WASHINGTON – The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama is not considering a strategy for Afghanistan that would withdraw U.S. troops from the eroding war there.
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Obama has invited a bipartisan group of congressional leaders to the White House on Tuesday to confer about the war. He said the administration would brief leaders from both parties and key committee chairmen and would seek their opinions.
Phi Beta Iota: Not only is the White House itself out of touch with reality on Afghanistan, but inviting a “bipartisan” collection of the same appartchiks that allowed us to go into two elective wars and to bankrupt the nation twice over is hardly the way to get coherent strategic advice.
DENVER — A store clerk's curiosity about why Najibullah Zazi was buying large quantities of beauty supply products indicated that something about the transaction wasn't quite right — and it's an example of the kind of citizen vigilance that can combat terror, a police commander said Saturday.
Phi Beta Iota: This new initiative is precisely as recommended by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02), then a very active member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, and author of the Foreword to the book, The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest. Included in his vision is a 411 number for calling in suspicious information, and a similar Internet address that delivers the information to the right precinct. Congressman Simmons has always been a decade or more ahead of the government bureaucracy in recognizing the value of first Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), of which he is the only Member pioneer, and then Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, of which is also the sole Member pioneer.
In roughly 1997 we were invited to brief Russian and Eastern European parliamentarians at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany, and presented a new concept, of the military as the core force for peace.
Our intent was rooted in our appreciation for the military in every nation–regardless of corruption or shortfalls in leadership–as the one organization that can generally manage uninterrupted communications, logistics, and mobility functions that are today vastly more important than the traditional military function of applying force.
Today we learn of an excellent communications exercise
Transcript Online
involving 25 nations across Africa, under the auspices of the Africa Command (AFRICOM). The transcript is well worth reading (and much more valuable than forcing one to watch the video, thank you AFRICOM PAO). We have just two questions:
1. Has AFRICOM engaged the DARPA STRONG ANGEL team and considered TOOZL as something to be included in this and future exercises?
2. Has AFRICOM talked to CISCO about providing free bridging products and services for testing by all participants? We continue to be astonished by how few domestic and international organizations are aware that it is now possible to mix and max all analog and digital forms of voice and data via CISCO hubs.
Speaking on the Senate floor in July of 2003, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla) rightly called the threat of catastrophic global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
The Cybersecurity Myth by Bob Crigely
Full Story Online
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said this week it will hire up to 1,000 cybersecurity experts over the next three years to help protect U.S. computer networks. This was part of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and the announcement was made by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, who also said they probably won’t need to hire all 1,000 experts, which is good because I am pretty sure THERE AREN’T ONE THOUSAND CIVILIAN CYBERSECURITY EXPERTS IN THE ENTIRE FRIGGIN’ WORLD!!!!
Phi Beta Iota: Correct.The politicization of United Nations as well as all government and corporate “reporting” to the public is now out of control.In no way does this reduce the need for real-time science and real-time policy (changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three), but it does demand that we recognize that the corruption of all information being presented to the public is now virtually total.There is an urgent need for both bottom-up Internet resilience (every appliance a server-router with Wi-Fi), and bottom-up public intelligence.
Reform or Go Home (David Kilcullen) End Suicide Attacks (Robert Pape) If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join (Linda Robinson) Pump Up the Police (Anthony Cordesman) Kick Out Corruption (Nader Nadery) Learn to Tax From the Taliban (Gretchen Peters) Polls Have the Power (Merrill McPeak) Take a Risk (Andrew McDonald Exum) Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose (Frederick Kagan) Pakistani Patronage (Paul Pillar)
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4 Broad Strategies Weighed — From Pullout To Boosting Troop Level
Getting out Scaling back
Staying put Ramping up
Integrated Analytics
Phi Beta Iota: In the context of holistic strategy and integrated analytics as depicted by the two thumbnails (click on each to get to the larger graphic), we are stunned by the mediocrity and myopia of the “conventional wisdom.” It's all connected. Absent a coherent world view and strategic analytic model with integrity, this Administration is toast. The Republic has no strategy, no mature threat construct, no Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS), and zero integrity in the sense of being honest about the totality of the substance of governance.
Check out Google's Project 10 to the 100, and vote for the ideas among the top ten that you favor.
They are listed below for reader convenience but descriptions and voting blocks are only available at Google's Project 10 to the 100th page.
Help social entrepreneurs drive change Make government more transparent Provide quality education to African students Create real-time natural crisis tracking system Build real-time, user-reported news service Drive innovation in public transport Make educational content available online for free Create more efficient landmine removal programs Work toward socially conscious tax policies Build better banking tools for everyone Collect and organize the world's urban data Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists Promote health monitoring and data analysis Enhance science and engineering education Create real-world issue reporting system Create genocide monitoring and alert system
The scattered nature of these “surviving ideas” gives us pause. Several of them should have been grouped into a Collective Intelligence category, many are so far down in the weeds we have to wonder about the substance of the process by which this final list was derived.
When one is brought up, professionally trained, in “systems thinking” and the importance of feedback loops, diversity, and integrity, everything else becomes pedestrian. Today we highlight two books re-inventing the wheel so as to feature an extraordinarily useful but slighting incomplete oration on “expert judgement by our much-admired colleague at NIGHTWATCH, concluding with a list of books on Collective Intelligence as the engine for Epoch B Human Scale Integral Consciousness and Conscious Evolution….i.e. the antithesis of Washington, D.C. politics.
Amazon Page
We are beginning to see the emergence of a very earnest and most promising form of historical revisionis, a series of books testing “what if” hypotheses that revolve around “what if” our leaders had acted with integrity; “what if” our leaders had sought out all the facts, been transparent, not been selfish, not been corrupt?
Below is an excerpt from NIGHTWATCH (find the rest halfway down the page for 23 July 2009) at NIGHTWATCH 20090723 in a “Special Note on Porfessionalism in Analysis–worth a complete read!
