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Telling the truth to those who have replaced intelligence with ideology and integrity with loyalty to something other than their Republic is most difficult and more often than not will get you fired, because those without integrity tend to be promoted in corrupt systems, and they see clearly the threat to their world-view — and their perks — of someone who persists in pointing out that the truth at any cost reduces all other costs.
Below is a complement to my earlier posting of 15 November 2012: 2012 Robert Steele: Addressing the Seven Sins of Foreign Policy — Why Defense, Not State, Is the Linch Pin for Global Engagement.
Reform can be job and revenue neutral from state to state and district to district — and is of course subject to Congressional oversight via the authorization and appropriations process. Below are seven truths about the US military that I would like to see introduced into the hearings on the confirmation of the next Secretary of Defense, and ideally also tasked to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), where the senior specialist for each of the major services is capable of validating my views.
Truth #1: The only winners in war are the banks, and they only win because governments are corrupt and let bankers gets away with mass murder, mass disease, mass pollution, and mass impovertization. Sun Tzu has it right and so did Gandhi: the real winner of any conflict is the winner that avoids the conflict entirely — non-zero win-win is not a concept anyone in Washington DC understands because they are poorly read and lack any incentive to be thoughtful about the public interest. The US Government has become unintelligent and unethical and thus incapable of achieving strategic coherence. This can be changed overnight, but the President, the National Security Adviser to the President, and the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury have to be on the same page. The Secretary of the Treasury has to be — unlike all recent choices less Paul O'Neil — a person of very high intelligence, absolute integrity, and with the spine to take down both the Federal Reserve and the private banks –there is no Constitutional or legal impediment to getting our house in order. We can start by rescinding the requirement that all local banks be part of the Federal Reserve system, by increasing the reserve requirement to 60%, and by ending all government borrowing. Resilience and local ownership of all land and assets is a very important starting point for restabilizing the USA. In that domestic context, the recapitalization of the US military is one of our most important priorities — it must be done with intelligence and integrity — that pretty much excludes all of the current “voices” across all the think tanks, foundations and corporations addicted to government specifications cost plus zero operational test & evaluation. We need a military that prevents war, not a military that loses wars or does interventions to protect bad or unethically derived investments, which is what we have been doing since WWII — killing hope.
Truth #2: Military power is most effective in a Whole of Government context. This is true at all levels (strategic, operational, tactical, and technical) and it is especially vital in the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) — until the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gets a Deputy Director for Management that actually has the intelligence and integrity to manage the comprehensive architecture of the US Government as a whole and in a manner that enables inter-operability with all others — and particularly multinational information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2) — the President will remain in charge of — Madeline Albright's phrase, not mine, “gerbils on a wheel.” Not only do we need to cut the military budget down to around $300 billion a year over the next six years, but we also need to redirect $100 billion if not more to Program 150 (International Affairs) while also doing three things to every other Cabinet to get our domestic affairs set right: 1) cut their budgets by 20% each year, restoring 10% to new initatives, doing this for five years in a row; 2) teach them how to do intelligence with integrity in-house, while also funding the Open Source Agency (OSA); and 3) demand that they think in thirds as the reconstitute their staff and their programs for the future: one third domestic engagement, one third Whole of Government engagement, one third global engagement.
Truth #3: Military power is least effective when the home front is hollow. Using Carroll Quigley's seven eras of civilization (mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay, invasion) it is clear to me that we are past the decay stage — with unemployment actually around 22% not the fictional 8% we are told — and well into the invasion stage with Mexico recovering everything up to the Guadalupe-Hidalgo line and a broad mix of refugees we have helped create undermining the cohesion of the Republic. The US has no serious coherent future-proofing strategy or policy in place across each of the twelve core policy areas: Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, and Water. OMB has some very smart people but it is useless to the President unless it starts demonstrating intelligence with integrity. Technology is not a substitute for thinking and neither is spending. Easily 50% of what OMB approves in the President's budget is readily identifiable fraud, waste, and abuse, but the President is not demanding intelligence with integrity, so he is not getting it [the secret world is largely irrelevant to our needs at this time — OMB should co-sponsor the Open Source Agency (OSA), and be its top client).
Truth #4: In a closed system, the principles of war must be replaced by the principles of peace. We continue to do the wrong things wronger. The next Secretaries of State and Defense — if they wish to actually serve the Republic rather than continue in corrupt “maintenance mode,” must abandon the old war paradigm and embrace the new peace paradigm — respect for history & cultural heritage; multinational diversity by default; open dialog and an end to both Zionist and military-industrial invited corruption of Congress; and a focus on waging peace via such tools as the Open Source Agency (OSA), “The Virgin Truth,” and the United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN).
Truth #5: Time is the new strategic imperative. Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three — not only is government incapable of governing in isolation in this context (it must devise means to share information and make sense with the other seven tribes or communities of information: academic, civil society including labor and religion, commerce, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit) to achieve viable integrated holistic WARNING across all dimensions, but in both Whole of Government global engagement and in military intervention terms, TIME rather than mass or technology or even human skill becomes the critical factor. This is relevant to the recapitalization of the US military in two ways:
a) Being the first to know, the first to understand, and the first to DECIDE is the acme of skill for the military, the government, and the Republic in the 21st Century. Today we are retarded on all fronts. We are much further away from being a Smart Nation than we were in 1995 when I first coined the term.
b) In today's environment, Nathan Bedford Forrest's doctine of “get there first with the most men” must be modified to one that emphasizes “get there first with the right mix of intelligence, men, and capability — just enough, just right, just in time.” The current military bases that are maintained around the world at taxpayer expense are dead weight – dead cost — and as we learned in Benghazi, totally useless when badly led.
