Pentagon Shifts Its Strategy To Small-Scale Warfare
By August Cole and Yochi J. Dreazen
Wall Street Journal January 30, 2010 Pg. 4
The shift in strategy sets up potential conflicts with defense contractors and powerful lawmakers uneasy with the Pentagon's growing focus on smaller-scale, guerilla warfare.
In particular, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has come to think that the Pentagon's traditional belief that it needed to be able to fight two major wars at the same time was outdated and overly focused on conventional warfare. The new QDR moves away from that model, a mainstay of U.S. military thinking for more than two decades, in favor of an expanded focus on low-intensity conflict.
Phi Beta Iota: This is most fascinating; it is also not the last word. Here is the timeline in short and long versions. Short: 22 years from advance guard to leadership; 12 years from internal think tanks to leadership; probably further delay from leadership acceptance to bureaucratic implementation: another 20 years.
1988: Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray and the USMC Intelligence Center figure it out. General Gray publishes “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990).
1992: USMC seeks redirection of one-third of the National Intelligence Topics (NIT) to Third World. Across the board stone-walling by other services and the US Intelligence Community.
The Homegrown Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland (ARI)
Lorenzo Vidino
ARI 171/2009 – 18/12/2009
EXTRACT 1: All these plots are very diverse in their origin, degree of sophistication and characteristics of the individuals involved. Yet they all contribute to paint the picture of the complex and rapidly changing reality of terrorism of Islamist inspiration in the US. Moreover, they smash or, at least, severely undermine an assumption that has been widely held by policymakers and analysts over the last 15 years. The common wisdom, in fact, has traditionally been that American Muslims, unlike their European counterparts, were virtually immune to radicalisation.
EXTRACT 2: The wave of arrests of the last months of 2009 has contributed to shedding light on a reality that is significantly more nuanced, showing that radicalisation affects some small segments of the American Muslim population exactly like it affects some fringe pockets of the Muslim population of each European country. Evidence supporting this view has been available for a long time, as the cases of American Muslims joining radical Islamist groups date back to the 1970s.[12] According to data collected by the NYU Center on Law and Security, for example, more than 500 individuals have been convicted by the American authorities for terrorism-related charges since 9/11.[13] Most of them are US citizens or long-time US residents who underwent radicalisation inside the US.
Phi Beta Iota: Recommended by Contributing Editor Berto Jongman.
After reading this report by my good friend Werther, I would urge you to compare Werther's analysis to the “inside the beltway,” K Street analyses published in today's Washington Post — then decide which you like better.
By Werther (Pseudonym) Electric Politics January 22, 2010
The Supreme Court's wholesale rejection of a century of statutes regulating corporate contributions to political campaigns is a breath of fresh air in a hypocrisy-ridden political process. It certainly ought to sweep away the tendency of timid rationalizers to deny the existence of corporate domination and control of every aspect of governance in the United States — a fact which should have already been made abundantly clear by the terms of the bank bailout and the health care travesty.
It is not inconceivable, using the Court's logic, that antitrust laws could be thrown out as well. Since natural persons have freedom of association, why should not artificial persons have a similar freedom of association? The Court has in fact created a species of Nietzschean Übermensch: a non-human human endowed with the strength of many people and theoretically immortal.
Now that our Supreme Court, with the assistance of a little medieval alchemy, has ruled that property can be transmuted into persons, is it conceivable that it could do the opposite? Before one dismisses the thought, the executive branch, with the connivance of lower federal courts, has already been busy establishing the precedent that persons held at Guantanamo prison and other facilities can be converted into the property of the United States Government, to be held indefinitely.
CLETA MITCHELL : The Supreme Court has correctly eliminated a constitutionally flawed system that allowed media corporations (e.g., The Washington Post Co.) to freely disseminate their opinions about candidates using corporate treasury funds, while denying that constitutional privilege to Susie's Flower Shop Inc
ROBERT LENHARD: The balance of power in political contests has shifted dramatically away from candidates running for office and toward corporations and unions seeking to advance their policy agendas.
KENNETH GROSS: Contrary to popular reports, the sky is not falling.
ANNA BURGER: There can be no doubt: The voice of everyday working Americans in the political process will be muted.
BEN GINSBERG: The voices of candidates and political parties just got much quieter.
MARK ELIAS: While few individuals exercise their right to fund multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns, we should expect that corporations will eagerly do so. Given corporate wealth and the legislative stakes, in many elections corporations will dominate paid campaign communications — leaving candidates and political parties as secondary actors.
KAREN FINNEY: At the very moment Americans' mistrust of big corporations, big government and large institutions has reached a fever pitch, the Supreme Court moved to replace a government of, for and by the people with a government that can be bought and paid for by just about any major corporation — from Exxon to Russian-owned Lukoil to China's CPC Corp.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision was a major blow to the two suits testing warrantless eavesdropping and executive branch powers implemented following the 2001 terror attacks. The San Francisco judge said the courts are not available to the public to mount that challenge.
“A citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law,” (.pdf) Walker ruled late Thursday.
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that brought one of the cases, said the decision means “when you’re trying to stop the government from doing something illegal, and if the government does it to enough people, the courts can’t fix it.”
The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world.
As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.
This country needs to get a grip. We need a slap in the face, a splash of cold water.
On Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute opened an emergency exit inside the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport. Alarms blared and sirens flashed. Bouloute later told police that he'd opened the door by accident.
Which is what you'd assume. Sure, the exit was clearly marked, but it happens all the time, does it not?
All of Terminal 8 was evacuated for more than two hours. Police then swept through the building with dogs and SWAT teams (because, you see, a terrorist wouldn't quietly drop an explosive device into a trash barrel; he would first set off alarms, in order to…?). Before being allowed back in, thousands of travelers were forced to undergo rescreening at the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, giving guards a chance to snag any butter knives or 4-ounce shampoo bottles they might have missed the first time. Inbound planes were stranded on the tarmac and departures were delayed for several hours.
Yemen has so many dire problems that it's easy to be overwhelmed. Al Qaeda is growing in prominence, a Shiite rebellion is expanding in the north, and the threat of secession is renewed in the south. There's a brewing fight over what comes after President Ali Abdullah Saleh, age 67, who has ruled Yemen for 31 years; the country's elites are locked in a closed-door struggle to take power once he departs. Finally, and perhaps most intractably, Yemen is an environmental and resource catastrophe in the making. The country's water table is nearly depleted from years of agricultural malpractice, and its oil reserves are rapidly dwindling. This comes just when unemployment is soaring and an explosive birthrate promises only more young, jobless citizens in the coming years.
Too many problems of too severe a nature to be dealth with in isolation from one another. “Yemen and its challenges have to be understood and dealt with as a whole.”
Standard party line “prep” for invading both countries. Most interesting tid-bit: 36 American convicts reached Yemen, ostensibly to study Arabic. Given the number of convicts the USA produces, most jailed for marijuana possession, and in combination with the bankruptcy of the USA and the meltdown of its social and physical infrastructure, we read this in a much more catastrophic homeland manner than might be the case in the cozy ambiance of Capitol Hill. Al Qaeda is no longer the center of gravity–domestic anger easily converted into violence is the center of gravity.
