Military – Page 78 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/142014/05/14

Marcus Aurelius: CSA Reflects on Whole of Government Deficiencies — Military Best for Strong on Strong, Not Strong on Weak

Dempsey Wants to ‘Rebalance the Use of Military Power’

By James Kitfield

Defense One, May 12, 2014

At the top of the United States military’s vast, global bureaucracy sits the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the land and the president’s senior military advisor. The chairman sits between the four-star service chiefs on one side, and the four-star combatant commanders on the other. The chiefs are responsible for developing, training and equipping the armed forces for the future. The commanders are responsible for deploying those forces, and their focus is on the application of military power to mitigate crises of the day. Between them in that “supply and demand” equation sits Gen. Martin Dempsey mitigating disputes and fashioning tradeoffs.

As U.S. combat forces withdraw from Afghanistan this year, the service chiefs are trying to manage a force drawdown across the military as combatant commanders cope with myriad crises and an unstable world. That has made Dempsey’s job one of the most difficult of any chairman of the Joint Chiefs in modern times. Defense One contributor James Kitfield recently discussed those challenges with Dempsey. Edited excerpts from their interview follow:

Defense One: Even before the U.S. has pulled its last combat troops out of Afghanistan, the administration is being widely criticized for its reluctance to use military force in response to numerous other crises. How do you balance the frequent demands for a U.S. military response with a stressed force and war-weary American public?

Dempsey: Well, I’m going to get a little philosophic with you here, but when you look at what the military instrument of power can accomplish, it is actually more effective in dealing with strength-on-strength situations than it is in dealing with strength-on-weakness scenarios. And we’re finding that a weakening of structures and central authority is pervasive in today’s world. The Middle East is a poster child for that dynamic. But if you look at almost any sector of civilization – from international organizations, to big corporations to places of worship – their authority has diminished over the past decade. That has to do with the spread of technology that has made information so ubiquitous in today’s world. But the result has been a weakened international order. And frankly, it’s harder to articulate the proper use of military power in that environment as opposed to a world with stronger centers of authority.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: CSA Reflects on Whole of Government Deficiencies — Military Best for Strong on Strong, Not Strong on Weak”

2014/05/102014/05/10

Berto Jongman: Being Anonymous a Virtual Crime

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

John Naughton

The Observer, 10 May 2014

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.

But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What's Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.

Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.

. . . . . . . .

In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.

The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.

. . . . . . . .

Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.

But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.

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2014/05/102014/05/10

Berto Jongman: NSA Kills People Based on Metadata

Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

David Cole

NY Review of Books, 10 May 2014

EXTRACT

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading. Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

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2014/05/102014/05/10

SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Here is a very good assessment discussing what I think is wrong with American foreign policy first under Bush and, now, under Obama. In my view Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are mass murderers no less than John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and ought to be in prison. It is it any wonder we are hated around the world?

‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’
MAJOR TODD PIERCE, USA (RET.) – Consortium News

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup, the 2011 ‘regime change” in Libya and drone wars waged in several countries by President Barack Obama.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules”

2014/05/082014/05/08

Berto Jongman: General Stanley McChrystal — Stop Classifying Information, Start Sharing Information – The Military Case

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military

Secrecy as part of the existing DNA — and a major cancer.

When General Stanley McChrystal started fighting al Qaeda in 2003, information and secrets were the lifeblood of his operations. But as the unconventional battle waged on, he began to think that the culture of keeping important information classified was misguided and actually counterproductive. In a short but powerful talk McChrystal makes the case for actively sharing knowledge.

QUOTE: “In a tightly coupled world, it's hard to predict who will need what information.”

QUOTE: “Change from ‘who needs to know' to ‘who doesn't know.'”

QUOTE: “Information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it.”

VIDEO (6:44)

Interactive transcript (1 language)

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: General Stanley McChrystal — Stop Classifying Information, Start Sharing Information – The Military Case”

2014/05/062014/05/06

Winslow Wheeler: Buck McKeon Sells Out the Troops and the A-10 — C/HASC Rolls Big Bucks Against Little People

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

Supporters of the A-10 “Warthog” close air support aircraft in Washington and US combat Soldiers and Marines who have seen, and are seeing, combat in Afghanistan were stunned Monday to read about a decision of the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Buck McKeon (R-CA). He is joining with the Air Force and wants to retire all of these extraordinarily effective combat aircraft, sending them all to the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force base, starting as soon as next year.

Ever since Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF) Mark Welsh decided to get rid of all of 300-plus A-10s in the active and reserve Air Force and the Air National Guard, the media and congressional hearings have been stuffed with information from combat veterans, pilots and defense specialists about how spectacularly the A-10 has been performing in Afghanistan and all other recent US wars in Libya, Iraq and Kosovo–going as far back as Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

McKeon's A-10 sell-out comes in the form of a ruse. His draft legislation, to be moved Wednesday (May 7) at the mark-up of the House Armed Services Committee of its FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), creates a distinction without a difference with CSAF Welsh's retirement plan. McKeon's own description of his handiwork says he “would limit funds . to retire A-10 aircraft unless each such retired aircraft is maintained in type-1000 storage [which]. means storage of a retired aircraft in a near-flyaway condition that allows for the aircraft to be recalled into use by the Regular or Reserve Components of the Department of the Air Force.” Falling for the ruse either foolishly or knowingly, some media describe the language as “something of a compromise” or emphasize the “near fly-away” condition of the A-10 fleet after it is sent to the boneyard at Davis-Monthan. However, a simple check of what “type-1000 storage” means reveals that the aircraft will be made un-flyable and sealed in two layers of latex, which can be removed and the aircraft made operable only after considerable effort.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Buck McKeon Sells Out the Troops and the A-10 — C/HASC Rolls Big Bucks Against Little People”

2014/05/062014/05/07

Mini-Me: US Army DCGS-A Failures — and Palantir Keeps Trying to Over-Sell Its Shallow Pit

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

Huh?

Internal Army Report’s Damning Conclusion on a System Meant to Protect Our Troops

Editor’s Note: This is the third part in an investigative series by TheBlaze into how top Army officials failed to provide necessary technology to troops on the battlefield, choosing to promote their own flawed software instead. Read part one and part two here.

In January, members of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team trained to track enemy combatants and bombs were inputing data into a $4 billion software system developed by the Army.

ADVANCE EXTRACT: A total of 60 companies were involved in the Army’s DCGS-A program. The four largest were defense weapons developers, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. “They have no play in the global commercial IT market, no standing at all,” said an IT specialist who works with both the government and private sector and is familiar with Defense programs. The specialist spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. “The cost to the taxpayer is extraordinary for products that already exist.”

The software was intended to give military analysts the life-saving tools they needed to be one step ahead of the enemy.

Instead, it shut down, losing all of the valuable data the unit members had uploaded, according to an after-action report obtained exclusively by TheBlaze.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: US Army DCGS-A Failures — and Palantir Keeps Trying to Over-Sell Its Shallow Pit”