“The technology of the current satellite architecture is pretty much at its limit, and the commercial satellites are producing just about the same thing at a much lower cost,” said retired Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The government’s satellites are better, but the question is, What do you need? Most studies show that about 90 percent of what the military needs can be solved with commercial.”
The military also favors commercial satellites because imagery from the intelligence community cannot be easily shared with allies. “The beauty of commercial imagery is that it is unclassified,” said Walter Scott, chief technical officer of DigitalGlobe, a satellite company based in Longmont, Colo.
Phi Beta Iota: Kill MASINT, shut down the NRO, cut NSA in half, cut cyber-security by four-fifths, fund the multinational clandestine human intelligence field stations, fund the Open Source Agency (with responsibility for open source software, open spectrum, and in passing cyber-security) and move on. This is not rocket science. All it takes is integrity.
One of the most disruptive men in the sprawling U.S. spy community, someone who turned the military’s elite killers into top spies, will likely soon be in charge of all military intelligence.
The Pentagon on Tuesday nominated Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to be the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S.’ central military-intel hive. That might not go over so well with many responsible for battlefield intelligence. The first time most people outside of the shadows heard of Flynn, he was loudly complaining that military intelligence in Afghanistan sucked.
All this disruption ended up professionally beneficial — a likely consequence of how highly the Defense Department esteems JSOC’s intelligence prowess. McChrystal’s successor in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, now the CIA director, kept Flynn on his team even as the rest of the McChrystal staff flamed out after a Rolling Stone expose. Flynn’s next job, which he retains, was to be a top deputy to the Director of National Intelligence, nominally the head of the 16-agency spy community.
The Defense Intelligence Agency is a powerful if obscure organization responsible for providing intelligence to military commands, the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its secret weapon: It’s chiefly responsible for all of the Defense Department’s human informants. Yet it can seem overly bureaucratic and in eclipse compared to the military tactical-intelligence shops it helps man.
“Flynn’s nomination is interesting because he does not seem like someone who would choose to be a placeholder at an agency in decline,” says spywatcher Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. “The appointment may signal a revival of DIA, or at least some upheaval.”
Flynn is the latest to ascend, pending Senate approval. And he’s probably not done breaking the spy community’s furniture.
Phi Beta Iota: From the US IC point of view, nothing changes as long as the money is constant. The point of the US IC is to waste $80 billion a year on corporate vaporware, not to actually provide intelligence. Jim Clapper, the single best qualified DNI in history, failed to change the IC because he did not focus on outputs–he let inputs and collection continue to drive the train, did nothing about processing, nothing significant about HUMINT, nothing at all about analysis which is worse off than it ever was, and he failed to actually create intelligence for Whole of Government or to implement initiatives in the open source intelligence and the multinational, multiagency, multidimentional, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making arena. He has been–like Gates was at DoD–a place holder, a token leader of one of the US budget's sucking chest wounds. Flynn does not know what he does not know — he is simply not armed with what he needs to know to make the big changes that need to be made if intelligence with integrity is to be restored not just within DoD, but across Whole of Government. With his present knowledge base, surrounded by the ever-present sychophants, he will make changes on the margin. He will NOT change the craft of intelligence, especially if he continues to let contractors drive the train and rob the government of its key personnel. He is inheriting a corrupt, pathologically-fragmented mess completely lacking in integrity.
A US general who once blasted the work of military spies in Afghanistan as “only marginally relevant” has been nominated to take over the Pentagon's intelligence agency, officials said.
The decision to name Lieutenant General Michael Flynn suggests a possible shake-up of the sprawling Defense Intelligence Agency as the general has earned a reputation for pushing for dramatic change in his work with special forces.
Flynn was a scathing public critic of military intelligence in Afghanistan, where he served as a top intelligence officer in 2010, saying it failed to provide decision makers with a clear picture of conditions on the ground.
He chose to publish his critique through a Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security, instead of sticking to customary channels within the Pentagon bureaucracy.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” his report said.
“Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade,” it said.
Flynn is credited with playing an influential role during his tenure at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secretive headquarters that oversees elite commandos like the team that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
At JSOC, Flynn reportedly persuaded special forces to place a higher priority on scooping up intelligence while carrying out targeted attacks on militants.
His nomination reflects the ascendancy of special forces in policy making both within and outside the American military, a trend reinforced by the successful operation against Bin Laden.
Flynn, whose nomination must be approved by the Senate, currently serves as the assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Phi Beta Iota: General Flynn has many challenges facing him at DIA: too many civilians with zero combat experience, redirection of MASINT dollars to HUMINT, while also integrating the fifteen slices of HUMINT into one coherent network using best in class commercial technologies; and resurrecting the now dead concepts of intelligence support to policy and acquisition (that is to say, intelligence with integrity that keeps policy honest and acquisition relevant). We pray for his success.
Complete integrity lost. If the soldier committed these acts, trying to cover them up and using the excuse, “the photographs could incite violence” is only self serving. Until the brass admits that they operate under two or more standards…those of the troops and then of the officer, the brass, the government, they will continue to hide from the American public the truth…and they will be aided and abetted by the dysfunctional two party system that has taken over this country to the detriment of the people….
The grisly photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents during a 2010 deployment in Afghanistan were the source of a dispute between The Los Angeles Times and the Pentagon lasting weeks.
