The purpose of this memorandum is to establish priorities for my strategic objectives through 2012 and pending the concurrence of a new president with a proper staff, 2020. There is no such thing as strategic guidance for one year. This document informs without directing anyone.
Intent
My intent is to establish a baseline of truth–the truth at any cost reduces all other costs–so as to return our Armed Forces to a condition of readiness, responsiveness, and effectiveness in the face of all threats to the Republic, both domestic and foreign. At a minimum this means an Air Force capable of long-haul lift; a Navy capable of distributed littoral operations; an Army able to fight uncomfortable wars while also reinforcing legitimate governments and where appropriate helping insurgents holding the moral high ground to displace despotic regimes. It also means a Marine Corps able to put air-land-sea forces on any spot in 24 hours (platoon landing team), 48 hours (company landing team) and 72 hours (battalion landing team), along with a Coast Guard able to fulfill all of its homeland safety and security missions. Underlying my intent for the Armed Forces is a strategic intent to demand clarity, integrity, and sensibility from the Whole of Government–sustainable legal orders consonant with our public's culture.
Our blood must only be shed when our brains are engaged and all other means–cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and political–cannot achieve the objectives that are open, legal, ethical, moral, and validated by both Congress and the public. My intent therefore consists of creating the conditions for getting a grip on reality and being able to deal with reality, with a particular emphasis on assuring that all information necessary to inter-agency effectiveness and multinational engagement is both known to us, and shareable with others.
Poor No Labels. A million dollars wasted, all because the donors and the recipients are so out of touch with America they simply don't “get” the fact that the two-party tyranny is a “walking dead man,” and a diversity of voices & values has emerged across America and around the world.
With today's posting, I point to twelve of the lists of books reviews from Book Review Lists (Positive). For each list, I highlight two books from within that list. My intent is to demonstrate that America does not lack for authentic, coherent, integral voices & values — right now it lacks for honest leadership. Labels or No Labels, America has no leaders worth a warm bucket of spit. From wing-nuts to buffoons to frauds, we have no bench. The time has come, in my view, to retire an entire generation of local, state, and national “leaders,” and to make way for the younger generation, the digitally literate generation, for whom secrecy is a connectivity outage to be routed around.
Phi Beta Iota: Laos was both an inspiring success story at the operational and tactical levels, and a massive strategic failure in context. On the one hand, a handful of CIA officers and a very modest amount of money kept entire divisions pinned down or occupied or distracted. On the other hand, in the words of Ted Shackley's deputy in Laos, we got a lot of people killed with nothing to show for it in the end. Today this would not be possible to achieve by kinetic means because it would be too easy to first spot with commercial imagery, and then cover all of the air strips with covert hides able to shoot down the light airplanes as they landed. However, today there are other means of empowering indigenous peoples, centered on Open Spectrum, Open Source Software, and Open Source Intelligence–the Open Tri-Fecta: Information Operations (Advanced).
I've never tried to work up the numbers, but I would be very surprised to learn that the ratio of Hmong soldiers to lowland Lao/other mountain tribe soldiers was greater than 50/50.
Having been a Marine, I'm sure you know the old saying that every Marine squad goes into combat with its own photographer. Merely jealousy, I'm sure, for all the favorable publicity the Marines have had over the years, but not unlike all the favorable publicity the Marines have had (not that they don't deserve it) the Hmong have been the beneficiaries of a similar favorable publicity to the exclusion of the part the lowland Lao and all the other tribal peoples played in the “Secret War.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government continues to be chaotic in part because its civilian leaders simply do not know what they do not know. They have the best of intentions, but have been promoted into a new world far removed from the world imprinted on them in their formative years. There are four ways to address global engagement needs:
1. With government employees performing inherently governmental functions. PROBLEM: The US Government has become hollow, with most of the experienced personnel scheduled for retirement in 2012 (if they don’t retire we lose what is left of the middle), and the bulk of the population, e.g. at CIA, having less than six years experience and being phenomenally ignorant of the real world. An inter-agency cadre for D&D does not exist.
2. With contractors hired to government specifications on a cost plus basis. This is what killed the Pentagon–decades of engineering responsive to military specifications on a cost plus basis, with no accountability anywhere. As we have seen in Iraq and elsewhere, individual instances aside, contractors are generally too expensive, very under-qualified, and often a major political risk hazard. They also loot our qualified manpower–in both intelligence and special forces, we have lost too many good people to bad jobs with too much money.
3. Multinational government task forces in which we plan, program, and budget for using the US military as a “core force” to provide intelligence, operations (mobility, logistics), and communications, and we default to unclassified information-sharing and sense-making. This allows culturally and linguistically qualified individuals to work at the highest levels of performance for the lowest per capita cost.
4. Multinational hybrid task forces in which we plan, program, and budget for using the US military as the “core force” to provide intelligence, operations (mobility, logistics), and communications, and we default to unclassified information-sharing and sense-making. This increases by a factor of SEVEN the number of culturally and linguistically qualified individuals to work at the highest performance levels for the lowest per capita cost with the greatest possible flexibility in covering all needs–the “eight tribes” (academia, civil society, commercial, government–all levels, law enforcement, media, military, non-governmental) become a “whole” force, using shared information and shared mostly unclassified decision support (intelligence) to achieve both a common view of the battlefield, and to most efficiently connect micro-needs in the AOR with micro-gifts from an infinite range of givers.
The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review is at least 20 years too late. It means well. It is both delusional and incomplete. Delusional because no one part of government can become effective until the Office of Management and Budget (OmB) learns to manage again, and incomplete because State simple does not “get” bona fide multinational operations or recognize the “eight tribes.” There is a small seed crystal here, one that could flourish if the Department of Defense (DoD)–or any significant element of DoD such as the US Army–were to “flip the tortilla” and recognize that the greatest contribution DoD can make in the next 20 years is to get a grip on reality, get a grip on open spectrum, open source intelligence, and open source software, and serve as the “center” for Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting, toward the end of creating a prosperous world at peace via low-cost low-risk multinational hybrid task forces that use information and intelligence as a substitute for wealth, violence, time, and space.
NOTE: On some systems links above appear to be underlining, they are actually links.
Post Your Solutions--Town Halls Across the Country
For the past few years, in response to the topics I speak about on my television show and write about on The Huffington Post, people have asked me how they could contribute to help fight for what I call “Truth to Power.” Previously there has been no mechanism to allow people to participate in this, but it is clear that we need to form an Alliance – a formation of like-minded individuals fighting for the same ideals.
With that, let me invite you to join The Alliance to help us all fight for the truth. It is clear that our country is divided in two – not left and right, but those who wish to change the status quo for better, and those who wish to keep it to protect their interests.
The problem is that the Democratic and Republican parties have lost their focus. Instead of fighting to empower the people, they are now only fighting to keep their own power. Only through the full engagement of the people can we change this.
Click on Title to Read at Huffington Post and Make Comments.
EDIT of 10 Dec 10 to add missing links and correct typos, this version only.
A Strategic Analytic Model is the non-negotiable first step in creating Strategic Intelligence, and cascades down to also enable Operational, Tactical, and Technical Intelligence.
Robert David Steele
