Senior Congressional sources in Washington have disclosed to The Mail on Sunday that President Obama has told the Libyan rebels through intermediaries that a condition of continued support from the US is that they must hand over Megrahi if they enter Tripoli.
The historic leader of the Libyan 1969 revolution, symbol of Libyan resistance, king of kings of Africa, Imam of Muslims, teacher of the Third Universal Theory, gave a historic speech to around one fifth of the entire Libyan population gathered to show their love and defiance.
Pakistan’s military continues to nurture a broad range of militant groups as part of a three-decade strategy of using proxies against its neighbours and US forces in Afghanistan, a prominent former militant commander said.
Phi Beta Iota: The details are compelling. What this really means is that the CIA and the Department of Defense are either incredibly ignorant of Pakistani plans and intentions, or remarkably cavalier and corrupt. What appears clear is that this is a sucking chest wound in US “intelligence” and national “defense” going back thirty years and multiple generations of so-called leaders who have no real grasp of reality in Pakistan.
UPDATE: A former member of Patraeus staff comments below the line.
Somewhat paraphrasing a senior Israeli leader of the late 1940s, speaking in reference to COL(USA-Ret) David Michael (Mickey) Marcus who had just given his life for Israeli independence, Dave Petraeus is, IMHO, the best man we have. But, again IMHO, this is probably not a good match. It is a political sidelining. General Petraeus should be succeeding ADM Mullen as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Following below are several headlines about the prospects for the Defense Budget. As an overarching summary, what you need to know is that, at the working level, the fiscal decrements are already impacting heavily. We simply do not have the resources to do the routine work necessary to steward the force and plan for the future. The division I work in is currently operating at less than 60 percent of the people we need and we are supposedly one of the elite places. Money for necessary travel has dried up for all but Generals and SES's and our capability to conduct necessary planning conferences has been formally terminated. So, at most optimistic and charitable characterization, the future looks dodgy.
Phi Beta Iota: Defense cuts will be at least 30% over the next ten years, and hopefully as much as 50%. What we have now is a circle of outright lies among all pertinent executive and legislative officials. An ethical Secretary of Defense would be identifying contracts, starting with most of what DARPA and the services are doing in the way of futures, and present a list to Congress of needed cuts irrespective of contract law, the US now being in a state of war and the exingencies of the situation mandating a legislative override of contract law. Salami slicing is the idiot's path to temporary relief. The entire US government is bloated and broken, not just the Department of Defense. This is not a system that can be repaired in the absence of intelligence and integrity. It needs to be replaced–or not even replaced, just routed around and starved to death.
From a brave but frustrated front-line infantry leader. Shades of SLA Marshall!
as the Army stands down from conflict life will get very dull……
Yeah I am dreading that and honestly I LOVE the Army. It's always the politics. Just like the article I read on MSNBC talking about the new strategy is to do “surgical strikes”. One of my favorite quotes ever is “Bombing from a B-52 is very effective. The bombs always hit the ground.” I just think it is funny when you blow up a mud hut in some shit hole country people think it makes a difference. It doesn't and at the end of a week the mud hut is back and it's back to whatever it was doing before it
was destroyed. Bombardment denies enemy the terrain only as long as stuff is exploding. Once the explosions stop anybody can walk through there. That is why nothing has ever beat the infantryman. It's why the Infantry has been around since the dawn of armies.
People are complaining about the cost of the wars and here again it's Politics. Congressman and Senators
and the general public forcing equipment training and standards onto the military that is may not necessarily need or want. We have cooks in the army we don't need the KBR chow-halls. I have two good legs and feet I
don't need a truck most of the time. I definitely don't want these MRAP's that I am being FORCED to use. Give me a soft skin Humvee a mission, beans and bullets and look see what I can do. Body armor, armored vehicles and these chu's while yes they are nice they aren't necessary. Somewhere though somebody thought it should be the rule and not the exception and here we are trillions of dollars later and for what. I don't really blame
army leadership as much as politics. I don't mean politicians either although they are the cause of a lot of this pain. Family and friends back home, bystanders and people who think their opinion should matter are
complaining that people are dying in Humvee's and we need something better. Hence the MRAP. People wanna know why the military doesn't have body armor and hell cops do. Cops don't carry near the gear and ride
around on motorcycles or in cars. Take away some of my crap and let me walk, I won't get blown up as much cause I am not walking on a road, I will be able to think clearer because I am not so miserable and let me
kill the bad guys so I feel there is a purpose. To the victor goes the spoils, but since when is the spoils of war rebuilding the losers country then leaving it???
I've enjoyed The War Nerd for years. Great, colorful writing. The author of the column, “Gary Brecher,” was never on the same page as me when it came to warfare. However, that's changed.
He now thinks, and makes an excellent case for global guerrilla thinking. In short: that blood and guts warfare is counter productive and that systems disruption (hiting network systempunkts/nodes to generate high ROI‘s and publicity) is a potential path to long term victory for guerrillas. In short: in the modern context, if you keep the blood/guts to a min, and keep the cost ratio massively in your favor while staying alive, you will eventually win.
To demonstrate this, he has a great article on how the IRA eventually adopted systems disruption:
“In 1994, they took the idea of non-lethal warfare a notch up by doing one of the most revolutionary things any guerrilla army has ever done: IRA mortar teams dropped shells on the runways at Heathrow Airport, totally stopping air traffic… but the shells weren’t even designed to explode. Intentional duds. That’s amazing; I’ve never heard of anything like that. It shows how far they’d come by that stage, away from the simple Al Qaeda maximum-blood crap I bought into in that earlier article. In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!
Obama made it clear today….civility is the Washington D.C. substitute for integrity. Go along with with military-industrial complex and you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Speak truth to power, and you lose your job. Land of the free and home of the brave? Not in Washington, D.C.
Phi Beta Iota: These are smart people. To tell the lies they do, to behave as they do, is not out of ignorance. It is the elevation of personal greed and political ideology over integrity. The Republicans are just as guilty–one bird, two wings, same stink.