Truth #6: Global engagement with flexibility must center on the US Navy and the US Air Force for global reach. The Department of Defense continues to be very badly managed today, because each Secretary of Defense that comes in tends to “go along to get along” and accepts the long-standing budget share, mission separation, and other factors that make the US military largely dysfunctional — worse, they pick as aides the usual suspects who never have learned to think independently. We need a 450-ship distributed Navy and a long-haul Air Force. We do NOT need a big ship Navy 4-6 days away from anywhere, or the scatter-brained Air Force we have now, mixing too few rotten airplanes (including one that kills its pilots from stealth toxins) with a vague claim to space operations, no real understanding of cyber operations, and a failure to be serious about long-haul lift or close air support (time for the Army to have its own Air Force). Frog 6 has spoken to this before — the US Navy must be able to drop a platoon of Marines with crew-served weapons, naval gun fire support (non-existent today for lack of integrity across multiple Commandants of the Marine Corps), and a Cobra overhead anywhere within 24 hours or less; a company with Harriers overhead anywhere in 48 hours, and a light Battalion Landing Team (BLT) with organic air anywhere within 72 hours. The US Air Force must be able to move an Army division anywhere in one week with a mix of organic and conscripted air, and also do a Berlin Airlift, while providing AC-130 gunships on strip alert in a global rotating system that does not demand investments in foreign territories. A sea-based variation of the AC-130 is long overdue.
Truth #7: No amount of money, technology, or munitions will make up for a badly managed human factor. Although the Special Operations Forces (SOF) have the right idea — quality matters and you cannot mass produce SOF humans — they also lost their integrity in the rush to move from $2 billion a year to $10 billion a year and over, and there is very little that is “special” about SOF today — they are just another form of cannon fodder. DoD today has hundreds of thousands of contractors, civilian employees, and uniformed personnel — both enlisted at the very bottom and officer at the very top — that are a drag on the system. Not only should we retire, as gracefully as possible, virtually all of the flags and half if not more of the O-6's, but we should also completely rethink our human resource strategy, to include eliminating reliance on contractors for acquisition design. The services have lost the ability to build useful, sustainable, affordable ships, aircraft, and ground systems. The services have lost the ability to think in terms of cause and effect, team in, solution out. Virtually everything we are doing today in the way of military acquisition, education, and training is obsolete Industrial-Era cookie cutting. C4I is the linch-pin but DoD has managed to hose that up completely, refusing to learn anything since the late 1980's and early 1990's when it was first pointed out to them, on multiple occasions, that unilateral internal communications were not the center of gravity, the ability to share and make sense with non-military and other military was of paramount importance.
And yes, communications without intelligence is still noise, and intelligence without communications is irrelevant [but even with communications, 96% non-existent — we need to flush an entire generation of intelligence clerk-leaders into retirement. My vision of the future is centered on senior non-commissioned officers, captains, and majors who can be put anywhere on the planet with redundant reliable communications, and begin to have an effect that is mostly preventive in nature–precision begins with a human Forward Observer and the termination of drones [DoD evidently has not figured out that pilots are less expensive than bandwidth and have better situational awareness]. The IC needs to make changes I have articulated since the 1990's, most notably with regard to changing the triangles of manning, dollars, and production. The Open Source Agency (OSA) will not only address the 90% or greater needs for decision support that the secret world does not address, now, it will also serve as a benchmark for evaluating and focusing the classified collection disciplines and the ability to process all sources in near real time. It's open source everything to technology — which includes security superior to what the IC has now both in terms of protected access and in terms of multinational sharing — will give OMB the long missing “common solutions” platform that no one sector of the USG could bring itself to embrace and champion.
My concept of the Peace Jumpers / Peace from Above as developed for Haiti, and then the United Nations, is an example. My concept of regional multinational intelligence and operations centers — as well as regional sea and airlift harmonization in crisis response or rapid interventions — is another — General Flynn has the right instincts, but he is being gutted by the combination of his treasonous bureaucratic civilians just waiting him out, and the general inability of the US military to think new thoughts — e.g. M4IS2, multinational clandestine, non-official cover, honest appraisals from the field, etcetera. SOUTHCOM demonstrated the incapacity of our theater commands in relation to Haiti, an enduring shame. We need to rethink the theaters and perhaps even get rid of them entirely, replacing them with four “type” commands for Big War, Small War, Peace, and Homeland, and reconstituting the regional intelligence-operations centers as Whole of Government capabilities that can be managed from a national Whole of Government and a multinational Whole of Government pair of co-located “harmonization” centres (command & control is history — 80% or more of what needs to be “harmonized” cannot be commanded or controlled, only educated and influenced. The President's first priority, beyond forming his new Cabinet, should be on “getting a grip” on reality, on creating the Open Source Agency (OSA) as a foundation for governance with intelligence and integrity, and on making — and demanding that his Cabinet officers make — ethical evidence-based decisions. St.
See Also:
21st Century Intelligence Core References 2.3
2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on Inspectors General
2013 Public Governance in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant – The Public
2012 Steele for Branson: The Virgin Truth 2.6
2012 Robert Steele: Practical Reflections on UN Intelligence + UN RECAP
2011 Peace from Above: Future of Intelligence & Air Power
2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere
2008 Open Source Intelligence (Strategic) 2.0
Amitai Etzioni: USG Suffering Multiple Realism Deficiency Disorder (MRDD)
DefDog: War Study – Troops Had Bad Intel, Worse Spin
Gold Transformer: Post-US world born in Phnom Penh — But See Also CELAC Etcetera
Graphic: US Military Bases World-Wide
Marcus Aurelius: SecDef to McCain on Sequester + RECAP on DoD Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Reference: Russell Ackoff on Doing Right Things Righter
Robert Steele Biography & Linked Publications
Search: purpose of military intelligence
