Military – Page 161 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/01/192013/01/20

Marcus Aurelius: Letter from Joint Chiefs to Senate Armed Service Committee — Comment by Robert Steele + DoD Transformation RECAP

Corruption, Government, Military

The letter appears only on the Association of the US Navy website, it does not appear at the Joint Chiefs website.

Letter from Joint Chiefs

Following Armed Forces Press Service item ((DOES)) appear as of 2042 EST, 19Jan13:

Sequestration Will Hollow Out Force Fast, Dempsey Says

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

ABOARD A MILITARY AIRCRAFT, Jan. 17, 2013 – The across-the-board spending cuts that would result if a “sequestration” mechanism in budget law kicks in March 1 will hollow out U.S. military forces faster than most Americans imagine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said today.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said during a recent news briefing that if sequestration happens, the American military “will be less prepared in months and unprepared in a year.”

During an interview today on his return trip from NATO meetings in Brussels, the general said the cuts would quickly bring about a new type of hollow force.

Read full story.

ROBERT STEELE: Below is an extracted paragraph from the alleged letter, the one paragraph that makes sense:

To avert this crisis, we urge you to take immediate action to provide adequate and stable funding for readiness. We need a legislative solution that provides the time and flexibility to properly shape the best military force in the world. This means prioritizing warfighting readiness, appropriately sizing our military and civilian workforce and force structure, and reducing overhead costs. We must also be given the latitude to enact cost-saving reforms we need while eliminating the weapons and facilities we do not need.

My initial reaction is “wow!” HOWEVER, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have not met Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) basic guidance as issued when he was Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC):

I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don’t know of any logical way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat,; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy. Senator Sam Nunn, then Chairman, SASC Source (p. 3)

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been dishonest and unprofessional up to this point, as have been their predecessors going all the way back to the end of World War II. They have administered to budget share driven by the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) while accepting extremely dishonest appraisals of the global threat, producing an incoherent strategy, and perpetuating an acquisition system that is so dysfunctional it could reasonably be found to be treasonous,the United States being at war at this time (whether legitimately declared or not).

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Letter from Joint Chiefs to Senate Armed Service Committee — Comment by Robert Steele + DoD Transformation RECAP”

2013/01/192016/03/26

Reflections on the Inability of Washington to Think with Integrity

All Reflections & Story Boards, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military, Non-Governmental

Power corrupts, no doubt about it. What most people miss is that it is not just about financial corruption that explicitly mis-directs scarce resources to benefit the few over the many (with Congress taking its standard 5% kick-back for delivering earmarks). Power also corrupts intellect. People forget how to think. They begin talking among themselves, shutting out external views, creating an incestuous cycle of circular citation. Col Mike Pheneger, then J-2 at the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) discovered this with respect to the Cuban Order of Battle (OOB), and I have found this myself on many occasions over the years.

Recently I have observed two deeply dysfunctional conversations in Washington. The first deals with intelligence and information overload, the second with the force structure requirements for the U.S. military beyond 2014.

Blithering Blobs of Blogdom

The intelligence discussion is best represented by SASA/INSA and The New America Foundation. The first fronts for the intelligence-industrial complex and the second for a mix of benefactors, none of whom appear actually interested in creating a government that works for all. Indeed, it can be said that the secret intelligence world and the “non-profit” think tank world share the same motivation: do whatever it takes to keep the money (inputs) moving, never mind the outputs or the outcomes.

Continue reading “Reflections on the Inability of Washington to Think with Integrity”

2013/01/192013/01/19

Marcus Aurelius: Military Seeks to Disarm Unstable Soldiers — But Only When They Are At Home

Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military

As much as I admire GEN(R) Chiarelli, I disagree profoundly with his position. It ((IS)) about Second Amendment. Admission of possession can be a form of registration. And registration can lead to confiscation. It is also about personal privacy. Except for cases where privately owned weapons are stored on military installations in either married quarters or unit arms rooms, DoD has zero need to know whether or not a Service member owns firearms. Suicide prevention concerns, while heartwrenching, must absolutely yield to personal privacy and Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms.

U.S. military worries about guns, too

Stephanie Gaskell

Politico, 17 January 2013

One provision in President Barack Obama’s gun-control plan already has played well in Congress and with the National Rifle Association: being able to ask people with mental health issues if they have access to guns.

