Former CIA director David H. Petraeus told Congress on Friday that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, was clearly an act of terrorism, but he did not resolve the question of when the agency reached that conclusion, according to lawmakers who attended the closed-door sessions.
. . . . . . .
According to accounts provided by intelligence officials, the CIA concluded early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack by definition, because any assault on a U.S. government installation with heavy weapons and substantial firepower could not be classified otherwise. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
I wrote this with John Kerry and Michele Flourney in mind, but regardless of who is eventually made Secretary of Defense, the core concept remains: the center of gravity for massive change in the US Government and in the nature of how the US Government ineracts with the rest of the world, lies within the Department of Defense, not the Department of State.
John Kerry, Global Engagement, and National Integrity
It troubles me that John Kerry is resisting going to Defense when he can do a thousand times more good there instead of sitting at State being, as Madeline Albright so famously put it, a “gerbil on a wheel.” Defense is the center of gravity for the second Obama Administration, and the one place where John Kerry can truly make a difference. Appoint Michele Flournoy as Deputy and his obvious replacement down the road, and you have an almost instant substantive make-over of Defense. Regardless of who ends up being confirmed, what follows is a gameplan for moving DoD away from decades of doing the wrong things righter, and toward a future of doing the right things affordably, scalably, and admirably.
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the executive summary — none of this has been validated from other sources, but what keeps coming back to us, in relation to both who the US Government does business with and who major commanders socialize with, is ZERO counter-intelligence. We have no clue. Amateur hour continues.
01 The Lebanese sisters are part of the Khawam family that fronted for Saadaam Hussein in assigning contracts where 50% came back to him. The family name is allegedly feared still in Iraq.
02 The twin married Washington insider Grayson Wolfe, founding partner of Akkadian Private Ventures LLC and affiliate companies.
03 They work in all the CENTCOM hotspots and many of their contracts can be traced to Petraeus / Allen command periods.
04 Grayson himself was Iraqi Reconstruction and Special Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer of the Export-Import Bank of the USA, appointed by President Bush. He also served in 2004 as Manager of the Private Sector Development Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.
Note to readers: this blaster contains two clearly marked inserts that were not in my Time essay. Also, in introducing Seymour Melman's important work below, I should have mentioned that it was Melman's considered belief in the possibility of putting together a political coalition to facilitate the conversion of the defense industry to civilian production. Conversion is a exceedingly complex and highly controversial subject; and to date, conversion has not been accomplished in any meaningful way, but that does not mean conversion is impossible. Here, that possibility or impossibility is not at issue in this essay; my focus is on the very short term: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce politicians who have been captured by the defense industry to react to the looming budget sequester by flinging the middle class off the fiscal cliff.
This recent essay – America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps – describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class.
My essay describing the decline of manufacturing employment will give you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s Siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors do not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of this excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.
The late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The birth date for the permanent war economy was 30 September 1950.
On that day, President Harry Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became a blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War. Central to this strategy was the establishment of a large, permanently-mobilized defense manufacturing sector.
They justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the World War II production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism, or in their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”
The post-WWII economic boom in the U.S. (with our competitive performance aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII damage to the world’s other major industrial economies) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68. Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating damage caused by the diversion was apparent to some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said, pointedly, was new in our national experience.
The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.)
Phi Beta Iota: Sorcha Fall is a discredited source still read in Europe that has a gift for connecting dots in strange ways that often make real sense. We do not believe that a coup was planned or that there was a serious plan to assassinate Romney and slip Petraeus in at the last minute. We do believe that across the senior ranks, both uniformed and civilian, there are such strong senses of entitlement, hubris, and immunity from accountability, such that the legitimacy and authority of the President and his designated senior civilian defense leader, have been called into question publicly and in a manner clearly prejudicial to good order and discipline. The US lacks a strong counterintelligence capability, but the one thing that could explain both the many officers being relieved, retired, or otherwise placed out of service, and the FBI's rather wide-ranging inspection of the emails of many flag officers, would be a legitimate concern on the part of the President that his military commanders could not be trusted. We also have the earlier case of US Navy Admirals, first Admiral Cosgriff and then Admiral Charles Gaouette, the first reported to be planning a false flag attack on Iran, the second relieved of command before he got past Guam enroute to Straits of Hormuz. Something is going on. It is not about bimbos but it will in passing flush the flags with personal indiscretions, as well as those who may be considered out of control or disloyal to a degree that mandates their relief or retirement.
Make no mistake — the PSC industry in Afghanistan is enormously powerful, having grown from nothing to immense in a decade of war that the invaders wanted to wage with as few uniformed troops as possible. As in Iraq, they are linked to a privatized model of military and development contracting in a highly insecure post-invasion environment.
While it’s only one among many factors bedeviling Afghanistan, its substantial private-security contracting industry warrants attention. It’s made up of tens of thousands of Afghan employees, mostly armed guards.
