This is a follow up to that 13 February Spinney piece on predicting the future, DARPA as Poster Child for Out of Control Budget. It belongs to the category of “we don't make this stuff up.” Speaking of this category, I think this latest incident in Pakistan (CIA contractor shoots two Pakistanis in broad daylight, CIA SUV going to his aid runs down a Pakistani motorcyclist) ought to be a signal to disestablish CIA.
Phi Beta Iota: FATAL FARCE just keeps on growing.
Algorithm: in computer terms, a finite set of coded instructions directing a computer to solve a specific problem or execute a specific process.
The term ‘algorithm’ is a prosaic word that has taken on an almost occult meaning to hosts of middle and senior managers in the intelligence and military sectors of the U.S. National Security Establishment.
It appears that anyone claiming to have developed an ‘algorithm’ to solve any of the many issues facing those sectors will find a receptive audience and usually a wad of cash to pursue development of that program.
Interesting, and if the point about Garmin is true, what is the relationship between them and the Air Force? The Air Force has gotten into a lot of areas that include tracking to the individual level (RFI) under the guise of tracking logistics….
Following a navigation system's instructions without driving into a ravine is hard enough as it is — can you even imagine how hard it'd be if you kept losing GPS reception every time you drove within range of an LTE tower? There have been a few anecdotal concerns raised over the last several weeks that LightSquared's proposed LTE network — which would repurpose L-band spectrum formerly used for satellite — is too close to the spectrum used by the Global Positioning System, leading to unintentional jamming when the towers overpower the much weaker GPS signals. Things have gotten a little more interesting, though, now that the US Air Force Space Command has officially piped in. General William Shelton has gone on record saying that “a leading GPS receiver manufacturer just … has concluded that within 3 to 5 miles on the ground and within about 12 miles in the air GPS is jammed by those towers,” calling the situation “unbelievable” and saying he's “hopeful the FCC does the right thing.”
Phi Beta Iota: Electromagnetic conflicts have been a known issue since the 1980's. The Soviets had emission control standards ten times tougher than the US, which had (and continues to have) virtually no standards at all. This is one reason why US forces in Afghanistan are so severely hampered, with drones, aircraft, radars, and various other “systems” all interfering with one another. Elsewhere, notably in England, modern cars come to a complete stop within a couple of kilometers of certain Royal Air Force emitting stations. All of this can be attributed to at least four root problems:
1. An acquisition archipelago (nothing sytematic about it) so stupid and out of control as to defy belief. No standards, no brains, no integrity.
2. Service-centric and mission-centric “preferred contractor” and “proprietary single point solutions” standard operating processes that are deliberately not orchestrated with other services, civilian elements of the government, or other nations.
3. A lack of integrity among senior officers who should know better.
4. A lack of integrity in Congress, where the focus is on collecting the 5% kick-back from delivered programs, not on actually serving the public interest by insuring affordability, interoperability, sustainability, and utility.
Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December. That unusual decision was in deference to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan, who did not want any official estimate of the insurgency's strength that would contradict his claims of success by Special Operations Forces in reducing the capabilities of the Taliban in 2010.
The top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, likes to describe the tactical gains his troops are making against insurgents. But a stream of independent data and analysis suggests a wide gap between those battlefield gains and the strategic progress needed to convince a skeptical President Obama, Congress and the public to stay with the war effort for at least three more years.
. . . . . . .
But an estimated 7,000 insurgents who had given up and come over to the government later went back to fighting because of poorly managed and underfinanced programs to resettle and reintegrate them, according to a detailed study by the Afghan Analysts Network, an independent nonprofit research organization.
. . . . . . .
On a broader canvas, the United States continues to suffer a negative strategic impact, in part because of its involvement in Afghanistan, according to James Clapper, director of national intelligence.
He testified in Congress on Thursday that al-Qaeda continues to be able to recruit willing new fighters by aggressively exploiting such explosive issues as “the presence of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and U.S. support for Israel” all of which “fuel their narrative of a hostile West determined to undermine Islam.”
From the inventors of McNamara's electronic line (which failed spectacularly in Vietnam) comes the Electronic Coup/Revolution Predictor (EC/RP)! This is explained below in the attached Wired report.
The EC/RP is merely the latest effort in DARPA's continuing campaign to overthrow Boyd's Law* (i.e., Machines don't fight war wars, people do, and they use their minds) by taking the mind out of the military's Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loop, and hardwiring what little is left of it with a automated predict-decide-act computer algorithm — the goal, apparently, being to make stupid decisions faster.
This particular DARPA boondoggle is bizarre even by DARPA's tolerant standards for lunacy. That is because the EC/RP is aimed predicting discontinuities in order to remove uncertainty from the future.
In a 13 February 2011 op-ed column [also attached below], George Will, a self-proclaimed conservative, who by definition must favor adherence to the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the Constitution, not to mention the rule of law (for example, the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990), announced that he has discovered the Pentagon's bookkeeping shambles! He ends his op-ed by saying … “To govern is to choose, always on the basis of imperfect information. If, however, the strong language of [Congressman Randy] Forbes and [Senator Tom] Coburn is apposite, Congress cannot make adequately informed choices about the uniquely important matters that come to McKeon's committee. This fact will fuel the fires of controversy that will rage within the ranks of Republicans as they come to terms with the fact that current defense spending cannot be defended until it is understood.”
Politico is a inside the beltway newsletter that revels in political gossip — the kind of new media phenomena that reflects the self-inflating, self-referencing character of behavior in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac. This rag is funded by right leaning contributors. That said, Politico is a barometer of sorts — in this case of bad ju ju (see report below).
Note, for example — its description of how pressure is building to whack the Pentagon’s budget. It will be interesting to see how Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) will wiggle out of the squeeze described in last few graphs. For what it is worth, my guess is that the MICC will move to protect its hi-tech cold-war rice bowls at the expense of its people and readiness. But we are in the middle of at least two wars — which of course will generate effective counter-pressures, because we “must to protect the troops!” — and so in the end very little will happen beyond a few cometic swipes. This one of the benefits of perpetual small wars or the perpetual threat of small wars (explained more fully in my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War) A more extensive discourse on the MICC's game will be found in soon to be released anthology, The Pentagon Labyrinth, which will be freely available in hard copy as well as electronic form).
So, get ready for a run on Social Security (and Medicare?), which conveniently is not even mentioned in the Politico “report.” Obama made SS more vulnerable with his recent “temporary” 2% cut in withholding tax. My guess is that little will happen to SS in near term, but the “phony solvency issue” was strengthened by the cut, and we should expect it to be reinforced endlessly in the looming political debate. Liberal economists who recently welcomed Obama's tax cut by arguing that it will clarify the real “pay as you go” nature of economic debate over SS may be in for a nasty surprise.