Last month, Congress passed a little-noticed provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that allows commanders and ranking officers to ask troops who are struggling with mental health issues if they have access to firearms.

The NRA, a big supporter of the military, did not try to block the provision. But it was not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Military Seeks to Disarm Unstable Soldiers — But Only When They Are At Home”

2013/01/182013/01/18

David Isenberg: How Responsible is the Chain of Command? IS THERE a “Chain of Command?” Does Yamashita Standard Apply to Commander in Chief?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Military

Military Justice

Lawbreakers at War: How Responsible Are They?

By David Isenberg Jan. 18, 2013

Anybody around here remember Tomoyuki Yamashita?

He was an Imperial Japanese Army general during World War II. In terms of battles he was most famous for conquering the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore.

But his historical legacy comes from being tried in late 1945 by an American military tribunal in Manila for war crimes relating to the massacre of civilians in Manila, and atrocities in Singapore against civilians and prisoners of war, such as the Sook Ching massacre.

Even though the massacre in the Philippines was carried out by a subordinate commander, Imperial Japanese Navy Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, against Yamashita’s specific order – and without his knowledge or approval – a U.S. military tribunal held Yamashita responsible for the conduct of his troops. He was executed on February 23, 1946.

Nowadays most legal scholars acknowledge that Yamashita’s execution was a case of victor’s, not legal, justice. Nevertheless his case become a precedent regarding the command responsibility for war crimes and is known as the Yamashita Standard.

An interesting tidbit of history, you’re thinking, but what’s its relevance to today’s U.S. military?

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Morality is even more important in war than in peace. Extreme violations will have a lasting negative effect. The USS Liberty, 34 KIA, 171 WIA, is a classic modern example. No one is Israel has been held accountable for this atrocity, and for over 30 years no one in Washington has been held accountable for covering it up and abusing the surviving crew and families. We continue to recommend Truth & Reconciliation — educating the public on what has actually happened, why, and its consequences — rather than individual punitive measures that do nothing for the greater good of society.

2013/01/182013/01/18

SchwartzReport: Is PTSD Contagious? What Cost War to Society Over Generations?

Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military

Is PTSD Contagious?

It's rampant among returning vets—and now their spouses and kids are starting to show the same symptoms.

—By Mac McClelland

Mother Jones | January/February 2013 Issue

EXTRACTS:

Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He's one of 103,200, or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It's hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for the former, undertesting for the latter, underreporting, under or over-misdiagnosing of both. And as slippery as all that is, even less understood is the collateral damage, to families, to schools, to society—emotional and fiscal costs borne long after the war is over.

. . . . . . . . .

Whatever is happening to Caleb, it's as old as war itself. The ancient historian Herodotus told of Greeks being honorably dismissed for being “out of heart” and “unwilling to encounter danger.” Civil War doctors, who couldn't think of any other thing that might be unpleasant about fighting the Civil War but homesickness, diagnosed thousands with “nostalgia.” Later, it was deemed “irritable heart.” In World War I it was called “shell shock.” In World War II, “battle fatigue.” It wasn't an official diagnosis until 1980, when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder made its debut in psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, uniting a flood of Vietnam vets suffering persistent psych issues with traumatized civilians—previously assigned labels like “accident neurosis” and “post-rape syndrome”—onto the same page of the DSM-III.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This may be the single most important article we have pointed to since we started. Please consider reading it in full. This is the home cost. Those we attack suffer, apart from the same casualties we do but on an order of magnitude scale, and also the effects of depleted uranium, now known as the “Fullujah mutant babies” effect. This is not something to be proud of, nor is it something that can be justified as being in the public interest once total true costs are understood. Having a dumbed down population is one thing — driving the population insane, at the same time that the elites are is such isolation as to be criminally insane, is another matter entirely.

2013/01/172013/01/18

NIGHTWATCH: Mali Out of Algeria — French Fighting Algerians Not Displaced Libyans + Mali RECAP

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, Military

Algeria: Islamist militants, apparently affiliated with al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, seized a natural gas facility in east-central Algeria early Wednesday. The 20 or so attackers took as hostages up to 41 foreign supervisors, technicians and workers. They include at least 13 Norwegians and seven Americans, plus one Irishman, and a number of Japanese and British citizens. Two workers died in the attack.