Bear in mind that 2014 is the deadline for Afghanistan assuming responsibility for its own security. This is a date the whole world has an interest in because either Afghanistan will be a more or less stable country — or it will lapse back into the chaotic and destabilized state it was after the Soviets left in 1989.
I supported the all-volunteer force but I now recognize the wisdom of General Matthew Ridgeway–he warned against relying on all volunteer force.. In combination with a battlefield full of unaccountable contractors — and a military no longer able to go to war without contractors — the failures of our generals are part of a larger picture. Fiasco was the better book, Generalsdoes not cut to the core, the terrible price paid by our youth, with 18 suicides a day among veterans returned home being a strong signal that we have been terribly irresponsible in our training, equipping, and organizing of the US military.
Requiem for the All-Volunteer Force
GI Joe is broken, and is about to be thrown away. Built to be a Transformer; we’ve made him now: an employee.
The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) was America’s gift to itself. It was conceived in the belief that the values of American culture would create the sacrificial willingness on the part of enough of its young to satisfy the requirements of the American People for their defense. Our young people’s willingness to step forward to personal jeopardy consummated their gift to us: their actual sacrifice in nine years of horrific conflict and foreign occupation on our behalf consummated the American Peoples’ obligation to their restoration to full and productive citizenship.
Experience and reason dictate the conclusion that Americans have failed and will continue to fail their restorative obligation to our newest veterans. This is a failure of momentous consequence for the Country. It is the result of the American People’s acquiescence to the moral failures of a generation of its political and military leadership.
In the nearly 40 years of its existence the All-Volunteer Force has been transformed from inchoate policy, to the most robust and successful defense structure the world has known, to a negative influence on the interests of the American people as a wasteland for its young. Those who ostensibly knew American Defense interests best and had the most power to affect its course set in place the preconditions for this debacle during the Administration of George H.W. Bush. Richard Cheney and Colin Powell were is architects, but many have been complicit
How did this happen?
The successful promise and execution of the AVF was built on the values of the generation of which Ronald Reagan was representative. Those values were founded on the unassailable fact that our military is based on our people, and that our people cannot succeed unless supported with cohesive structure, honorable function and ethical integrity. From those values flowed the belief and policy that the AVF was to be an institution designed not only for the betterment of our volunteers in and for the military, but also for the betterment our society through him or her. Those values and policies were systematically abandoned or corrupted by our political-military leadership since the end of the Cold War. A broken AVF and a broken generation of our most valuable young citizens is the result.
Structure is about how something is put together: its size, its hierarchy, and the interrelationship of its parts. The Reagan generation understood and valued institutional integrity in public and private life, in peace and war. Our Military structures are now in shambles.
Logistics, the most justly celebrated sustainment structure of the American military, is now a contract function for companies flipped on Wall Street along side Waste Management and Burger King. As a result, we now have a military that cannot feed itself in the field or in garrison. It is an Army that cannot maintain or move its equipment; that has marginal capacity to protect itself, or to gather tactical intelligence. This is the sustainment structure that failed our volunteers for the past nine years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Function is about the goals of an institution and whether its mission is understood, accepted, and supported. The Reagan generation understood the scourge of war, the value in its deterrence, and the requirements for the successful societal reintegration of those who sacrificed in fighting if necessary. The post cold war generation of leaders turned our historical commitment to deterrence, or necessary national commitment to rapid victory on its head. We are now a nation willing to commit the honor and bodies of our volunteers to undeclared perpetual imperial wars of occupation; in the Orwellian language of our military industrial intelligencia, to “Sustainable Pre-eminence.”
Ethics concern the manner, in which an institution conducts itself, how it is used, and what image it has of itself. The Reagan generation understood the value and primacy of rule of law, of professionalism and of human life. To that generation, meaning was derived from the pledges of the Atlantic Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the fundamental quest for fairness embodied in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the openness which permitted the heroism of Mauldins, Pyles, and Murrows. Our generation of political military leadership sent our volunteers to Iraq in an undeclared war, unready in training and rationale for occupation, and, for eight years, turned the nation’s back on their ultimate sacrifice.
Americans and their political military leadership will turn their backs on our veterans because they turned their backs on them as volunteers. The broken structures, functions and ethics at the heart of the All-Voluntary Force have obliterated the connection between the soldier and the citizens he sacrificed to represent. Ours is now a Contract Force and our ‘volunteers’ contract-employees. Our volunteers, as “veterans,” continue to die: of broken hearts.
Based on notes from a talk at Ingleside at Rock Creek, June 25, 2012 entitled: “The Defeat of Reagan’s Army.”
Phi Beta Iota: The all-volunteer force disconnected society from the military and allowed unethical and even unprofessional generals and admirals, in collusion with corrupt legislators, corrupt corporate chieftains, and ideologically driven presidents and vice presidents, to sacrifice our blood treasure and spirit precisely because of this disconnect. The all-volunteer force assumed that Washington has intelligence and integrity. Not so. Indeed, this resurfaces the entire concept of ending the election of politicians, and instead adopting the lot system — Members should be like jurors, selected at random and given strict term limits.
