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What Acting SecDef Miller’s Special Ops Shift Means
The move “will put special operations command on par with the military services for the first time,” acting SecDef Chris Miller announced today
The crux of the transformation will ensure that the top special operations official at the Pentagon can go directly to the Defense Secretary on matters of training and equipping special operations forces, along with operational matters, including secret raids against high-value targets. The office will no longer have to move through the larger DoD Policy apparatus to reach the secretary, though some issues with the country’s larger counterterrorism policy will likely still need to be coordinated with the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy.
ROBERT STEELE: Expeditionary operations (EXO) & global reach, low-intensity conflict (LIC), and information operations (IO) have always been the red-headed step children with a sock in their mouth locked in a closet. It will take more than this excellent long overdue move to fix all three.
The Marine Corps lost its integrity after General Al Gray, and after I was hired to create the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA) under the leadership of Col Walter Breede III, USNA '68. The Commandant gave us one marching order: build me a Marine Corps based on reality. He knew that acquisition by all the other services was based on building the budget, not on mission accomplishment and certainly not on reality.
Our strategic generalizations and 450 ship Navy concepts have never been equaled since and could be useful today to Acting SecDef and his strategic advisor whom I admire very much, Dr. Col Doug Macgregor, USA (Ret).
Strategic Generalization for Expeditionary Force Structure
1990 Expeditionary Environment Analytic Model
I vividly remember a LtCol in HQMC Intelligence Division losing his mind when I had the temerity, as the second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, to convene an information meeting with the other LIC stakeholders including DoD SO/LIC, USA Airborne, and the USCG. He went into our general who threw a drooling hissy fit so bad that I seriously considered going downstairs to see the Admiral and chief medical officer for the Marine Corps to suggest a psychological evaluation.
The problem with EXO, LIC, and IO is that they are not an expensive enough problem I did the Somali piracy study for CENTCOM J-2 plans around 2005 as I recall, and delivered to USN SEALS and SOCOM. In 2008 or so when we put a multinational fleet hammer in to deal with a piracy fly, I asked both of them why they had done nothing when I delivered maps of specific villages, boats, and the London insurance fraud connection and their answers — one from Dam Neck and one from Tampa stunned me in their identical working:
“It wasn't an expensive enough problem.”
The solution I had proposed, for under $5M, was buying several yachts in Turkey, and sailing them into harms way with bare breasted beauties on deck and seriously pissed off SEALS below deck. I also suggests a SEAL picket line.
“It wasn't an expensive enough problem.”
IO has more problems than that. IO is too hard for a military culture that simply does not do culture, language, or nuance. Ferd did a really excellent job with the first Civil Affairs Brigade to be commanded by an active duty officer, but Army SOF IO and the MISTFs are total crap, in part because of the combination of ignorance and an obsession with secrecy that now makes the MISTFs (I serve in one in Afghanistan) good candidates for dissolution.
My book below has — with great deliberation — a SOF track and SOF does not come out of this well. The book was funded by Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, which paid me ($9,000) and them promptly censored the book.
PRINT: Steele, Robert, REINVENTING NATIONAL SECURITY: Grand Strategy, Global Reality, and the U.S. Army — Everything Our President Is Not Being Told (Trump Revolution 45)(Amazon CreateSpace, Earth Intelligence Network, November 2019).
KINDLE: Steele, Robert. REINVENTING NATIONAL SECURITY: Grand Strategy, Global Reality, and the U.S. Army — Everything Our President Is Not Being Told (Trump Revolution Book 45)(Amazon Kindle, Earth Intelligence Network, November 2019)
FREE ONLINE: None but see https://tinyurl.com/Steele-GOARMY.
This is my analysis of SOF today in one graphic, only it has gotten worse.
Now to my final points:
01 The move is long overdue, absolutely the right thing to do, and I support it with the added comment that USMC SOF is available to do missions within the USA without special charters, the USMC being exempt from Posse Comitatus.
