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.
This is the first video part of eleven parts on YouTube. This video (1990's) by the late Aaron Russo earned him a visit from Nicholas Rockefeller around the time Russo was running for governor of Nevada as stated in this video interview before he died in 2007. Part two reveals Russo's commentary on “totalitarianism” disguised as anti-terrorism long before 9/11 with the passage of the Clinton anti-terrorism bill in the 90's.
Mexico: BBC reported on 8 August police officers in Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico detained their commander at gunpoint, accusing him of corruption and links to drug gangs. More than 200 federal police agents raided the hotel where their commander was staying and accused him of planting drugs on police officers to blackmail them into carrying out extortion. Some of the agents were injured when officers loyal to the commander defended him.
While some agents blocked off nearby streets to prevent their commander from escaping, others moved into the hotel where he was staying. They raided his room, where they say they found weapons and drugs. The federal officers allege that they were part of a stash, which their commander would plant on officers who refused to take part in his corrupt dealings. They say he would then blackmail the agents into carrying out extortion and other crimes.
The police officers held their commander captive until the Federal Police Commissioner General agreed to suspend him, pending an investigation. One of the policemen who took part in the protest told the Associated Press corruption in the higher ranks was putting them in danger. “We risk our lives, we leave families behind and it's the fault of those officers that we go down,” he said.
Phi Beta Iota: The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) has been a success story, despite some internal issues that are under investigation. What we are seeing across Central America, with El Salvador recently joining the fray, is the emergence of an anti-corruption culture that sees the value of self-policing. Four challenges remain:
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.
Fairfax County is seeking bidders for a new contract that injects private sector intelligence analysts into regional law enforcement and homeland security efforts.
The county began working with intelligence analysts five years ago, and the existing contract with Fairfax-based ManTech International Corp. is set to expire at the end of the year.
Under the agreement, the defense contractor has provided eight analysts who work to identify terrorist threats in the national capital region and also provide support for more bread-and-butter police work.
Today we have a Pentagon that is spending more money (in inflation adjusted dollars) on defense than at any time since WWII, yet it can not pass the relatively simple audits required by the Chief Financial Officer's Act of 1990. This law was intended to put teeth into the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution. The audits required by the CFO Act are “checks and balances” audits — they merely describe whether or no any agency of the federal government spends the money Congress appropriated on the items Congress authorized for appropriations — essentially the line between where the money comes from and where it goes. The attached article helps to put the implications of this travesty into a frightening perspective. CS
BY JUSTIN LOGAN, American Conservative, 1 Mar 2010
Periodically, it is worth remembering just how much the American Founders detested the signs of a bloated state: standing armies, a large fiscal-military federation, and a capacious national bureaucracy. It may be going too far to say that today’s conservatives would denounce the Founding Fathers as unpatriotic conservatives—but not much too far. While members of the Right now flutter like schoolgirls at the mention of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, the Founders scorned the prospect of military leaders becoming figures of worshipful esteem. As the historian Arthur Ekirch has highlighted, aversion to standing armies and centralism was at the heart of the American founding.
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.