Two of the 18 photographs given to the paper were published Wednesday by The Times over fierce objections by military officials who said that the photographs could incite violence. The officials had asked The Times not to publish any of the photographs, a fact that the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, reiterated on Wednesday as the images spread across the Internet.
Read full article. Use first link above to see the two photos.
Phi Beta Iota: Citing earlier LA Times report: “An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.” This is exactly right. We are glad someone in the US military still has intelligence and integrity. A force is the embodiment of its commander. The US military is “out of control” and has morally disengaged. They have lost their soul. If we had the power, not only would Panetta be gone and Gates' ridiculous Presidential Medal of Freedom rescinded (as ridiculous as the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama for his first ten days in office), but the flag officers would be retired en masse, all one grade lower than their present rank. They are a uniform disgrace to the nation for their lack of integrity in matters large and small.
AFGHANISTAN COMMENT: The photos published by the Los Angeles Times have been covered extensively by the US press, except for a few minor issues not mentioned by any news services.
First of all, an Islamic suicide bomber is not someone who has abused his body, as some pundits opined today. On the contrary, he is a martyr, in fundamentalist theology. The American soldiers were not just defacing a dead human being; they were insulting an Islamic warrior.
But that is not a big deal for Muslims. They do the same and understand fighting and death. Fighters die. Winners gloat.
Even suicide bombers ought to be respected as warriors, but that means little, even to Afghans. Above all, they understand that death is an occupational hazard for a warrior. Plus they believe he gets his reward in heaven.
No American leader should apologize. An apology betrays a complete ignorance of the culture because the Afghans understand war: national and regional; tribal and clan; and village and family. Afghans consider an apology by a stronger power to be a sign of weakness.
For example, the bombers were most likely kids taken from a madrasah in Pakistan, given rudimentary training, doped up and sent to die by their religious teachers and elders. In which case, no Afghans will lament the deaths. The US does not even know the nationality of the bombers. To whom should the US apologize?
The cultural and religious differences are valid. Fundamentalist Islamic values that encourage children to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers do not represent the mainstream of Muslim theology. Suicide bombings are denounced regularly in every meeting of Pakistani and Afghan Islamic scholars. However, they have never denounced the killing of Americans, Jews and Christians. A US apologiy to people whom even Muslims consider extremists serves no point.
It might be some kind of epiphany for some news reporters that American soldiers are soldiers, who are not so different from Roman legionnaires. But in most of the world, including in the US outside of San Francisco or Los Angeles, everybody in every culture understands that gloating is part of winning after a battle, along with mourning the dead. So in a war, a US apology for the death of an enemy fighter by his own hand also serves no point.
The Taliban have shown no special reverence for their suicide bombers in the past 11 years, unless they kill lots of Americans or unless an incident could be turned to some propaganda advantage.
US soldiers in Afghanistan are not placed in increased risk because of this incident. Most Afghans most likely will consider taking pictures of the lower half of a dissected body bewildering, if not sick. Any protests will be perfunctory. Protests over the dead never last more than a day or two, if they occur at all.
Defacing the Koran is a vastly more incendiary offense. These protests last for weeks.
After 11 years of US troops in a country and culture, Readers and citizens have a right to expect a deeper official understanding and better handling of these incidents. It did not happen in Vietnam and it is no better in Afghanistan.
Thanks to Brilliant and extremely well-informed Readers for Feedback about Afghan attitudes towards death and towards defacing the Koran.
The difficulty that the military has in allocating the efficient use of the electromagnetic spectrum for military operations is aggravated by the fact that some of those uses — involving intelligence platforms and sensors — are secret even from military planners themselves, a new Pentagon doctrinal publication notes.
“Coordination with intelligence units and agencies can be challenging for many reasons, to include classification issues, disparate data formats, and separate technical control or reporting channels,” the publication states.
“In many cases, the JSME [joint spectrum management element] does not have adequate visibility or knowledge of intelligence sensors, platforms, or systems in order to accomplish accurate deconfliction.”
“In order to capture all aspects of intelligence spectrum use, the JSME must understand that intelligence platforms such as UAS/unmanned ground system will have spectrum requirements for both a payload (e.g., imagery or data) and control frequencies to operate the platform.”
“Intelligence is a heavy user of sensors that employ both active and passive techniques. Active sensors are usually accounted for, but the passive sensors will also require spectrum consideration so they perform properly.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US has never been serious about spectrum–one of the dirty little secrets of Afghanistan is how often drones, artillery, and aviation as well as C4I messed each other up. Adding remote disengaged drone video games made it much worse (news flash for DoD “leaders”: pilots are cheaper than bandwidth and much, much better at situational awareness). The Soviet standards for emissions control have always been 10 to 100 times more serious than US standards. However, the bottom line is that Open Spectrum is here to stay, and the US military is the last to know or accept this.
I urge that you reject SECDEF's assertions; also urge that you contact your Congressional delegations and ask them to also reject what SECDEF is saying.
At a Pentagon press briefing on Monday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said congressional tinkering with the $613 billion 2013 Defense Department budget could have unintended consequences and result in a hollow force. Flanked by Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Panetta also defended the long-term Defense strategy unveiled in January, saying it will help the Pentagon to slash its budget by $487 billion over the next 10 years.
In March, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, told a National Journalforum that senior military commanders were dishonest in presenting Congress with a budget request he doesn't believe they fully support. After Dempsey charged Ryan with calling senior military leaders liars, Ryan backed off and said, “I really misspoke.”
