User talk:David E. Mann

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! Jitse Niesen 23:07, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Welcome!

I may be the only active Military Workgroup editor, so a special welcome. I definitely need other eyes on some of my work, and there are some things that certainly could use collaborative work in updating.

But first...I must ask a question that I can ask of few people, and hope you have done two things:

1. Been in the main storage area of the Investigative Records Repository at Holabird
2. Seen Raiders of the Lost Ark

If so, doesn't the Repository look exactly like the place where they put the Ark in storage?

I'd certainly be glad to help you with articles on your own interests. There's a good deal of intelligence technique, including quite open literature material about HUMINT. I believe very strongly that there is a strong public need to know that effective interrogation is an art, not something that depends on methods that will get someone to tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear. There is too much misinformation floating around.

Other things of interest on the intel side, along with the process, are things like cognitive traps for intelligence analysis, which is actually a sub-branch several levels down under intelligence cycle management.

I've been doing a major rewrite on Southeast Asia, trying to put things into context, and the structures are messy. If you look toward the bottom of the Talk: Vietnam War page, there's a couple of graphics that will show what I have in mind. I'm still juggling material between the 1962-1975 period and, at least, 1858-1999. The latter includes both the ironies of the Vietnamese explaining how we should have read their history, and, how they managed to blunder into 13 years in Cambodia. Can anyone say "Vietnam's Vietnam?"

You may find Vietnamese Communist grand strategy interesting, as it is indicative of the careful line we walk between using expert knowledge and synthesis, and even posing questions, but not wandering off into unsupported speculation.

On the more combat arms side, there's restructuring of the United States Army. AN/ will lead you into lots of short pieces on electronics, with longer articles on electronic warfare, information operations, and then the various technical intelligence disciplines: SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, MASINT, IMINT, etc. I really need to clean up a mess in TECHINT/Scientific and technical intelligence.

Hope this isn't too much too soon, but it might give you some ideas.

Howard Howard C. Berkowitz 00:08, 14 January 2009 (UTC)