What Would an Open Source Secretary of Defense Look Like?
by Rob Kall
OpEdNews
25 December 2018
Interview with Robert David Steele
Shortly after James Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense, I noticed a post from Robert David Steele, whom I have interviewed in the past (Transcript 1, Transcript 2), who is himself a former Marine. Mattis Resignation Most Helpful Reaction of Congress Reveals Degree to Which ALL Members are Bribed and Blackmailed by Zionist Israel and US Military-Industrial Complex opens by stating:
The Secretary of Defense simply does not “get” that the Koreas will be unified, denuclearized, and demilitarized; that most if not all US bases overseas will be closed starting in Germany and the Italy and Japan; and that it was the Zionists, not Iran that did the Marine Beirut Barracks bombing. As with so many in Washington, he has reached the limits of his capabilities and is not ready for the brave new world that is going to include extraterrestrial disclosure and the termination of mind-control, geoengineering, and the Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMB) that SecDef has probably not been fully briefed on.
I thought to myself, what might a Department of Defense look like if Steele, author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto (OpEdNews Review by Richmond Shreve), were the Secretary of Defense? The more I thought about it, the more I thought that Steele might be the antithesis to Mattis: both Marines, one favoring eternal war and the Deep State ubber alles, the other a fan of Ron and Rand Paul and eternal peace, and perhaps the most published vocal opponent of the Deep State.
It turns out Steele is not just the foremost proponent for open source everything, to the point that he was recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 by the Editor in Chief of Defence and Intelligence Norway (in an article, Intelligence & the Nobel Peace Prize), he is also one of the most prolific but persistently ignored thinkers about what a national grand strategy favoring peace and prosperity might look like. He is more commonly known as the father of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and a near rabid critic of the secret intelligence community that he famously calls “pathologically dysfunctional.”
My strategy emerged I would ask Steele three questions, on strategy, open source, and intelligence, in relation to the remote very remote possibility that he were to be considered as the new Secretary of Defense. Here is what came from my email to him.
Rob: No one in power in Washington, D.C. will give the possibility of you being Secretary of Defense a second thought. The doorman at the Omni Shoreham has as good a chance as you. What have you to offer the President in terms of a strategic perspective that might lead him to actually interview you? Steele replied,
“Chuckling! Or LOL as the rising generation might write. Since I have often said that we would be better off if we chose our Members of Congress by lottery, I am not in the least put off by how you frame your question. My chances of being considered by President Donald Trump for the position of Secretary of Defense are perhaps 200-1 but then, those were also the odds on his being elected President according to most London bookmakers until about midnight on Election Day, when the tide turned.
Certainly I am a wild card. I would be honored to be considered for any position with the president, including food taster. What I will say is that I am the only person in the USA that I know of who has actually published a Grand Strategy that fully addresses the changes we need to make in diplomacy, development, defense, and commerce (D3C), and in intelligence. Below is the capstone graphic from my three-monograph series published in 2016.
I have been thinking about defense reform since I was first asked to create the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA) in 1988, serving as the senior civilian under Col Walter Breede, III, USMC and also a graduate of the US Naval Academy ('68). General Al Gray, then the Commandant, wanted us to do the intelligence (decision-support) for acquisition that was not being done by the Army, Navy, or Air Force, Overview of Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World for which I was the Study Directory and BDM the supporting contractor. Published in 1990 it set a standard that has still not been replicated by anyone, in part because it produced strategic generalizations about the real world that are ignored by the other three services: for example, the real world aviation day is hot and humid, which means that apart from the problem of only having 40% of your aircraft available on any given day due to spare parts and maintenance skills shortfalls, you can only carry half as much half as far. The President needs to understand that we do not have a military optimized to win wars, we have a military optimized to pick the public's pocket and transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1%.
In 2001 I published “Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security,” in Steven Metz (ed.), Revising the Two MTW Force Shaping Paradigm, and for the first time did something the military still refuses to do: distinguished between four completely different threat classes, as shown below, each of which needs its own counter-force and its own counter-doctrine.
Let me just sum up by saying that I am certain that 50% of every defense dollar is waste; and that within the existing defense budget there is ample funding for the border wall and anything else the President wants to get done. Perhaps the single most important recommendation in my Grand Strategy is that we close all of our military bases overseas starting in Korea, Japan, Germany, and Italy. This brings back to the USA a ton of money that can be distributed among the Congressional districts, and offset the objections of the Deep State and its military-industrial complex. I have a clear vision of how to build a military that can defend America, including its borders, while revitalizing the civic health of our citizens and their communities.
Rob: The idea of an Open Source Military is titillating, however unrealistic it might be. You were recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of your demonstrating that all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) could be accomplished within a decade or two at 10-20% the cost of the failed Western economic paradigm that is 50% waste and 90% profit for the banks. What would an Open Source Military look like if you were Secretary of Defense?
Within the enormous budget of the US Department of Defense (DoD) a budget that consumes 60% of the annual disposable income of the federal government, there are huge opportunities for savings that can be translated into presidential flexibility and new initiatives.
I would start by fully funding the Open Source Agency that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved twice, in 2000 and in 2010, but that has not been funded because of constant opposition from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT: Eradicating Fake News and False Intelligence with an Open Source Agency That Also Supports Defense, Diplomacy, Development, & Commerce (D3C) Innovation to Stabilize World is free online. The below graphic is central:
I don't know of anyone that properly appreciates the fullness of the Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) opportunity. Open source everything takes us far beyond software and hardware. Open Provisioning is central; that includes free energy, unlimited desalinated water, and infinitely scalable aquaponics integrated farming and fisheries at human scale without pesticides. This matters because the best defense relies on the best diplomacy and the best development.
