A handy rule of strategy-making is to first list the assumptions that undergird the strategy’s logic and to identify any risks that might interfere with those assumptions. And this document attempts to do just that. With violence in Afghanistan just as high as it was before the “surge” (if not higher – the Department of Defense decided to stop releasing information on enemy-initiated attacks), the American taxpayer could reasonably expect a candid re-assessment of the assumptions that have guided American strategy in the Hindu Kush in recent years. The analyst could hope for at least a partial departure from the narrative, now resembling Swiss cheese, that we are leaving Afghanistan a more stable and secure place. Both the taxpayer and the analyst in me are disappointed.
Some of the ten assumptions listed are highly problematic – dangerous even – which undermines the entire strategy.
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The assumptions are followed by a “risks” section, which numbers fewer than 200 words in an 8000 word strategy document.
We haven't seen a National Security Strategy or National Military Strategy in years.
The sexual assault issue is virtually all-consuming. My own two-star, one of the Army's better flag-level intellects, will soon (or may already have) take charge of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Reporting program at OSD level. In fairness, word is that he was selected for something much better but personal considerations drove him to seek to remain in Washington area.
IMHO, the women in direct fire ground combat issue is largely much ado about very little. Right or wrong, for good or ill, females have ALREADY successfully engaged in direct ground combat. To my knowledge, in modern American history, it dates back to World War II when the Office of Strategic Services employed a number of females, often as radio operators and couriers, in unconventional warfare and espionage operations in then European Theater and perhaps elsewhere. More recently, during Operation JUST CAUSE (Panama, 1989), LT Linda Bray led an MP platoon in a direct fire ground attack against a Panama Defense Force position vicinity Curundu dog kennels. Most recently, Female Engagement Teams (GPF) and Cultural Support Teams (SOF) have accompanied conventional and special operations ground elements in direct fire combat operations. By all reports they have performed well, probably because they were carefully selected and well trained. The general argument about PT requirements requires, IMHO, more study. I'm not totally convinced that all of the PT requirements are truly essentially. I think much of the PT stuff is simply a cheap way to crudely measure “resolve.” For the single most essential special operations physical quality that comes immediately to mind, tolerance of cold in combat diving, I'm not aware of any way to teach that; it's an inherent can or can't kind of thing.
The sexual revolution has some traditionalists wondering whether the Pentagon is taking its eye off the ball — the enemy.
“Every conceivable form of PC is being enforced upon our hard-pressed military with a zeal that only a Russian army zampolit — a political officer — would truly appreciate,” said Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel and commentator. “We are seemingly concerned about everything except the most basic thing: how to fight and win the nation's wars. If we have forgotten that constraint, let me assure you that our enemies have not, from the Taliban to the drug cartels to the Iranian Quds Force.”
Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.
The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.
All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.
After 25 years of service, including combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Lt. Col. Stephen Preston retired from the Army and began collecting a pension of nearly $55,000 a year. The money made it possible for Preston to go back to college, get his MBA and embark on a second career in corporate strategy.
So it happened that Preston was sitting in his new office shortly before Christmas when he heard on the radio that he had become the latest target in Washington’s war on spending.
“I’m not an angry man, but I was very, very angry,” Preston, 51, said in a telephone interview from his home in Tampa. “This is a pact between the greater population of the United States and the fraction of people who served and sacrificed. If you didn’t want to pay us what you promised us, then you probably shouldn’t have promised it.”
Bill Binney – the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, senior technical director within the agency who managed thousands of NSA employees, interviewed by CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others – told Washington’s Blog:
[NSA chief Keith] Alexander wants you and everybody (including this clueless judge) to believe that caller ID does not work. First of all, all the calls that are made in the world are routed by machines. And, with machines, you have to tell them exactly what to do. Which means, the routing instructions calling nr and called nr have to be passed through the machines to route the call to get from point A to point B in the world.
So, he is feeding everyone a line of crap. If you buy into this, I have a bridge I would like to sell.
Also, all calls going from one region of the world to another are preceded by 01 or 011 in region “1″ (US/Canada/some islands) or by “00″ in the rest of the world. And that goes both ways on any call.
The Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) numbering plan is how we could eliminate all US to US calls right up front and never take them in.
In other words, while Binney headed NSA’s global digital communications gathering efforts prior to 9/11, his team knew in real-time which countries calls were made from and received in. The NSA is lying if it claims otherwise.
All is not well in the land of US spooks despite them having access to all the data on citizens that they can eat.
William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, has warned that the agency knows too much.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the NSA can't understand the data it has because it has too much to do anything useful with it.
Binny said that the NSA's addiction to data had made it dysfunctional and the agency is drowning in useless data.
He described an agency where analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.
His warning mirrors concerns shown in the Snowden documents. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign mobile phone location tracking by the agency said the efforts were “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data.
In March, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the “relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection”.
