Military – Page 217 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/12/082011/12/11

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

05 Iran, Corruption, DoD, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies

An outstanding piece of bargaining power for Iran with both Russia and China….don't expect UN sanctions anytime soon…..

Updated 11 Dec 2011 to add more stories with photos and comment.

Iran won't return U.S. drone it claims to have

Iran Shows Video It Says Is of U.S. Drone

Zakaria and Baer: Downed U.S. drone an intel catastrophe

Phi Beta Iota: Variants of this stuff are for sale at Brookstone and Best Buy. The US has consistently refused to be serious about emission control, downlink security, and real-time processing. This is a “disaster” only to the degree that it reveals–once again–how immature the US “intelligence” archipelago of fiefdoms actually is.

Iran shows film of captured US drone

BBC, 8 December 2011

Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.

Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.

However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.

Iran's Press TV said that the Iranian army's “electronic warfare unit” brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar, about 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.

Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.

Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Our first impression has been that Iran has downed the UAV with an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) beam. This is much cooler. As with the Taliban in Afghanistan able to hijack the downlinks, the Iranians simply hijacked the entire aircraft. From where we sit, the Chinese (who ride electric power circuits into “isolated” computers) and the Iranians [Persians, more PhDs per capita than most] are laughing at us, while the Russians simply ignore us. Newsflash for the Pentagon: our technology is not that great. Classifying the idiot vulnerabilities does not work–something we have been pointing out for twenty years.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Journal: Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

Journal: Running Interference On Interference

Journal: U.S. Air Force–Remote from War & Reality

2011/12/082011/12/08

Theophilis Goodyear: Disposable Hero Body Parts — When Blind Collectives Run Amok

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Military

Remains of 274 US troops dumped in landfill: report

Agence France Press, 8 December 2011

The US Air Force dumped the cremated, partial remains of at least 274 troops in a landfill before halting the secretive practice in 2008, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

Read full article.

Theophillis Goodyear Comments:

No matter who is specifically to blame here, this story is certainly a powerful metaphor for what's wrong with worldwide society. Our systems have taken on a life of their own. They've become massive machines that no one is steering. And we've become fodder for them. Some people have more power than others. But mostly these machines are blind collectives that are beyond the control of any single individual or group. According to the article, senior Pentagon officials never authorized this decision and were unaware of it. But anyone who's ever been in the military knows that the culture tends to force underlings to get creative when it comes to fulfilling objectives. Orders are not always doable but they must be done anyway. And the culture is a collective entity.

What's likely is that the person in charge of the US Air Force mortuary at Dover Air Force Base was facing a dilemma created by his superiors. And the bottom line must have been money. I'm guessing that budgetary pressures, time deadlines, and political correctness (not calling attention to piles of body parts) were the motivating forces here. These conflicting forces probably left the head of the mortuary with only one option: dump the remains as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The article goes on to say that “an additional group of 1,762 remains . . . were also disposed of in this manner.” Knee-jerk reaction tends to drive us to search for an individual to blame. The Tea Party will want to blame Obama. The Democrats will want to blame Bush policies. The military will want to blame the lowest man on the totem pole. And the officer who applied all the pressure to the man who actually made the decision, probably has an airtight defense; because he probably never told him exactly how to solve the problem, and he probably said that he didn't want to know, or need to know (all discussed verbally and in private, no doubt); because the military also trains people to cover their asses at all costs! It's a basic survival skill.

The real culprit here is likely to be the collective. And collectives tend to dilute the responsibility of individuals. That's what makes collectives so dangerous. We would become extinct as a species without them, but they have grown so massive and powerful that top-down management no longer works. The solution, of course, is open-source intelligence.

We are no longer driving these collectives. No one is. They are driving us! Even the most powerful leaders are disposable. But the collectives that they manage go on and on without them. And if they try to reform them, they will be quickly ejected and replaced. Our collectives have become blind machines. And only truly open collective intelligence, collective wisdom, and other open-source systems can save us from them.

But we must remember that although this incident can be used as a metaphor for the problem, the incident itself is not a metaphor but a reality. Our collectives have become giant meat grinders. That too is a metaphor. But the networks of cause and effect it describes are all too real. Who did the heroes who were unceremoniously dumped in a landfill serve? Ultimately they served a blind collective and were discarded by the same.

A blame game or a witch hunt can't save future heroes from a similar fate. If the Pentagon wants to do justice to these men and their families, they must blame their own military culture, which is what led to this disgraceful and undignified end. They must start openly challenging the blind aspects of the collective they serve. And citizens (in whose name the collective operates) must support them in the effort.

