Military – Page 272 – Public Intelligence Blog

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

The Clear-Hold-Build (C-H-B) strategy was first enunciated enthusiastically during the Bush Administration as the new counterinsurgency strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Actually, this strategy was merely an unimaginative regurgitation of Marshall Lautey's “tache d'huile” (oil spot) strategy used to quell native uprisings during France colonial wars at the end of the 19th Century and the first decade of the 20th Century.

The recent escalation in Afghanistan may be taking the unimaginative C-H-B soundbyte to the extremities of its logical absurdity, if the attached report by Spencer Ackerman is correct: Apparently, our forces applied the C-H-B strategy literally to a small Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley of Taliban by using 25 tons of air delivered explosives to CLEAR it off the map (see photo). Ackerman goes to suggest HOLDING will be accomplished because we will spend one million dollars to (re) BUILD it. As part of our cultural sensitivity strategy to HOLD onto the Afghan's hearts and minds during the BUILD leg of the strategy, our troops are holding “construction shuras” with the villagers to compensate them for their loses.

Think of the C-H-B strategy as the Petraeus equivalent of destroying a village to save it — sound familiar?

Chuck Spinney

Archive of selected Blasters

25 Tons of Bombs Wipe Afghan Town off Map

by Spencer Ackerman, Wired, 19 January

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar's Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It's hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America's counterinsurgency strategy – which supposedly prizes the local people's loyalty above all else.

But it's the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.

Paula Broadwell, a West Point graduate and Petraeus biographer, described the destruction of Tarok Kolache in a guest post for Tom Ricks' Foreign Policy blog. Or, at least, she described its aftermath: Nothing remains of Tarok Kolache after Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.

Continue reading “Clear-Hold-Build–VN Deja Vu “Destroy to Save””

2011/01/172014/01/01

Richard Wright: MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain Part II

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Methods & Process, Military, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy

The USAF claim that the tragic killing of 23 innocent Afghan civilians last February by one of its Predator UAVs was due to “information overload” reflects an appalling lack of critical thinking on the part of senior Air Force officers. General Mike Hayden (USAF ret.) when director of the NSA used regularly entertain the U.S. congress with the same complaint again reflecting the same lack of critical thought.

The problem for both the USAF and the NSA is that both seem to be following collection and processing strategies that belong to the Cold War era before the information revolution.

The Soviet Union may have been the most incompetent super power in world history, but it was extremely good at information denial. When the NSA could actually find and collect a signal containing exploitable information emanating from the USSR, it was common practice to collect and process everything from that signal 24/7 because it was such a rare occurrence. Because of the Soviet practice of immediately shutting down any signal that there was even as hint had been comprised the material so obtained was compartmentalized and distribution was tightly controlled. All this was possible because the information collected from such a signal at best was miniscule by today’s standards. In the same manner before such neat things as down linking digital images, the number of images to be processed were absurdly small and scarcely time sensitive. So again ‘full take’ was the best, and indeed, the only option.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain Part II”

2011/01/172011/01/17

Event: 18 Jan, NYC Society for Ethical Culture – Iran Hostage Crisis 30th Anniversary Meets WikiLeaks – All-Star Panel

Ethics, Government, History, Military

Online promo flyer with graphics from Cognito

Who: Author Stephen Kinzer, Grand Theft Auto Director Navid Khonsari, Newscaster Amy Goodman, Emmy-nominated Mike de Seve, Columbia University Chair of Iran Studies Hamid Dabashi

Where: 2 West 64^th St. & Central Park West, NYC, (New York Society for Ethical Culture)

When: Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 7 p.m.

CONTACT: Natalia Mount, Natalia@mountrehbein.com (315) 440-5036

New York, NY, Jan. 12, 2011 – This January 20 marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Iran Hostage Crisis, when students and militants imprisoned 52 Americans in Tehran for 444 days. The event will occur two days before the anniversary, on Tuesday, Jan. 18th at the Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W. 64th St. at 7:30 pm.

To commemorate the 1981 event, New York Times veteran and best-selling author Stephen Kinzer (All the Shah's Men) joins Amy Goodman and Columbia's Dr. Hamid Dabashi (Chair, Iranian Studies) to re-examine this historic incident, and discuss its impact on current events.

Contributing: Media and tech pioneer Daniel Burwen, founder of Cognito Comics and publisher of Operation Ajax (an interactive iPad app about the crisis' roots); Emmy-nominated Ajax author Mike de Seve; and eBook innovator Harold Moss of FlickerLab. They'll present breakthrough ways history can be brought to new audiences in today's wired world.

Continue reading “Event: 18 Jan, NYC Society for Ethical Culture – Iran Hostage Crisis 30th Anniversary Meets WikiLeaks – All-Star Panel”

2011/01/17

HAARP: Electromagnetic Atmospheric War Games

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Technologies

Jesus. Now I understand a remark made twenty some years ago by an angry senior Mexican scientist who essentially accused the US of provoking a horrific hurricane that caused terrible damage in Mexico. He added: “And you [the US] know exactly what I mean.” You can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys, but this is like a tree full of monkeys masturbating. The quotes from Brzezinski below are confirmation enough of the US psychotic craving for high-tech global dictatorship, risking everything for total control. And we think Hitler was nuts?

