
The Art of Influence - dfc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-ff9a9c01-faa4-4038-b4e9-83e619460e1f
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golergka
Wow, that passages describes exactly what's been happening with Gaza the last
few years

> Events in Lebanon had added to the growing sense of unease that I had first
> experienced in Baghdad. When a powerful military is faced by apparent
> military "weakness", it can respond by an overuse of kinetic force - the
> "hard power" of attacking with guns, bombs and artillery.

> I worried that in Afghanistan, as in Lebanon and before it, Iraq, hard power
> was not being properly balanced by the application of "soft power" \-
> stabilisation, reconstruction, investment and negotiation.

> We were also being out-fought in the propaganda war by an enemy that was
> more adept and agile in the use of the internet.

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sabirc
Could someone elaborate on the intent schematic that was used to plan the
attack? I have always wondered how big military operations were developed,
it's hard to imagine anything of that size and complexity in the civilian
world.

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ryanmarsh
I'm sorry that I don't have direct links but most US military doctrine can be
found easily in the for of FM's and TM's (field and technical manuals
respectively). Many of which are available free on the Internet.

FM's are usually written in a terse and skimmable format.

A good place to start might be US Army FM 7-8 (that's "seven dash eight" not
"seven through eight")

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mildweed
Is it just me, or did they leave out all the interesting details of how they
used influence?

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drited
I came away disappointed about the level of detail on that too. Also I
wondered on the political nuance of why Semple was expelled, that part was
quite terse.

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javajosh
I'm getting massive layout breakage on Chrome 45 (OSX).

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sehr
Chrome 45 on 2011 MBA, 4gb ram w/ uBlock on

Worked really, really well. CPU jumped to ~50% when scrolling though.

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Mz
The style of the layout of this article is intriguing.

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ZeroGravitas
People with access to the BBC iPlayer can watch the third quarter of Adam
Curtis's "Bitter Lake" to get another angle on this.

I find his tale of a ridiculous series of mistakes a bit more compelling.

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dfc
Or Bram Cohen's IPLayer: 49C2E772BFDB18686FC3384B363F4A544F549150

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iliaznk
Cool site, this is what I see
[http://cl.ly/image/0v1A2z3H3S0i](http://cl.ly/image/0v1A2z3H3S0i)

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johnflan
Insightful, particularly with regards to political influence on decision
making.

