Transcribed as accurately as I can from the title page of an ISBN-less slim 169 page card-bound book printed on very dense glossy paper I found in my local Half-Price Books store:
I am only a little ways into it, but it is a very interesting book that spends a lot of time repeating the obvious and defining simple words like “Policy” and esoteric phrases like “Defensive Counterspace Operations”. The prose is very strange, and I cannot parse out its intended audience, other than that it is definitely military in some capacity. The author seems frightfully serious about everything he is saying, almost but not quite to the point of imbalance, and repeatedly invokes Alfred Thayer Mahan. It also contains what so far seems to be a very good, strikingly practical, layman explanation of orbital mechanics under the overwrought heading “Appendix 1 to Chapter 1: Useful Principles of Orbitology”.
Are publications like this regularly circulated within the US Government? Who writes them and why? Who is meant to actually read them?
The footnote goes to Roger Handberg (2000). Seeking new world vistas: the militarization of space. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0275962954, ISBN 978-0-275-96295-1.
The government routinely publishes publications on all sorts of esoteric subjects, showing the results of their thinking on any issue.
They’re written by people who can address the subject.
Whoever is interested in the subject. The audience can be small, since the reports aren’t supposed to make a profit (and government reports are not copyrighted). In the old days, print runs were small; nowadays, they probably print on demand.
Geez, sorry guys. I’m usually better about this sort of thing but the dang book just looked so weird I assumed it wasn’t on the internet anywhere and didn’t even Google the title.
Does it officially make me an old person that I remain unable to start from the assumption that all human information is at my fingertips when beginning any activity?
I still can’t find the band Squatweiler’s song Arturro online, though. That seems to remain the last hold out of all non-digitized information- the name of the song has percolated through the free mp3 sites, but the track itself remains obscure. If some software guy hadn’t secretly bundled all these obscure mp3 on my CD-ROM drive’s driver disk back in 2000, there is no way I could have ever heard that song. It’s a good damned song, too.
But I suppose one of you is going to take it as a challenge to find the song now?
EDIT: OH GOD I JUST FOUND IT. Terrible sample rate, but it’s Arturro all right…