A good model might be truth and reconciliation, which waives individual culpability in order to get at the truth of the matter. And in this case I think the truth will liberate everyone. The collective can't be tried and sentenced and sent to prison. The collective can't be embarrassed or humiliated. The collective has no need to avoid responsibility or defend itself, because the collective is an abstract entity with no life other than what we give it.

Put the collective on trial.

2011/12/082011/12/08

Penguin: The Heart of Darkness is Empire

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Book Lists, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy

Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott – review

The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history

Richard Drayton

Guardian, 7 December 2011

Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government

“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.

Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.

Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.

. . . . . . .

What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.

Read full review.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Corporate & Transnational Crime

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

2011/12/07

DefDog: SASC Questions Sanity of Pentagon InfoOps

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations…………

A speed bump for Pentagon’s information ops

By Walter Pincus

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to assess the effectiveness of a series of news and information Web sites that have been initiated by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in recent years in a bid to counter extremist messaging. The so-called “influence Web sites” are maintained by various overseas commands and operated by defense contractors.

For fiscal 2012, SOCOM sought $22.6 million in the Overseas Contingency Operations account — primarily intended to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — for the initiative.

Congress, over the past few years, has been pressing the Pentagon to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars spent overseas under various headings such as “strategic communications” and “information operations.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: No one now serving in the US Government actually has a clue what Information Operations (IO) should be, because no one now serving in the US Government can combine intelligence and integrity to get to holistic analytics with deep “true cost” data. IO is all information in all languages all the time. Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence and all-source intelligence is 10% of IO. IO includes policy, acquisition, and operations feed-back loops that must be transparent, truthful, and replete with trust–that pretty much eliminates ALL inter-agency and intra-agency information. We've learned nothing since 1992.

See Also:

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

2011 from 1999: Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21 st Century (Full Text Online)

2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

2011/12/06

Marcus Aurelius: Experts: DoD Could Slash 150K Jobs

Budgets & Funding, DoD, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Experts: DoD could slash 150K jobs

Sean Reilly

Federal Times, 4 December 2011

A reduction in force. More base closings and consolidations. Big cuts to defense intelligence agencies.

All those options affecting the Defense Department's vast civilian workforce would be on the table if automatic across-the-board budget cuts go forward, experts predicted last week.

That workforce, the largest of any federal agency, totals about 790,000, according to the most recent DoD figures. During the next decade, its size could tumble 20 percent to about 630,000, the smallest since the Defense Department's creation in 1947, under a scenario outlined last month by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in a letter to Congress. The Army, Navy and Air Force employ almost 80 percent of the existing civilian workforce; DoD organizations and the National Guard account for the rest.

DefDog: War with Iran? Opening Pandora’s Box!

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Has the War with Iran Already Begun?

The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore

Michael Hirsh

National Journal, 4 December 2011

Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.

Read full article.

2011/12/04

Josh Kilbourn: War Against Iran Has Been Underway

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Is Iran Already Under Attack?

Jeffrey Goldberg

The Atlantic, Dec 2, 2011

Adam Chandler, the Goldblog deputy-editor-for-monitoring-Iran-obsessively-even-though-Goldblog-himself-also-monitors-Iran-obsessively, pointed out to me the other day that perhaps the West has already begun the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, that perhaps we ought to reframe this issue a bit. The attacks he mentioned are not the usual sub-rosa, eyebrow-raising tech and computer virus sort of attacks, but outright physical attacks. This is more a semantic issue, I suppose (and yes, I realize the Iranian regime is virulently anti-semantic), but operations against Iran are seeming to move away from the pure Mossad-in-the-70s-style attacks to straight-up military confrontations. I don't know if this is a sign of escalation or desperation or both, though it seems fair to say that less subtlety on the part of Israel, the U.S. and whoever else is doing this suggests that the previous tactics were deemed insufficient.

Following a (perhaps not-so-mysterious) explosion on a military base last month that took with it the life of Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam–one of the Iranian missile program's most distinguished OGs–comes news of a second explosion in Isfahan this past Monday, which according to sources “struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.”

Of course, accurate news out of Tehran is hard to come by, but if you want to take this a step further, one might consider Tuesday's (perhaps not-so-spontaneous) storming of the British embassy by Iranian “students” to be quite an effective smokescreen in keeping news of this second explosion from making serious waves. If you've had a lot of coffee, it's also worthy to note that on Monday evening, following the explosion in Iran, four missiles fired from southern Lebanon struck Israel–the first such incident in over two years.

I'm not entirely convinced, but it's not unreasonable to group these recent explosions with the Stuxnet virus of last summer that haywired an uranium enrichment facility in Natanz; last October's explosion at a Shahab missile factory; the killing of three Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years, last November's attempted assassination of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davan–a senior official in the nuclear program — and rumblings of a second supervirus deployed this month as proof that the West's war on Iran's nuclear program is getting less covert by the minute.