OSEE is also a commercial trade opportunity. Not only can we rebuild our national infrastructure with OSEE at 10-20% the cost of the failed existing paradigm that is 50% waste and 90% profit for the banks, but we can export this to all other countries and prevail on our most important allies, such as Saudi Arabia, to fund OSEE innovation and production centers across Africa and Asia.
I predicted the illegal immigration problem in my book, The New Craft of Intelligence (2002); we solve that problem by ending our funding for dictators and other repressive regimes, and by investing in development first at home (Texas is a priority for me) and then overseas. The best defense is a well-fed public everywhere.
Put more bluntly, the future of our country and of the world depends on our moving as quickly as possible away from a centralized hierarchy reliant on secrecy and proprietary technology toward a distributed society with equal access to open source technology across all domains.
Open source information is how the President educates the public and guides all elements of the government. I ghost wrote for General Al Gray his article, Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's, and I am proudest of his embrace of two concepts: that we must take asymmetric and unconventional threats as seriously as we take conventional standing armies; and that we must use intelligence to make the case for “peaceful preventive measures” that avoid war. Sun Tzu had it right: the greatest warrior wins wars without fighting. China gets this, we do not.
Rob: You are famous as the father of the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement, and also well known for having failed. CIA was able to kill your baby early on. What have you learned in your thirty year fight with CIA, and how would you advise the President in relation to restructuring secret intelligence on a foundation of OSINT as provided by the Open Source Agency you have proposed?
I wish in retrospect I had heeded Buckminster Fuller's wisdom, he said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” It never occurred to me that the CIA would rather betray the public trust and keep building a worthless secret budget, instead of serving the nation more capably with inexpensive open sources. I was naïve.
Although you ask this last, let me say that this is in my view the first priority, and central to the President's re-election if combined with #UNRIG: Election Integrity Act that makes the collective intelligence of the public the foundation for our national defense. Here is the graphic from my Trump Triumph in 3 Moves UPDATE 7 WH 4.0, Trump 2.0, #UNRIG 3.9
Note that I have proposed that the President make better use of the space now allocated to the press corps. Other locations can be found for them indeed it could be said that the National Press Club is where all government briefings should be delivered! In any event, for the White House to become a fully competent seat of governance, the President must have a grand strategy cell, a Trump Studio and truth channel oversight team, and an open source decision support unit close at hand.
This space would be the heart and soul of the President's direct relation with the American people through a Trump Studio that supports fireside chats on a daily basis (seven minutes) as well as interviews with key personnel and experts from across the government and the country. The truth channel where 200 million can opt in to receive direct access to everything while also being able to communicate to a Presidential Dashboard, will totally redefine politics in America, and end the toxic role of both corporate and foreign money, and the undue power of the two-party tyranny that enables “pay to play” legislation and budgeting.
Once the Open Source Agency is up and running, providing the President and all other key personnel with 80-90% of what they need to know, inexpensively and with the added advantage of being shareable with the public, allies, and media precisely because none of it is secret, the President can move to dismantle up to 70% of the existing secret intelligence community. I would consolidate the 30% worth saving from each of the major technical agencies into a revitalized CIA (which itself would lose 70% starting with the drone assassination program), such that CIA would have new Directorates for Signals (instead of the eliminated National Security Agency), Imagery (instead of the eliminated National Reconnaissance Office), and so on.
The President also needs to dramatically increase domestic counterintelligence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is both incompetent and disloyal. A new Presidential Counterintelligence Task Force manned by the military with a leavening of law enforcement is needed to interview every Member of Congress about who is bribing and blackmailing them (if they cooperate they get a presidential pardon). The FBI needs to be stripped down and then built back up toward the day when we can eradicate corruption at the state and local levels — the Clintons in Arkansas are the norm, not the anomaly.
The fundamental flaw of intelligence as it is practiced today in the USA is that it does not focus on the needed outputs (decision-support) but rather on the most expensive possible inputs (generally technical), and it refuses to be serious about holistic analytics and true cost economics. Below are three book reviews I did, from most important to least important, these are my latest thoughts on the subject, with extensive endnotes:
· “Intelligence at a Cross Roads: To Be Or Not To Be (Review of Principled Spying by David Omand and Mark Phythian),” American Herald Tribune, 25 June 2018
· “Grand Theft, Mass Murder and Legalized Lies Book Review as Epitaph,” American Herald Tribune, 19 June 2018
· “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies Book Review,” American Herald Tribune, 5 June 2018
You have asked me three questions: on strategy, on open source, and on intelligence. So I will finish by integrating all three, urging your readers to at least click on Intelligence at a Cross Roads above. We cannot defend America without a grand strategy that connects ends, ways, and means to our Constitution; we cannot defend America without a functional intelligence community that can address 100% of the decision-support requirements of the President and all of his commanders and cabinet officials; and we cannot defend America — we cannot afford to defend America — and achieve 100% intelligence without fully leveraging not just open source intelligence, but open source everything.
I care deeply about America the Beautiful. I have said over and over again that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed, and fixed quickly, by restoring the integrity of how we elect and how we decide. You have not asked about my years of work on election reform, so I will end with a link to my three minutes of fame speaking to thousands from Rolling Thunder in front of the Lincoln Memorial my Forrest Gump moment.
#UNRIG
That is my epitaph. I pray God that I still have 20 years of service left in me.
Rob: I don't agree with everything Steele says or believes in but he would be a a massive gust, a hurricane of fresh air. Of course there are herds of forces that would line up to oppose Steele.
