My Masters is focused on Strategic Studies and International Security and my thesis is about the relevance of the black-ops (paramilitary) to the detriment of the conventional military operations in America´s foreign policy. Basically I argue (due to literature that I´ve been revising for more than a year) that it is a fact that since the 1980s the importance of the special forces when it comes to convey important missions has been increased drastically and paramilitary operations are used more and more. I came to the conclusion that operations are carried out nowadays (specially in Syria, Iraq and overall around the Machrek) by the Special Forces units of the USSOCOM but with the support of the CIA (where CIA agents also engage in armed actions).
Dancer,
It is not possible to understand the American way of war or spying without understanding that money is the central factor in deciding what we do and what we buy and what we spend — including lives. Here are three key points:
01 The US military and the US intelligence community are very large pools of money that deliver a 5% kick-back to the legislators that approve the budgets, and second-career jobs with great riches to the flag officers and senior executive that oversee programs (most of them failed programs) before retiring and taking up a second job in retirement for a contractor.
02 No one holds the US military or the US secret world accountable for results. We have lost every war since WWII (which we barely won in part because we had so many traitors especially bankers secretly helping the Nazis), and every regime change action we have undertaken has generally resulted in huges costs in blood and treasure to the public, while generating huge profits for a very small cabal.
03 The shift toward CIA assassination of people with drones (which has a 98% collateral damage rate) and toward the proliferation of Special Operations hunter-killer teams across more than 115 countries, is partly smoke and mirrors — an attempt to look tough on the cheap while denying that we are, as the Chinese have said so correctly, a “paper tiger.” All CIA and SOF personnel are subject to relatively quick identification and annialation — we simply pretend they are effective, this fools no one except the gullible public — the Congress is a mix of idiots who know nothing with a handful of leaders who are fully aware and corrupt beyond measure.
04 Cyber-operations — both those seeking to gain access to substantive information and to protect our own substantive information — are the third leg of this of this modern security stool and I would emphasize that the US Government is totally ignorant and totally corrupt when it comes to cyber-security. NSA is known to have undermined all US communications and computing capabilities for its convenience, in violation of the presidential mandate it was given in the early 1990's to protect same — and the CEOs of Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Google, among others, are now known to be complicit in gutting the security of all of their offerings, which in my view makes them liable to legal action from their fiduciary stakeholders, and of course anyone around the world who buys a US-made or US-services product or service in the cyber arena is an idiot.
Here are some lists of my amazon reviews that can provide additional sources and perspective:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Dereliction of Duty (Defense)
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Government Corruption
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Corruption 2.0
More generally see all the lists at http://phibetaiota.net/
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive Future-Oriented)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative Status-Quo)
Worth a Look: Recent Books on 10 High Level Threats
Worth a Look: Recent Books on 12 Core Policies
At the strategic level where you are operating I would make several points:
01 The US Government lacks both intelligence and integrity. No one in the US Government, least of all the President or the Office of Management and Budget, is doing “whole of government” strategy, policy, acquisition, or operations. Everything is stove-piped and decisions are made on the advice of financial, religious, and ideological traitors who lie to the President (who is himself subject to assassination if he does not go along — he has accepted the gold and fears the lead). here are two articles focused on this point and on the failure of defense intelligence:
2009 Intelligence for the President — AND Everyone Else (CounterPunch)
2014 On Defense Intelligence — Seven Strikes (CounterPunch)
02 Strategic security depends on three things: an educated healthy public; a balanced overall program that creates a strong infrstructure and sustainable economic and social programs going into the future; and a foreign policy of peace and commerce that avoids creating rage and anti-US feeling. We are at the beginning of an era in which both security and prosperity are redefined back to the original concepts of our indigenous forebearers, see the graphics below. I have reviewed many books in these areas, welcome specific questions that might re-orient your thesis — the emphasis on CIA and SOF is a tactical symptom of “strategic decrepitude” and poltitical corruption. There is every reason to have competent spies and competent special operators but only in the context of a larger security structure in which we have coherent ethical evidence-based decisioin support on everything; honest policymakers and politicians, and transparent legitimate engagement around the world. See below for a sense of where we are going wrong with our own public and foreign publics:
Election 2008 Chapter: Legitimate Grievances
03 What is changing in the security world is the access of the public to information (substance) and information tools for sharing information and for multinational crowd-sourcing of sense-making. There are challenges — many people are poorly educated, easily swayed, with short attention-spans and an inability to have choice-creating conversations. We are at the beginning of a new era in which education, intelligence (decision-support) and research are blended, made transparent, and made accountable to the public rather than special interests. here is my “open letter” on this generally.