02 General Peter Schoomaker, USA, was the last CINCSOC with a holistic mind. He created J-26 which in an utterly brilliant move demanded that all EEI go into COLISEUM such that within one year SOCOM J-26 could prove it was answering 40% of all SOF EEI world-wide (including Russian military maps of denied area border crossings and evaluations of all terrorist, insurgent, and opposition websites in 29 languages) for under $5M a year with 22 people. CIA subsequently lied to or deceived SOCOM and that unit is now down to 5 people with no money and going through the motions. Meanwhile, NGIC is giving BAE $400 million for absolute crap of no military value at any level (strategic, acquisitiion, operations, or tactical). My point: to fix SOF and make the most of SOF — 70% white and 30% black SOF — we have to reinvent intelligence, which is why the new USDI is so important. Without an Open Source Agency (OSA) SOF will remain impotent. In passing note that General Tony Zinni, USMC, at the time CINCCENT, is on record as saying that the secret world provides “at best” 4% of what our military commanders needs, I would say that in the SOF arena it is “at best” 1%.
03 I am utterly gob-smacked by the Acting SecDef saying that we are going to end all wars because that is a statement that General Smedley Butler, USMC and I have been waiting for. The next big leap for US national security, apart from eliminating the National Security Council (NSC) that is how the Deep State and military-industrial complex control the information and options presented to the President, is D3C: Defense, Diplomacy, Development, and Commerce. SOF is central to both Whole of Government strategic, operational, and tactical planning and execution; and also central to multinational and joint government-private sector planning and execution. LtCol Gary Beavers USA was brilliant in the Kosovo campaign using OSINT to harmonize across all aboundaries. We shoot and dishonor our pionneers, until that changes no amount of good intention at the top will achieve results at the bleeding edge of the battlefield. We need, apart from the OSA with its equal emphasis on OSINT and Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE), a Peace College and an Inter-Agency Development Command. All three could and should be build on the undeveloped land east of Fort McNair, with NDU providing housekeeping. My vision for that area is below.
It should fall to others to reinvent the totality of secret intelligence — certainly I would applaud if Mike Flynn were to return to service as a restored DCI while Sidney Powell takes FBI and Bill Binney goes back into NSA as the President's personal representative to assure NSA direct support to clandestine operations abroad and counterintelligence operations at home — this has never been done as an across the board all-source near-real-time process, and I would be honored to support them with the OSA.
I do not agree with the proposition that we should eliminate the CIA or — my view before — that we should reduce the secret world by 70%. Influenced by the below interview, I have concluded that we should first purge the secret IC (and State and Education and all other USG elements) of Zionist and other traitors, and then REDIRECT one third of the secret world to Global Coverage topics not now covered, and one third to domestic topics including Agriculture, Energy, Health, Immigration, and Water.
2006 Sutton (US) Global Coverage, Looking Backward, Looking Forward
1997 Sutton (US) The Challenge of Global Coverage
My vision for the OSA as a foundation stone for everything POTUS wants to do including MAGA is here:
Smart Nation Vision – By Invitation
As an afterthought, the Acting Secretary of Defense may wish to consider restructuring the DoD along the below lines because the existing Secretaries perpetuate the stove-piping of Air, Land, and Sea — we need CINCS and Secretaries that can do holistic analytics and true cost economics across all aspects of their respective force focus.
I amplify my ideas in a very recent product done for NATO Atlantic Transformation Command and immediately useful to DoD leadership.
PRINT: Steele, Robert, NATO 2040: Intelligence (Decision-Support) as Root for Transformation (Earth Intelligence Network, 2020)
KINDLE: Steele, Robert, NATO 2040: Intelligence (Decision-Support) As Root for Transformation (Trump Revolution Book 50) (Earth Intelligence Network, 2020).
FREE ONLINE: Robert Steele: NATO 2040: Intelligence (Decision-Support) as Root for Transformation [Final Draft Seeking
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JFK’S VISION: Trump’s DOD ‘Watershed Reform’ with Special Operations Civilian Leadership
