Hans Mark, a septugenarian DoD official in a seminar at Harvard on "Intelligence, Command and Control," in Spring 2000 said: "It is as bad to have too much information as it is not to have any. Both contribute to Clausewitzs fog of war. It is not good to have a completely transparent communications system. The private does not need to know what the general knows. In fact, if the private knew what the general knows, he might not want to go over the next hill." Mark says he believes in unquestioned command authority as the most essential quality of the military, over weapons, strategy, tactics and intelligence. He acknowledged that commanders made mistakes but that history has shown the validity of supreme command authority. Elsewhere one reads that commanders are taught that casualties are inevitable in war and that the resolute commander will not hesitate to order an action that will certainly cause death. Corollary of Mark's moral: be a commander never a follower or, best, avoid heirarchies of rank and their promugators. Better than best is to destroy heirarchies. For getting followers to obey commands requires bountiful deception and betrayal. That is called morale building, esprit de corps, patriotism, putting the nation, the unit, your comrades above your self-preservation. Believers in heirarchies get really pissed when you question their authority, and will kill you to show who is boss, or more likely order an underling commander to order a blind faith warrior to do it with a stand-off weaponry created for cowards. Check out the NY Times Magazine's featured piece tomorrow on the US plan to command the world through space weaponry. All doomsday gadgets commanded from Earth by e-generals pushing Linux sysadmins' buttons with dreams of generalship for all just over the hill. Why is command-authority IBM, Oracle and Sun getting so deeply in bed with the Linux mavericks under cover of combating Microsoft?