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Alex, Enough years have passed and the situation has been corrected but... Up until early 1981 Nordstrom Corporate Offices only had computer system for billing. In late 1980 fellow came to us and said that he had developed a customer service system for a hospital and wanted to retool it for a business like ours. Would take some time... When he had a finished project, he would market it elsewhere. Our prize for being the guinea pig? No charge for the final product. In late 1980 he started... and we were fully up by target date of June 1, 1981. The final product was splendid... simple, elegant, and bug free. He did leave a warning about password security. Apparently it didn't register. For the first couple of years *everybody* in the lash-up had the same password: TEST -Yankee Papa-
Excellent Alex.
You're totally right in a number of ways here. People forget that America's massive military infrastructure and two decades worth of combat operations have provided our opponents with a lot of actionable intelligence. You don't need faster jets, bigger bombs, or smarter satellites, you just need to identify vulnerabilities and focus spending in those realms. Our size and complexity is an advantage is some aspects of this WWIII preamble, but we also make for a big, largely soft target when it comes to rapidly advancing technologies thanks to that slowness you mentioned. If we don't get our eye on the ball soon, America could find itself in difficult to defend position on multiple fronts.
This is an excellent article that illustrates the reality of the Asymmetry of Force Projection in the modern battlespace. As is always the case with behemoth beaurocracy, and massive military nation-state force - the learning curve as a whole is very slow. The days of a technological arms competition and match in linear race ended 30 years ago with the fall of the Soviet Union. the Chinese - have been lying, stealing, and cheating their way to try to catch up with the USA in that realm all along (and in my adult lifetime, nobody until 2016 really did anything about it). The Russians, without their aging nuclear arsenal, are nothing with regards to large scale, nation state weapons systems. while the scientists and engineers most certainly need to continue to push the envelope of development and technology, and most likely are and have been to levels that we John Q Public can only imagine - the modern battlespace has evolved rapidly in such fashion that is faster than a beast the size of the US DoD moves. The best example of what I'm talking about, is the reality that a couple of men armed only with box-cutters 18 years ago, were able to create enough damage so that the USA as a nation has spent trillions and trillions of dollars mobilizing entire armies to futility while spilling blood all over the world. For 18 years and counting. It's a well known quote that: The goal of stratagem is to make the enemy quite certain, decisive to action and wrong. I am of the opinion that when historians write in the future about the first quarter of the 21st century, it will be remarkable to study how the entire USA was focused on spending so much time. money and blood and effort on fighting an ideology globally that in reality is a minimal threat to our fragile and beautiful experiment in self-government, while the reality of the Asymmetric Battle Space was ignored and our society was attacked and divided from within for so long. With regard to this article - asymmetry of force. The F-15 strike eagle isnt' even the most formidable air-combat platform. The F-22 Raptor is, and we halted production of them. But it seems, that a single person with internet access and a computer could bring one down? That's one example of the asymmetric force in the modern battle space in a nutshell. The need for actionable intelligence for policy makers and war fighters has never been greater.