing firms who in turn re-sell them to other marketing and product companies?

Today’s aggressive marketplace and the business of cloud services has radically changed the procurement process. Many of us have a fiduciary duty to protect data of our students, research and institutions.  Regardless of how students freely give away their data on Facebook, our institution will still be held responsible to  protect all of our institution’s data.

My views on the impact of Cloud Computing in Higher Education have been slowly evolving. This past May I was given an incredible opportunity to further my learning by participating in an Engineering & Technology Short Course with the UCLA Extension.
Remember those “must-take classes” in college?  UCLA’s Contracting for Cloud Computing Services is one on my list of those opportunities you cannot afford to ignore.  My advice: Find your way to UCLA.

Again, I hope this can help as many people as possible understand the lessons taught in class.  Due to the nature of the beast they are in no specific order. They are all top level concerns:

BACKGROUND
For over a generation traditional desktop PC vendors focused on features and price. Since the late 1980s schools established trust in vendor’s products to conduct business, educate students and store student data. From floppy disks to magnetic tape all data was stored locally on campus.

Today’s globalized internet marketplace is radically different when compared to the modem era of computing. The cloud computing model represents a number of fundamental shifts including Software as a Service(SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) are well established.

And although it’s a bit ahead on the radar we should not overlook the quickly emerging SuperComputer as a Service. While there is no  standard acronym, there are established vendors like SGI’s Cyclone, Amazon’s Cluster Compute, IBM’s Watson, and with forthcoming merge between PiCloud and D-Wave‘s quantum computing….more options for High Performance Computing will be available to many smaller, lean and aggressive institutions.

These new services are directly tied to the “consumerization” of technology: advanced technologies at affordable price points. As a result the new focus is around access.  The shift to mobile computing via netbooks, smartphones and tablets is well underway, yet many school’s do not have a sufficient wireless infrastructure. Students, faculty and administrators are today carrying a laptop, smartphone and probably an iPad. Schools are struggling to to handle bandwidth demands of so many devices in concentrated areas around campus, from the Student Union to the ResHalls.

IMHO the tipping point with Cloud computing and digital devices is the convenience of access. Today many diverse schools have a campus community that simply demands anytime/anywhere access to data. And it’s no longer just email and web.  Its BIG data from data base research to the delivery of HD media. For better (or for worse) society has become trained to demand mobile solutions that easily integrate into the app economy and their mobile lifestyles.

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Education Reading Vietnam War

2011 Book of the Year: Pentagon Papers

My 2011 Book of the Year: Pentagon Papers. I’m actually still reading the study known as  “United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense” or as history refers has always called it — The Pentagon Papers.

The study is a 47 volume, 7,000+ page report regarding the US involvement in Vietnam’s long civil war.  This is a long deeply engaging read of organizational failure at the highest levels of the military and government.  So many American lives were lost for a policy that was doomed from the beginning.  This book will painfully show that the brightest and smartest RAND analysts knew it, senior military and policy advisors knew it and so did the White House.

The study was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967.  And for “newly released” material (in 2011) it provides the most horrific, fascinating and astounding read of our policy and warfare strategy under a total of four Presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. However the war continued through both Johnson and Nixon administrations finally ending under President Gerald Ford in 1975.

The Vietnam War was the longest 20th century war in American history.  The study covers a 25-year military engagement in Vietnam while US political interests and efforts actually developed before the end of World War II and continued until the fall of Saigon in 1975.  Take a step back and realize it was a 30 year losing commitment.

Even today in 2012 its amazing to learn multiple volumes of this 1967 study remained classified for exactly 40 years until released (fully redacted) by the National Archives in June 2011.

As important as this study is for understanding our role in the world over a generation, it will regrettably open old wounds. We finally have full access to read the carelessness of our decision makers (both military and Presidential) that cost the lives of over 53,000 American soldiers.  How horrific would these numbers be viewed today?

So why isn’t this “book” listed with any 2011 best sellers?  It was sure greeted with much fanfare and press coverage the day the US National Archives released the study.

IMHO today’s twitter-focused society cannot read a 7,000+ page study. Sorry to be so blunt. American culture today — we are a nation of ‘skimmers’ due to the vast amounts of data available and our busy lifestyle, we simply do not have the time to read such lengthly books.  We only seek to quickly skim headlines in print, online and while mobile.

And regarding war, I’m afraid here (yet again) is where the lessons of history are lost.

40 years also makes another amazing difference — my ability to hold all 47 volumes on an iPad. As of January I’m just past page 3,500.