Military – Page 174 – Public Intelligence Blog

This will only get worse…..

Classified Cable From Benghazi Warned That Consulate Couldn’t Withstand a ‘Coordinated Attack’ (3 UPDATES!!)

Chron, Thursday, November 1, 2012

Let me get this straight. A month before the attack in Libya, an Aug. 16th secret cable was sent to Sec Hillary Clinton and others in the State Department from the senior security officer that said the Benghazi consulate could not be protected, and the mainstream media is completely ignoring it? Imagine for a moment if Bush was President. It would be on a 24/7 news loop on all networks, including the news that Pres. Obama misled Americans on purpose on why the attack happened at Benghazi by blaming it on a video over and over. This cable also tells us that the administration lied about not having any warning of this attack. Our Ambassador and four other Americans are DEAD, and our media (other than Fox News) doesn’t see this as newsworthy. The mainstream media doesn’t want anything to hurt Obama re-election campaign, and that is why true journalism is dead.

Yes, Fox New’s opinion shows are conservative, but no matter what part of the political spectrum you fall into, if you want ALL the news, you should be watching Fox News.

The U.S. Mission in Benghazi convened an “emergency meeting” less than a month before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, because Al Qaeda had training camps in Benghazi and the consulate could not defend against a “coordinated attack,” according to a classified cable reviewed by Fox News.

Continue reading “Penguin: (Un)Classified Cable – Three Updates All Sad”

2012/11/032012/11/03

DefDog: Benghazi Update — In Three Parts

Government, Ineptitude, Military

Mysteries of Benghazi

Scott Johnson in Benghazigate

PowerLine, Posted on November 3, 2012

Even for one who follows the news obsessively, it has been extremely difficult to keep up with the developments in the Benghazigate story this week. In the lead editorial of the new issue of the Weekly Standard that is out this morning, our friend Steve Hayes usefully summarizes the Benghazi story with an emphasis on the open questions:

The Benghazi debacle is a drama in three parts: the lack of security before the attacks, the flaccid response during the attacks, and the misleading narrative after the attacks. There are unanswered questions about each part. Here are some of the most important.

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi Update — In Three Parts”

2012/11/032012/11/03

DefDog: Benghazi Round-Up Plus Meta-RECAP

Government, Ineptitude, Military

By Paul Wolfowitz no less. Worth a full read, with two comments from readers also included.

Distrust but verify

Paul Wolfowitz | October 31, 2012, 9:19 am

It is hard to understand why Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in discussing the US response to the attacks on two US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, offered this novel principle as a guide for US action – or inaction – during that crisis: “A basic principle is you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.”

Of course, no such “basic principle” governs the conduct of US military personnel in Afghanistan and elsewhere, who regularly go “into harm’s way” without “knowing what’s going on,” particularly when they know that American lives are in danger.

Panetta’s comment made it inevitable that people would question – as I did myself – President Obama’s claim that “The minute I found out what was happening . . . I gave the directive to make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to do. I guarantee you everybody in the CIA and military knew the number-one priority was making sure our people are safe.” If that was true, did Panetta’s comment mean that the military was disregarding a clear instruction from the president?

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi Round-Up Plus Meta-RECAP”

2012/11/02

NIGHTWATCH: Syria & Libya Update – US Poor Judgment Faulty Intelligence on Multiple Levels

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

ME NA Enhanced — Click on Image to Enlarge

Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.

Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.

Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.

The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.

Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.

Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.

If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2012/11/012012/11/04

Winslow Wheeler: Romney’s Unrealistic Defense Budget with Comment by Robert Steele

Ethics, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Romney's defense budget is unrealistic

By Winslow T. Wheeler, director, Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight – 11/01/12 10:45 AM ET

Mitt Romney's proposal to boost defense spending until it reaches “a floor of four percent of GDP [gross domestic product],” as he proclaims at his official website, is an insult to history.

This graph [below] shows how unprecedented it is. It tracks spending for the Department of Defense (DOD) from 1948 to 2022, expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars normalized to 2012. The data up to 2012 are actual spending. The data for the years after 2012 show Romney's plan (in red), President Obama's (in blue), and the spending to be imposed by sequestration (in green) – the result of the Budget Control Act's automatic reductions now scheduled for January 2, 2013.

winslow graph — Click on Image to Enlarge

The Romney Plan shown assumes a gradual build up to his four percent goal, as calculated by Travis Sharp at the Center for a New American Security. Compared to other calculations of Romney’s declared intent, it is one of the more modest. The data for the Obama plan are from his 2013 budget, and the data for sequestration is from the Congressional Budget Office. In each, money has been included to accommodate a rapid drawdown from Afghanistan: all three data lines assume the Obama budget for overseas contingencies in 2013, $88.5 billion; an arbitrary assumption of $50 billion for 2014, $25 billion for 2015, and nothing after that. In other words, the spending levels shown are about as low as one might conceive.

Romney’s plan would boost the Pentagon’s budget more or less $300 billion above the previous post-World War Two highs, namely the Korea and Vietnam wars and the Reagan Cold War peak, and it would more than double the average amount of DOD spending during the Cold War: $440 billion compared to $900 billion.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Romney's Unrealistic Defense Budget with Comment by Robert Steele”

2012/10/292012/10/29

Marcus Aurelius: General Failure — Neil Sheehan Reviews Thomas Rick’s New Book Plus Chapter Extract

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

An adapted excerpt from this book, cued to me by a friend, can be found as indicated below, followed by Neil Sheehan's review of the book.

General Failure

Looking back on the troubled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many observers are content to lay blame on the Bush administration. But inept leadership by American generals was also responsible for the failure of those wars. A culture of mediocrity has taken hold within the Army’s leadership rank—if it is not uprooted, the country’s next war is unlikely to unfold any better than the last two.

EXTRACT:

Relief of generals has become so rare that a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of the war.

. . . . . . .

To a shocking degree, the Army’s leadership ranks have become populated by mediocre officers, placed in positions where they are likely to fail. Success goes unrewarded, and everything but the most extreme failure goes unpunished, creating a perverse incentive system that drives leaders toward a risk-averse middle where they are more likely to find stalemate than victory.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: General Failure — Neil Sheehan Reviews Thomas Rick's New Book Plus Chapter Extract”

2012/10/292012/10/29

DefDog: Benghazi: No Intelligence, No Integrity, No Answers PLUS Planted Story in Washington Times?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

Integrity lost….again.

TRR: Is a General losing his job over Benghazi?

Washington Times, 28 October 2012

Is an American General losing his job for trying to save the Americans besieged in Benghazi? This is the latest potential wrinkle in the growing scandal surrounding the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack that left four men dead and President Obama scrambling for a coherent explanation.

On October 18, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared unexpectedly at an otherwise unrelated briefing on “Efforts to Enhance the Financial Health of the Force.” News organizations and CSPAN were told beforehand there was no news value to the event and gave it scant coverage. In his brief remarks Mr. Panetta said, “Today I am very pleased to announce that President Obama will nominate General David Rodriguez to succeed General Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command.” This came as a surprise to many, since General Ham had only been in the position for a year and a half. The General is a very well regarded officer who made AFRICOM into a true Combatant Command after the ineffective leadership of his predecessor, General William E. “Kip” Ward. Later, word circulated informally that General Ham was scheduled to rotate out in March 2013 anyway, but according to Joint doctrine, “the tour length for combatant commanders and Defense agency directors is three years.” Some assumed that he was leaving for unspecified personal reasons.

Read full article.

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi: No Intelligence, No Integrity, No Answers PLUS Planted Story in Washington Times?”