A good start but less than 20% of what is needed. This should be a living online directory that spans all military occupational specialties (e.g. communications, engineering, water treatment, power) and it should have a multinational information-sharing and sense-making component including of course reach-back to the Multinational Decision Support Center, wherever that might be located. It would also benefit from a revitalization of DARPA's STRONG ANGEL and TOOZL, and a new pilot project to integrate Twitter and UNICEF's RapidSMS into the overall “outside the wire” C4I campaign plan.
It is becoming increasingly clear that 1981 was a watershed year in the history of the American political economy. What checks and balances that remained broke down. Deregulation, for example, took off and the bomb of private debt exploded (recall the chart I circulated earlier). The trade deficit skyrocketed after 1981, and deindustrialization, which started in the late 1960s took off with a vengeance. The growth in real income stagnated and gap between the rich and poor began to expand rapidly.
The same collapse of political-eocnomic checks and balances occurred in what was already a poorly checked defense sector. During the first 30 years of the Cold War with the Soviet superpower, between 1950 and 1980, the defense budget never experienced more than three consecutive years of real growth (i.e., after removing the effects of inflation) before going into decline. During war and peace, the inflation adjusted budget oscillated around a relatively constant or slightly growing median value (if one believes the Pentagons estimates of inflation). That pattern changed radically with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. The budget began to grow much more rapidly and the checking process weakened markedly during the 1980s and especially the mid 1990s, when the budget began increasing even though the superpower threat evaporated.
With the election of George Bush II in 2000, any remaining checks on budget growth came off (as can been seen in Slide 1 of my June 2002 statement to Congress, which can be downloaded here), and then, spurred on by the politics of fear which enveloped the US after 911, the checking process to ceased completely and the defense budgeting process spun out of control, as a part of it went to fight never ending guerrilla wars but most of it went to propping up a modernization program and force structure that is an outmoded legacy of the Cold War.
Now, if there is any truth to the attached AP report, Bush's insane madness has captured President Obama and he is power boosting the defense budget further, albeit with feeble promises of small declines in the future, which will no doubt be forgotten in the unfolding politics of the permanent war economy.
The Obama administration plans to ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned.
Phi Beta Iota: this specific book is rocketing around Reuniting America, Transpartisan (Left) and Post-Partisan (Right) circles, the 50 million or so Americans–possibly more now–that consider themselves Cultural Creatives. This book will be reviewed here in a week or two. Below are related books with links to their review page and from there to their Amazon page. Put simply, conscious evolution is an information-sharing problem, nothing more or less. You liberate and enrich people in the aggregate by connecting them (cell phones) and then empowering them (access to free information).
Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after the strongest earthquake hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.
Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor, or to estimate how many were dead among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people.
France's foreign minister said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.
The mounting crisis in the country only attracted notice when a Nigerian student is revealed to have been “trained” in Yemen by al-Qa’ida to detonate explosives in his underpants on plane heading for Detroit. But this botched attack has led to the US and Britain starting to become entangled in one of the more violent countries in the world. The problems of Yemen are social, economic and political, and stretch back to the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s, but Gordon Brown believes solutions can be found by holding a one day summit on Yemen to “tackle extremism.”
Al-Qa’ida in Yemen is small, its active members numbering only 200-300 lightly armed militants in a country of 22 million people who are estimated to own no less than 60 million weapons. Al-Qa’ida has room to operate because central government authority barely extends outside the cities and because it can ally itself with the many opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in office since the 1970s.
The real motives behind the increasing US involvement in Yemen are obscure, to put it charitably. M.K. Bhadrakuma, retired Indian diplomat, presents a complex and fascinating — and no doubt controversial — hypothesis in this regard. Bhadrakuma, a prolific writer, is an astute observer of the Central and South Asia, and judged by his writings, he is by no means a toady of the Indian government.
Chuck
UPDATED to add critique of the below article by a colleague of Chuck Spinney's (below the fold).
Full Story Online
Obama's Yemeni odyssey targets China
By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times 9 January 2010
It's all about China
Most important, however, for US global strategies will be the massive gain of control of the port of Aden in Yemen. Britain can vouchsafe that Aden is the gateway to Asia. Control of Aden and the Malacca Strait will put the US in an unassailable position in the “great game” of the Indian Ocean. The sea lanes of the Indian Ocean are literally the jugular veins of China's economy. By controlling them, Washington sends a strong message to Beijing that any notions by the latter that the US is a declining power in Asia would be nothing more than an extravagant indulgence in fantasy.
Professor Walter Dorn is the virtual Dean of peacekeeping intelligence scholarship, going back to the Congo in the 1960's when Swedish SIGINT personnel spoke Swahli fluently and the UN stunned the belligerents with knowledge so-gained. This is the final published version of the article posted earlier in author's final draft.
In the absence of US interest, we are asking Brazil, China, and India to bring it up. Should a UNODIN working group be formed, it will certainly include African Union (AU), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) counterpart groups, as the regional networks will do the heavy lifting and be the super-hubs for the UN (this is in contrast to a US DoD-based system in which military-to-military hubs would be established to do two-way reachback among the eight tribes in the respective nations). Both concepts are explored in the new book, INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH and in two DoD briefings that are also relevant to the QDR.