The group announced that this attack was in retaliation for the French use of Algerian airspace to mount their attack against Islamist rebels in Mali. The attack group reportedly is led by a militant named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian. He claimed that his group would release the hostages if the French stopped their operations in Mali.

During this Watch, Algerian forces have surrounded the plant and the situation is in a standoff.

Comment: Despite French warnings about retaliation, this plant in eastern Algeria undertook no increased security measures. The salient features of the Islamists in Mali to date are their organization and discipline. Today's action adds to their military repertoire communications connectivity with sympathetic groups in Algeria. The Islamists threatened retaliation over the weekend and they have been as good as their word.

Today's attack and hostage-taking occurred a long way from Mali. The al-Qaida franchise in the Saharan region is far more sophisticated and coordinated than the Pashtun and Uzbek tribal fighters in Afghanistan or the tribal Arabs in Yemen. Southern Algeria appears to be their base of operations, not LIbya.

Mali: Malian and French ground troops clashed with Islamic rebels in Diabaly on 16 January. The French-Malian force has not yet recaptured the village.

Mauritania reportedly has increased its border patrols, reducing the rebel ability to operate with impunity from Mauritanian territory.

Comment: A prominent narrative in the English language press is that the jihadists and Islamist rebels who seized northern Mali, plus their weapons, came from Libya. In fact, the information in the public domain indicates they came from Algeria and maintain connectivity with other Algerian Islamist groups. The attack at the gas facility at In Amenas, Algeria, tends to reinforce that judgment.

The significance is that the Islamist takeover of northern Mali was not a ripple effect from the inept NATO management of the Libyan uprising. It is a more sinister and well planned expansion of the Algerian Islamist rebels, who form the core of al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. These are tough guys.

The French are not fighting Libyan terrorists in Mali. They are fighting Algerians [armed by Americans] …again. Apparently several thousand of them.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Mali Out of Algeria — French Fighting Algerians Not Displaced Libyans + Mali RECAP”

2013/01/162013/01/16

Chuck Spinney: Pivotng to China — Criminally Insane, Business as Usual

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Media, Military

The attached report by Greg Jaffe in the Washington Post (from 1 August 2012) is an excellent case study of the inside-the-beltway networking by the players in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC). Jaffe shows these networks build a consensus to keep defense spending high when wars end and a terrifying peace dividend threatens to break out. At the center of Jaffee's report a an influence peddling network orchestrated by an ancient artifact of the Pentagon, a futurist named Andrew Marshall, nicknamed Yoda.

Most of the ideas surrounding the all seeing – all knowing – deep-strike precision guided attack systems portrayed in Andy Marshall's so-called Revolution of Military Affairs (its most recent incarnation is the Air – Sea Battle described by Jaffe below) have been around in various forms for a very long time, dating at least from McNamara's electronic line the Viet Nam war, but some of these ideas have conceptual roots in World War II (e.g., the wide area surveillance and close control command architecture of the British air defense system as well as the “precision” weapons programs developed by the US and Germany during WWII). In fact, readers with a sense of military history will quickly realize that Marshall's ideas are basically a rehash of America's traditional mechanical conception of attrition warfare, especially those ideas underpinning the critical-node theories of strategic bombardment (begun in the 1930s at the Army Air Corps Tactical School), albeit masked by new fancy sounding acronyms.

Readers with a sense of history will also recall that Obama's pivot to China is hardly a new idea. It was first floated in the early 90s and promoted by Senator McCain, among others, in the early maneuvering to keep defense spending high despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. (That maneuvering succeeded, because as the chart below shows, the post-cold war budgets never dropped low the levels of the Eisenhower Administration during the height of the Cold War.) McCain's maneuvering also led to the law mandating the Quadrennial Defense Review, which to date has produced a series of totally useless reports (as I explained here and here) but nevertheless provided rhetorical justifications for continuing Cold War boondoggles like missile defense, the Virginia class nuclear attack submarine, the Army's future combat system, and that turkey of turkeys, the Joint Strike Fighter.

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