04 The next big leap in local to global security demands the integration of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. My background paper for the creation of the United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (http://tinyurl.com/EIN-UN-SDG
ATTACHMENT: APPLIED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE 1.4
05 Panarchy — informed comprehensive citizen engagement in which public interests are paramount at every level from local to global — is the next step. All forms of organization — governments, corporations, non-profits, law enforcement and military paritcularly — must become subordinate to the public interest and over time be re-trained, re-organized, and re-equipped to be public services responsive to public needs, rather than a means of looting the public treasury on behalf of special interests or in the case of the police and military, too often used to repress legitimate public movements on behalf of the special interests — over 7,000 Occupy protesters were arrested for peaceful protests, while no bankers of note have been arrested.
06 Control of money is going to be central. The greatest public security will be achieved from shutting down central banks and ending the ability of governments to print money. As one wise person has said, allowing governments to print money, incur dept and wage war without public approval is what allows them to ignore the public interest and fail to consult the public. Public security demand public re-assertion over the public bdget, over taxes (eliminate all taxes less one Automated Payment Transaction Tax that applies to currency and stock transactions — the total pie — and it is set by public ballot not by government mandate).
07 Education of the public one cell call at a time or one graphic at a time is going to be a primary source for mobilizing and sustaining public power. This was the outcome of the preliminary effort by Earth Intelligence Network.
And now for a conclusion you might not expect.
01 Intelligence — decision-support — also includes the supporting or enabling functions of counterintelligence, technical and human collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination (explaining complex findings to busy people that will understand three colors (red, yellow, green) on one post-card). In this context, counterintelligence is extremely important and very neglected. In the USA, intelligence is part of a criminal enterprise — it is 95% ineffective, and the 5% that is effective is toxic — used to do insider trading and blackmail Presidents and Senators and others. I am personally committed to one day serving an honest President and an honest Congress in creating a useful intelligence community that serves the public interest. I will start with absolutely ruthless counterintelligence that cleans out the financial, religious, and ideological traitors and I will use an Open Source Agency to promote open source everything and public intelligence such that every public official and every public and private corporation are held accountable for at least doing no harm.
02 Special Operations is like artillery or aviation — it is a capability that is never ever sufficient in and of itself. It is not a substitute to conventional operations or diplomacy or spying. It is a piece of an organic whole. Edward Luttwak in Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, does an excellent job of showing how the pieces relate to one another at different levels. Bazzokas slow tanks down; artillery channels tanks; aviation finishes them off, infantry controls the human survivors. Everyone has a role but that role is part of a larger whole. Special Operations is supposed to be primarily about by, with, and through foreign civilians and foreign forces. The hunter killer teams are not only an internatonal atrocity, they are uninformed. My own colleagues in Special Operations are very angry about being sent to kidnap and kill bus drivers and waiters — the secret intelligence STINKS — the entire matter lacks integrity. Similarly, when Special Operations are sent to do good works in Civil Affairs or Psychological Operations, all the good they do is undone by a White House and Department of State that actively support criminal dictators from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan — or genocidal Zionists in Israel, etcetera. Most of what we do today is illegitimiate and inappropriate. Our government is out of control and not representing the public interest, only special interests. Our spies and special forces operators are dying for no good reason.
So in the larger scheme of things, neither CIA nor Special Operations are contributing substantively to US security — they are badly-managed political theater, a pretense, and much of what they do is a crime against humanity for which I believe international tribunals are entirely appropriate and called for. In no way are they — in their present configuration lacking intelligence and integrity — a substitute for a conventional force that is totally corrupt and inept to begin with.
Semper Fidelis,
Robert
