Thomas Barnett - Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns

If this is the wrong forum, please move it.

I came across this fellow yesterday.

Thomas Barnett. He has a PhD from Harvard, one of 9 siblings. Worked for the Center for Naval Analysis, then went to the Naval War College. He gets called to brief the Pentagon and the CIA about Y2k, then gets involved in a project with Cantor Fitzgerald (he says he had a meeting scheduled for the 25th of September 2001 at Cantor Fitzgerald's HQ on top of WTC1), a project that had the objective of bringing the Pentagon and Wall Street together, a vision from Cantor Fitzgerald's Senior Managing Director Bud Flannigan*, a 4-star admiral (one of the youngest in US Armed Forces history). He says he briefed the National Security Council (which consists of President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and the National Security advisor). So his words reached some very powerful ears directly.

He also came up with the unknown unknown idea at least 2 years before Rumsfeld made it famous during a Press Briefing: www.youtube.com... (about 13:30 into the video).

His ideas are quite powerful, it seems... But he has a certain disconnectedness from the world, a very pure analytical take that's kind of creepy. Anyway, if anyone is interested in knowing what the military was thinking in the 1998-2004 timeframe, watch his presentations...

*: On 9/11 658 people from Cantor Fitzgerald die. Bud, although he worked at the WTC, "accidentally" wasn't there (Thomas Barnett's words here).

^ There ya go, clicking this will automatically start the film at 13 minutes and 31 seconds.

Interesting guy. I read this:
www.foreignpolicy.com...
He seems like one of the smart ones, that's for sure.

The upshot of that article is a future military that works in a more "blast you at a distance" sort of way, with less entanglement and boots on the ground. In some ways its positive, but its a big thrust in the drone direction, i.e. toward the concentration of military power in fewer and fewer hands - namely the hands holding the joysticks and programming the bots. I don't like that trend.