A consensus is building among current and former military leaders and defense industry executives that rising military personnel costs threaten the viability of the all-volunteer force.
Phi Beta Iota: Health benefits would not be a problem if Congress did not insist on paying 100 times more for the top 75 prescription drugs as paid by all others (Canada only pays 10 times more). DoD can be saved, but someone somewhere is going to have to get a grip on reality, strategy, acquisition, and Whole of Government operations. We are not holding our breath.
Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, Tuesday August 10, 2010
RICHMOND — Virginia officials reacted with bipartisan dismay on Monday to Defense Department budget shifts that will cost the state thousands of jobs in coming years and will dramatically impact the economies of the Norfolk area and Northern Virginia.
Most of the immediate reaction revolved around Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates's proposal to close the U.S. Joint Forces Command. It is a major employer in Hampton Roads, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach, whose elimination could translate into the loss of 6,100 military, civilian and contractor jobs in the region.
In simple terms, the collection of links below centered on the latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), come to the general conclusion that the Department of Defense (DoD) can no longer think, strategize, complete staff work, or acquire the right capabilities to do what DoD is supposed to do (which is also a topic lacking consensus).
SMALL WARS JOURNAL ROBERT HADDICK: Not trusting the Pentagon’s staff to prepare a Quadrennial Defense Review that would be useful, the Congress established an independent panel of “wise men” to critique the QDR after its release. Last Thursday, the QDR Independent Panel, led by William Perry and Stephen Hadley and supported by a praiseworthy list of commissioners and staff members, released its critique of the 2010 QDR. With the exception of one glaring clunker, the Independent Panel’s report is superb and is the strategic defense review the QDR should have been. Yet the very fact that the Independent Panel was needed (confirming Congress’s suspicions) shows that something is seriously wrong with the government’s ability to formulate and execute strategy. Read more from Haddick.
Phi Beta Iota: Business profit center opportunities abound, the most notable being the provision of intelligence and shared computing and communications to multinational, multiagency, multifunctional forces that do not speak English. The following two short lists are pulled from the Executive Summary of the Independent Report, which is the best “old” thinking (do the wrong things righter) and while utterly brilliant as far as it goes, lacking in “new” thinking (create a prosperous world at peace). This report fails to point out the obvious, to wit, for one quarter of what we spend on war today ($1.3 trillion a year), we can eradicate all ten high level threats to humanity (the top three of which are not recognized by this report (poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation), in the process reinventing capitalism to go after the four trillion a year the five billion poor gross, which just happens to be four time what the one billion rich gross per year.
HONG KONG — The calculator busily counting out how much money the United States has spent on wars since 2001 has raced past $1 trillion — $1,024 billion plus at the start of August. There is little point in trying to give a more refined figure since the clock ticks remorselessly on, mesmerizingly faster than you can write the sum down, about $260,000 blown away in each passing minute.*
Meanwhile, the wars are being lost rather than won, U.S. and allied soldiers are dying and being maimed every day, tens and sometimes hundreds of innocent civilians are killed daily, and billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of lives being destroyed for no good reason apart from the overweening egos of politicians who are not prepared to admit that they are wrong.
Accompanying Veterans Today article (Obama burning with Bush)
The grim bottom line is that American military and foreign policy is bust and the greatest imperial power the world has ever known is failing. U.S. President Barack Obama promised to be different, but he has become trapped as a gear-lever in the same broken machine.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the stunning graphics, click on the photo of the two faces stitched together to get to a compelling article on veterans and families of veterans being against both elective wars, both wars of the rich of no benefit to the public.
The 15th biennial African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda ended on July 27 with mixed results regarding support for U.S. and Western European plans to escalate foreign military intervention in nearby Somalia.
The 35 heads of state present at the three-day meeting were reported to have authorized the deployment of 2,000 more African troops to back up the beleaguered Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu and to bring the full complement of forces doing so to 8,000, but the new contingent will probably consist solely of troops from Uganda and Burundi, which supply the approximately 6,000 already serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Reports of another 2,000 reinforcements from Djibouti and Guinea are problematic and their deployment remains to be seen, not that pressure will not be exerted on those two nations and others from outside the continent.
AMISOM is the successor to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Peace Support Mission in Somalia (IGASOM) set up in 2005 by the six-member group which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda and which also was to have provided 8,000 troops for deployment to Somalia. The 53 members of the African Union except for Uganda and Burundi have been loath to commit military units to intervene in fighting in Somalia, whether against the Islamic Courts Union five years ago or against al-Shabaab insurgents currently.
In late 2006 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa to plan the earlier IGASOM operation and in January of 2007 Uganda pledged its first troops which, along with those included in a reported offer by Nigeria, were to total 8,000.
Three and a half years later, there are only 6,000 foreign troops in Somalia (now under AMISOM, the only difference being the acronym now employed) and all of those from Uganda and Burundi, both nations U.S. military clients and surrogates.
The African Union (AU) initially approved AMISOM on January 19, 2007 and granted it a six-month mandate. In July of 2010 the real prime movers behind the mission, the U.S. and its NATO allies in the European Union, are pushing for an escalation of armed intervention in Somalia with more Western-trained Ugandan troops conducting open combat operations: Changing the mandate from, to use the terms employed to mask military aggression, peacekeeping to peace enforcement. Continue reading “US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia”
Below is a good summary of the wikileaks database. It is also a good example of how the secretive conspiratorial mind, trained in the wilderness of mirrors that is the US intelligence establishment, conjures motivations out of the ether. The author builds a an inferential case to insinuate the massive leak of intelligence data via the wikileaks website was an orchestrated info-operation aimed at influencing the American polity by building the case for leaving Afghanistan. Left unsaid, but dangling tantalizingly in the last two paragraphs, is a subtle (and unsubstantiated) suggestion that this leak came from very high levels, perhaps the highest level, of the Obama Administration. Too clever by a half?????? Chuck
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior US and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.
In my opinion the Washington Post series that exposed the exponential increase in the size and cost of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was not taken seriously by official Washington and is considered a minor nuisance. That is why the only response to the series, as crafted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), was largely vintage intelligence agency boilerplate with a few bizarre additions such as the claim that the collection and analysis of intelligence are not essential government functions of intelligence agencies and so can be left to contractor personal. The series did not merit a serious response in the thinking of the Executive Branch and Intelligence Community.
In fact the series, although much touted, was a huge disappointment to readers expecting a more deeply researched and in-depth look at the IC. Clearly the craft of investigative journalism has fallen on hard times.
Also it is the case that in this country quantity always trumps quality. The growth in the size of the Intelligence Community is taken by official Washington as a priori evidence of the value it has provided since 9/11. The facts that the current IC is ruinously expensive to operate, is producing largely worthless intelligence, and has frequently failed even in the most basic warning functions are irrelevant. A bloated IC serves as ‘proof’ that political Washington is serious about protecting American citizens from terrorist threats. As with quantity, in the political arena form always trumps substance.
