02:30 SOUTHCOM Strip Alert CAB 21 6-Hour Response Big Bird Takes Off
04:00 CAB 21 Peace Jumpers Parachute into 4 separate locations
04:30 CAB 21 Peace Jumpers provide four separate GPS LZs for GPS-Para Drops
05:00 CAB 21 “Peace from Above” Bulk water, blankets, canned rations begin to drop
05:30 CAB 21 Re-Supply Masters & Emergency Medical Teams parachute in
06:00 Preliminary Multinational Needs List Generated from four different locations
06:30 MDSC begins coordinating multinational lift link-ups with US GPS Para Units
07:00 USN finishes breakfast and starts a hospital ship (creates 75,000 gallons of fresh water from sea water per day) and an amphibious ship toward the scene…still thinking about whether Peace from the Sea has enough promotion slots.
Phi Beta Iota: The below material is a bit cluttered as it was built up over time as the individual pieces came to light. The important point in our view is that each element of the dynamic planning model is an intelligence (decision-support) requirement, and the U.S. Intelligence Community is completely unable to address of of them in a tactical near-real-time neighborhood level of granularity such as Dr. Stephen Cambone knew in 2000 we would need. This is why General Flynn says intelligence is not helping in Afghanistan. 95% of what we need to know to support this planning and operational campaign management model is available for open sources of information–multinational open sources of information.
Phi Beta Iota: These guys were around long before the new handbook came into being, and chances are most of it was drawn from their earlier work. This is righteous brilliant good stuff, and it is precisely the kind of thinking and leadership process that should go into Whole of Government Planning, Programming, and Budgeting, if we can ever get the Office of Management and Budget back in the business of “managing” to outcome and effect.
UPDATE: A single page of text has come available and the slides are now infamous after media discussion. Below is the graphic used in the NBC report:
Original Briefing without Text
We thought we would add a couiple of thoughts:
1) Whole System thinking is long over-due for a renaissance. We have a government that overseas is all fist and no brain or heart, while at home it is all lips and no brain or heart.
2) If you think of the world as a three level chessboard, the bottom level is the Earth–natural resources and the specifics of the atmosphere, climate, and so on. The middle level is the vast public, a power that cannot be suppressed in the long run. The top level is the Industrial Era menage a plus of governments, corporations, and other institutions, all working on a zero-sum basis, none actually willing to share information or work from a shared Strategic Analytic Model to harmonize spending.
3) The dynamic planning model, the Navy's global gaming, the DARPA efforts to “simulate” what everyone on the planet is thinking, all are the right idea executed in the wrong way: divorced from reality. Creating a World Brain Institute with an embedded Global Game that absorbs all true cost information as it becomes available is the fastest possible way to “get a grip” and achieve non-zeroinfinite wealth.
New York Times on Colbert AdaptationIO & Ground Truth Briefing
We're in the process of trying to track down the Army originator of this brief, which is both exquisitely focused and extraordinarily complex.
Below is a first cut–nothing more than an ugly concept for consideration, of what could become a generic approach to assuring our personnel going in harm's way that everything possible has been study to study, understand, and plan for every aspect of what we call Stabilization & Reconstruction Operations, what others call Occupations.
The mounting crisis in the country only attracted notice when a Nigerian student is revealed to have been “trained” in Yemen by al-Qa’ida to detonate explosives in his underpants on plane heading for Detroit. But this botched attack has led to the US and Britain starting to become entangled in one of the more violent countries in the world. The problems of Yemen are social, economic and political, and stretch back to the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s, but Gordon Brown believes solutions can be found by holding a one day summit on Yemen to “tackle extremism.”
Al-Qa’ida in Yemen is small, its active members numbering only 200-300 lightly armed militants in a country of 22 million people who are estimated to own no less than 60 million weapons. Al-Qa’ida has room to operate because central government authority barely extends outside the cities and because it can ally itself with the many opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in office since the 1970s.
The real motives behind the increasing US involvement in Yemen are obscure, to put it charitably. M.K. Bhadrakuma, retired Indian diplomat, presents a complex and fascinating — and no doubt controversial — hypothesis in this regard. Bhadrakuma, a prolific writer, is an astute observer of the Central and South Asia, and judged by his writings, he is by no means a toady of the Indian government.
Chuck
UPDATED to add critique of the below article by a colleague of Chuck Spinney's (below the fold).
Full Story Online
Obama's Yemeni odyssey targets China
By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times 9 January 2010
It's all about China
Most important, however, for US global strategies will be the massive gain of control of the port of Aden in Yemen. Britain can vouchsafe that Aden is the gateway to Asia. Control of Aden and the Malacca Strait will put the US in an unassailable position in the “great game” of the Indian Ocean. The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean are literally the jugular veins of China's economy. By controlling them, Washington sends a strong message to Beijing that any notions by the latter that the US is a declining power in Asia would be nothing more than an extravagant indulgence in fantasy.
Professor Walter Dorn is the virtual Dean of peacekeeping intelligence scholarship, going back to the Congo in the 1960's when Swedish SIGINT personnel spoke Swahli fluently and the UN stunned the belligerents with knowledge so-gained. This is the final published version of the article posted earlier in author's final draft.
In the absence of US interest, we are asking Brazil, China, and India to bring it up. Should a UNODIN working group be formed, it will certainly include African Union (AU), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) counterpart groups, as the regional networks will do the heavy lifting and be the super-hubs for the UN (this is in contrast to a US DoD-based system in which military-to-military hubs would be established to do two-way reachback among the eight tribes in the respective nations). Both concepts are explored in the new book, INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH and in two DoD briefings that are also relevant to the QDR.
The QDR slides got me thinking about the fact that DIA could be a really first rate intelligence agency and an effective counter to ODNI and CIA for the SecDef, JCS, and the military services, especially field commanders.
Although badly executed, DIA has two vitally important missions: support to military operations; and support to military strategy formulation. Unfortunately, DIA has always suffered from unimaginative senior leadership and the worst form of military thinking whereby rank trumps truth and an incompetent major trumps a competent lieutenant.
If DIA is going to achieve its potential and rally to provide the best intelligence possible to the SecDef, JCS, and service field commanders it needs to break free from the military hierarchical thinking and its influences on intelligence judgments.
In point of fact DIA has and has always had an excellent group of military and civilian analysts working there although there is a constant churn due to service requirements and limited prospects for civilians.
So what does DIA need? It needs an influx of original (out of the box) strategists who can visualize and articulate the multi-level threats to U.S. National Security, who understand the phenomenon of globalization and its effect on DOD strategic thinking, and can effectively relate such 21st Century phenomenon as trans-national asymmetric warfare to U.S. force and command structures.
Perhaps most importantly, DIA needs to build a capability to exploit the fact that increasing amounts of information relative to DOD concerns that are actually available from open sources. At the same time DIA needs to introduce much more effective information management systems to support its intelligence production.
UNIDIR (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research) has produced a superb checklist approach to the mission of reducing the proliferation of small arms, which kill and maim and orphan tens of millions at a time. The Director of UNIDIR at the time, Dr. Patricia Lewis, was the first UN official in modern times to contemplate the need for a UN-sponosred World Brain. 2003 Lewis (UNIDIR) Creating the Global Brain: The United Nations.