U.S. global climate change weapon called HAARP

World news Friday, December 31st, 2010

The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and built a ground based “Star Wars” weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska. Scientific evidence reveals that it is now active.

The US has developed a new type of weapon called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP zaps the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an “ionospheric heater.” (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.) HAARP is a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything — living and dead.

Phi Beta Iota: This is not new. Conspiracy theorists have been all over this for decades, and the lack of transparency has enabled the Soviets, among others, to leverage this against the US within normal propaganda channels. What is new is the combination Brzezinski quotes and current context in which the “elite” are now known to have exploded the global economy, contrived food, water, and energy shortages, and generally sacrificed a prosperous world at peace in favor of obscene wealth for the few. Apart from this we know two things: first, that Acts of God are actually acts of man, but more associated with the catastrophic effects of paving over wetlands, producing toxic goods, and generally ignoring the Precautionary Principle; and second, that governments and corporations cannot be trusted to be transparent, tell the truth, or be worthy of the public trust. Transparency is the new app, Truth is the new wealth, the times they are a-changing. The article is worth a full read.

Structured Web Hits

See Also:

Reference: Infinite Wealth for All

Review: Water Wars–Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Environmental Degradation (Other than Emissions)

2011/01/17

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies

Interesting, but also fails to mention we do not train our analysts on the
basics, know your enemy……we are so focused on technology we forget
that the basics are still the best way to view the situation…..

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters
last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the
operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information
about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly

By THOM SHANKER and MATT RICHTEL

New York Times, Published: January 16, 2011

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.

See Also:

Gorgon Stare–USAF Goes Nuts (Again)

Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

2011/01/132011/01/13

TUNISIA: The First WikiLeaks Revolution?

Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Policies, Reform, Threats

Posted By Elizabeth Dickinson Thursday, January 13, 2011 – 6:17 PM

Foreign Policy

EXTRACT: As in the recent so-called “Twitter Revolutions” in Moldova and Iran, there was clearly lots wrong with Tunisia before Julian Assange ever got hold of the diplomatic cables. Rather, WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistle-blower site.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a good time to bring up the Davies J-Curve again. Wikileaks is a precipitant of revolution; the preconditions exist in most places outside the Nordic region and a few other special countries. The preconditions assuredly exist in the USA but in our view, the precipitant is most likely to be some really outrageous US Government action, such as federalizing all state and local police forces and then start trying to confiscate personal weapons. However, if the two party system continues to think that changing its “tone” matters, while it does nothing about the substance of poverty, economy, education, health and so on, then we will see a mix of widespread poverty and apathy with pockets of extreme violence and random attacks on elected officials and perhaps uniformed law enforcement professionals. America is, in our view, very volatile right now. 2011-2012 are not going to be subject to the usual pre-election “damping down.” The situation is now “out of control.” Nothing less than a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of the larger public will do, if we are to avoid a cascade of socio-economic and ideo-cultural uprisings and individual “random” acts of violence in the next two years.

2011/01/13

Exclusive: America has ‘reached the point of no return,’ Reagan budget director warns

10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

The Obama administration's $78 billion cut to US defense spending is a mere “pin-prick” to a behemoth military-industrial complex that must drastically shrink for the good of the republic, a former Reagan administration budget director recently told Raw Story.

. . . . . . .

The ‘Ponzi scheme' of ‘artificial prosperity'

Stockman, who described himself as a libertarian during a recent interview with Reason.tv, told Raw Story that the economy got into this mess because of the public and private sectors' addiction to “guns and butter Keynesianism,” an economic policy that amounts to a Ponzi scheme that has ballooned since 1990.

“If we see what's going on carefully, we've reached the final unmasking of the Keynesian illusion, that Keynesianism is really nothing but borrowing, stealing from the future to induce consumption today,” he said. “There are no multipliers. Every one of these programs we've had from ‘cash for clunkers' to housing purchase credits have disappeared as soon as they expired and simple shifted activities in time by a few months.”

Stockman explained that before 1980, it took about $1.50 of new borrowing — public or private — to generate $1 of GDP growth. By the mid-1990s, it was $2.50 or $3 of borrowing for a $1 of GDP growth. By 2007, before the big collapse and meltdown finally came, $7 of public and private debt was added to the national balance sheet in order to get $1 of GDP growth.

“When you get to the point of $7 of borrowing to get $1 of income, you're obviously on an unsustainable path and pretty close to hitting the wall, which more or less we have,” he said.

Read full Raw Story….

Phi Beta Iota: Drawing down the military-industrial complex will immediately produce two highly undesireable masses of unrest: pissed off unemployed veterans who own a gun and know how to use it; and pissed off pasty-faced short fat bald white guys with no marketable skills who either own a gun or know where to buy one. We agree that the military budget needs to be cut by $200 billion or more–however, it must be done strategically, with clear-cut plan for both assuring every veteran of a job, with priority to amputees, and for redirecting our energies into homeland development before we spent another dollar on foreign development. We've blown it for nearly three-quarters of a century. This is now about strategic design–do it, or lose what's left of the Republic.