6 Threats, 6 Changes, & A Brave New World: Intel Chief Vickers
WASHINGTON: There’s no one thing that keeps the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence up at night. There’s half-a-dozen things — terrorism, cybersecurity, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China — but Mike Vickers has a six-point plan to counter them.
“Unlike the Cold War, when we had one big enduring threat and then a series of episodic threats, we have several that are likely to be enduring now,” Vickers added, “[and] all of them over the past few years have gotten worse.”
ROBERT STEELE: I am sure Vickers is not a complete idiot so I have to assume he has mastered the art of talking crap while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on corporate welfare that dishonors our brave men and women of the Armed Forces — and our citizens — who deserve better. Below are the two comments I posted at the article, followed by two seminal works that define Vickers' sad state — he is out of touch with integrity and reality.
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This is utter idiocy. Vickers is proposing to spend more money on more technology, none of which will make America safer. I've called for the firing of Clapper, Vickers, and Brennan, not going to happen but it should. These people are disgracing the intelligence profession — intelligence is about decision-support (the outputs), not about spending money on corporate welfare (the inputs). See my indictment of Vickers as published in CounterPunch, “On Defense Intelligence – Seven Strikes.” What Vickers does not know about ethical evidence-based decision support to strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations defies belief.
Vickers will never learn, but the rest of you might be interested in the ten high level threats to humanity and the USA as identified and prioritized by LtGen Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) and the rest of the High Level Panel on Threats Challenges, and Change: 01 Poverty 02 Infectious Disease 03 Environmental Degradation 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War 06 Genocide 07 Other Atrocities 08 Proliferation 09 Terrorism 10 Transnational Crime. Senator McCain and Congressman Forbes are on the right track in holding hearings, but their witness list stinks — no one who actually knows anything about holistic analytics, true cost economics, or what Admiral James Stavridis famously called in a TED presentation, Open Source Security. Bottom line: the Obama defense team is going to warm the bench, waste more money, and do absolutely nothing for the 4% of the force that takes 80% of the casualties and gets 1% of the budget. Vickers does not give a crap about our fighting men and women, nor does he give a crap about cutting 30% waste as the President has asked, or showing how that can be done at the same time that we create a 450 ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, and an air-mobile Army that takes over Close Air Support and the A-10. All disgraceful.
See Also:
1990 Intelligence in the 1990′s – Six Challenges
1989 Al Gray (US) on Global Intelligence Challenges
