The minute you start arming people in these conflict zones, things don't go as expected. We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual.

Clearly the American military has been a force for good for the United States. There's a reason we have a standing military. But there's something to be said for having a much smaller military because then we wouldn't be tempted to get involved in things we shouldn't be getting involved in.

I made this bad joke on Twitter saying, "I want to put in my first no-bid contract to train the Libyan army and police force." These counter-insurgency guys like to say, "We don't do the big F-16 or big boondoggle projects, we're not pulling this stuff because it's good business." But in fact it turns out there are tons of business opportunities involving counter-insurgency operations - and it's not like we're getting rid of the boondoggle programs either, we're just doing more of everything.

We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual. For me, it's always a failure of diplomacy. Our willingness to immediately turn to a military solution is disturbing.

A $200 million contract just got awarded to develop software to provide the Department of Defense with all these sock puppets who have fake Twitter and Facebook accounts. Why not create ten fake Libyan Twitter users and then get one journalist to follow them. But the problem is, of course, it corrupts the entire process. One of the caveats is that anything they write is going to be in a foreign language so it won't affect Americans. But that doesn't make any sense because: A) it can be translated pretty easily, and B) Americans also speak other languages.

Johnny Apple, a New York Times correspondent, wrote a front-page story saying Afghanistan could be a quagmire and he was mocked and derided. What is certainly true is that all sorts of resources that would have been used in Afghanistan were diverted to Iraq. Would those resources have helped? Almost undoubtedly. Whether or not Afghanistan would be a peaceful nation-state had we not gone into Iraq I doubt. Afghanistan is going to be Afghanistan, no matter how hard we try to make it something else.

An information operations team was sent to Afghanistan to conduct various psychological operations on the Afghans and Taliban. The team was then asked not to focus on the Taliban but on manipulating senators into giving more funds and troops [to the war].