Category: Military

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Journal: US Office for Contingency Operations

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Military, Peace Intelligence
Haiti Watch Thread

TIP OF THE HAT to Manna

The idea of a new agency for S&R ops was put forward a few months ago by Stuart Bowen, IG for Iraq reconstruction. After reviewing DoD and DoS efforts there, he proposed a US Office for Contingency Operations (USOCO). A whole of government agency to unify command and avoid the situation mentioned above between USAID and SOUTHCOM. Makes too much sense to get very far.

“That proposal may be controversial in some circles — particularly in areas the development community, where there’s concern that USOCO might represent a more cumbersome bureaucratic structure. But Bowen’s idea is attracting some powerful allies, like the widely admired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. “I do support the concept,” Crocker, the incoming dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, emailed me. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies.”

Proposal Circulates on New Civilian-Military Agency

Iraq Reconstruction Inspector General Urges Office to Report to State, Defense

As the United States’ special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart Bowen has blown the whistle on millions of dollars worth of waste, fraud and abuse. But one of his final acts in the job will be to address something more fundamental: the way U.S. civilian officials interact with their military counterparts during the complex wars of the future.

Maybe a role for the “fourth battalion.”

USASFC Command Reorganisation By Sean D. Naylor

Meanwhile, the fourth battalion will convert to a special troops battalion. This will include ele¬ments previously in the group support company, such as the Spe¬cial Forces advanced skills compa¬ny, the signals detachment and the regional support detachment. New organizations will be added, including a military intelligence company, an unmanned aerial systems platoon, two human intelligence sections, a signals intelligence section and other ele¬ments, according to a slide brief¬ing Repass provided to Army Times.

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Journal: DoD Mind-Set Time Lags Most Fascinating

10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Key Players, Law Enforcement, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Threats

Full Story Online

Pentagon Shifts Its Strategy To Small-Scale Warfare

By August Cole and Yochi J. Dreazen

Wall Street Journal  January 30, 2010  Pg. 4

The shift in strategy sets up potential conflicts with defense contractors and powerful lawmakers uneasy with the Pentagon's growing focus on smaller-scale, guerilla warfare.

In particular, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has come to think that the Pentagon's traditional belief that it needed to be able to fight two major wars at the same time was outdated and overly focused on conventional warfare. The new QDR moves away from that model, a mainstay of U.S. military thinking for more than two decades, in favor of an expanded focus on low-intensity conflict.

Phi Beta Iota: This is most fascinating; it is also not the last word.  Here is the timeline in short and long versions.  Short:  22 years from advance guard to leadership; 12 years from internal think tanks to leadership; probably further delay from leadership acceptance to bureaucratic implementation: another 20 years.

1988: Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray and the USMC Intelligence Center figure it out.  General Gray publishes “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990).

1992: USMC seeks redirection of one-third of the National Intelligence Topics (NIT) to Third World.  Across the board stone-walling by other services and the US Intelligence Community.

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Journal: Haiti–A Special Forces Sergeant Major Reports Our National Crime Against Humanity in Haiti

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Threats

Marcus Aurelius

From A Retired Special Forces Sgt Major:

To All,

I just returned from Haiti with Hebler. We flew in at 3 AM Sunday to the scene of such incredible destruction on one side, and enormous ineptitude and criminal neglect on the other.

Port o Prince is in ruins. The rest of the country is fairly intact. Our team was a rescue team and we carried special equipment that locates people buried under the rubble.

There are easily 200,000 dead, the city smells like a charnel house. The bloody UN was there for 5 years doing apparently nothing but wasting US Taxpayers money.

The ones I ran into were either incompetents or outright anti American. Most are French or french speakers, worthless every damn one of them.

While 1800 rescuers were ready willing and able to leave the airport and go do our jobs, the UN and USAID ( another organization full of little OBamites and communists that openly speak against Americana) [REDACTED].

These two organizations exemplified their parochialism by:

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Journal: Vietnam and Laos and Afghanistan

Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military, Strategy

Thomas Leo Briggs

One Tribe at a Time

Can the U.S. military devise a successful strategy to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan?  It already has the outline of a potentially successful strategy, just read Major Jim Gant’s “One Tribe at a Time (A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan)”, previously posted here, Reference: One Tribe at a Time by Maj Jim Gant along with Reference: One Tribe at a Time by Steven Pressfield.

The details of how to implement a tribal strategy and work with the Afghan tribes are unique to that country, but the overall strategy of working with tribes is not new at all.

Where has it been done?  Maj. Gant mentions what Army Special Forces did with the mountain tribes of Vietnam (known by the French term “montagnards”).  Another even more appropriate example is what the CIA’s Bill Lair did with the Hmong of northern Laos and what other CIA officers did with the Ta’oi and other Lao Theung tribes of southern Laos.

There were no American fighting units in Laos at all.  The only American military assigned to Laos were the handful of U.S. Air Force forward air controllers, known as Ravens, but they coordinated a very powerful force multiplier, the close air support of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft assigned to work for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).  The tribal strategy in northern Laos was a very few CIA officers working with entirely Lao tribal surrogates. These tribal surrogates fought on our side and helped implement the strategy of keeping the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) occupied in Laos and away from South Vietnam. They also defended the ancient invasion corridor leading from Hanoi to the Lao capital and on into Thailand.

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Reference: Transforming How We Hire Analysts

Analysis, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Reform, Strategy
Full Paper Online

This is a righteous piece of work out of the National Defense University (NDU) by Mr. Adrian (Zeke) Wolfberg of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), entitled “To Transform into a More Capable Intelligence Community: A Paradigm Shift in the Analyst Selection Strategy.”  Published April 21, 2003, this is still valid and of course still ignored.

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Journal: In Search for Truth….Maybe Not

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Media, Military
Story with Many Links

Pentagon’s Gitmo Recidivism Claims Don’t Add Up

Researchers at Seton Hall and New America Foundation track the Pentagon's claims that released Guantanamo detainees ‘returned to battle.'

Phi Beta Iota: Government claims 1 in 5 and counts those who speak to the press against USG and Guantanamo.  Researcers find 1 in 25 at best and observe that the USG is simply not able to get the same story told in the same way more than once.

Appeal Hearing on Guantanamo: Main Issues

On January 26, 2010, a panel of military officers will hear the historic first direct appeal from the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.  Oral argument in the case of United States v. al Bahlul will focus on three constitutional issues that reach beyond military commissions and terrorism trials.    The main issue in the case asks whether the war on terrorism justifies the censorship of foreign media. [Emphasis added.]

My Truth & Only My Truth

The Age of Affirmation: A new study finds that TV viewers watch the news more for affirmation than for information.

A new study suggests that viewers worldwide turn to particular broadcasters to affirm — rather than inform — their opinions. It's a notion familiar to those dismayed by the paths blazed by cable news networks FOX and MSNBC — although the study finds one (perhaps unlikely) network may actually foster greater intellectual openness.

The study in the December issue of Media, War & Conflict by Shawn Powers, a fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and Mohammed el-Nawawy, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Queens University of Charlotte, found that the longer viewers had been watching Al Jazeera English, the less dogmatic they were in their opinions and therefore more open to considering alternative and clashing opinions.