Phi Beta Iota: Read every word. Highlights include:
;1) Every province is difference (see General Zinni's characterization of the six different Viet-Nam wars in Battle Ready)
2) Climate and Ops Tempo, not the Taliban, are the major challenge
3) Taliban losing, resorting more to terror against civilians
4) NATO works–could not have done AF without NATO C4I
5) Not a single word about civilian stabilization & reconstruction assistance, which appears to be dead in the water with AID pulling back
Our Conclusion: Having tried and failed at everything else, we are now at the cusp of the “Brass Hour” in both IQ and AF but the military is failing to do the homework needed to present a compelling case for fur a “Berlin Airlift” into both countries that overwhelms the population with what we should have used the first time around: language-qualified Muslim engineers from Indonesia and Malaysia and Turkey, along with a mini-Marshall Plan that wages peace without end. One Tribe at a Time, Yes, But Bring Peace Goods with You….
Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts
Operation Barbarossa
Recent events like the Fort Hood Massacre and the bungled attempt to fire bomb the airliner bound for Detroit have focused attention on and encouraged our escalating intervention in Yemen, which has been taking place quietly, as if Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were not enough to keep our strategic planners and stretched out military forces occupied. Our reactions to events in the so-called Long War on Terror suggest an aimless spreading of effort throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. This aimlessness brings to mind a comment General Hermann Balck, a highly decorated German officer in WWII, made to a small group of reformers in the Pentagon in the early 1980s. The subject was Operation Barbarossa, or Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Balck pithily dismissed the German strategy shaping that invasion with the words: “Nicht Schwerpunkt.” Balck was saying there was no focus or main effort to the German invasion, and without a focus, there was no way to harmonize the thousands of subordinate efforts. The result was a spreading of effort that led to eventual overextension as can be seen in the following map.
Now the Eastern Front of WWII is very different from the ridiculously misleading label of a Central Front in the Long War on Terror. But the idea of schwerpunkt is germane to both efforts, and the US is showing all the signs of spreading and over extending its efforts which accompany a nicht schwerpunkt.
This is no small thing. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed in his famous briefing, Patterns of Conflict, the idea of a schwerpunkt is central to organizing all effective military operations. It is far more than a simple question of concentrating forces. According to Boyd, the idea of a “Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.” Now this is a very compressed statement, pregnant with information, and based on a lot of research, but it nevertheless makes it self evident that there is no comparable unifying medium in America's Long War on Terror. Our failure to form a schwerpunkt is just as much a prescription for paralysis and defeat by a thousand cuts in a guerrilla war as it is in a mechanized conventional war between standing armies.
To see why, consider please the following three attachments:
Long over-due for re-issuance, this time with a great deal more participation from all Eight Tribes, and a really warm welcome for the US Institute of Peace (USIP) which hit its stride with Guiding Principles for Stabilization and Reconstruction (Paperback). No one answers the phone when we call to ask about an update.
Detroit jet terrorist attack was staged – journalist
The recent failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence, author and journalist Webster Tarpley stated to RT.
“[The terrorist’s] father, a rich Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 and said ‘my son is in Yemen in a terrorist camp, do something about this.’ Nevertheless, the son is allowed to buy a ticket in Ghana, paying cash, $2,800, for a one-way ticket,” Tarpley said.
After that, a mentally deficient young man who doubtfully could make it from one gate to another managed to illegally enter Nigeria and get on a plane to Amsterdam.
“There was a well-dressed Indian man who brought him to the gate and said, ‘my friend does not have a passport, get him on, he is Sudanese, we do this all the time – that is impossible!” said Tarpley.
Nine of the ten largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas. Four of them share one intersection: Las Vegas Boulevard (The Strip) and Tropicana Avenue. Together, these four corners comprise 12,953 rooms, most of which enjoy high occupancy year-round and are often full. Figure 25,000 people huddled on four corners.
The imagery is also appealing to terrorists: Occupying one corner is New York, New York, with a “skyline” that features the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty.
This thought: It is no longer necessary for al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack two Beechcraft C99 planes out of Vegas, as easy as this would be. Instead, why not drive (three-and-a-half hours from Vegas) to Grand Canyon West Airport with a few vans filled with ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) and diesel fuel? Armed with a few baseball bats, one could take command of the airstrip in less than a minute. Then wait for the Beechcrafts to arrive. Loaded with ammonium nitrate (or a low grade chemical or biological agent), these vector weapons could then be dispatched back at Las Vegas, a mere 15 minutes away at full throttle, or Hoover Dam, half the distance.
Phi Beta Iota: This posting was brought to our attention by a patriotic citizen who finds a great deal of common sense on this web site, and none at all within the so-called Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We recollect the period 1990-1994 when Peter Black, Winn Schwartau, and Robert Steele, among others, tried to warn Congress and the Executive about the cyber-threat, to include substantive correspondence to the top National Information Infrastructure security officer, Marty Harris, sounding the alarm. We vividly recollect testifying on behalf of Hackers and trying to tell the Secret Service it should hire them, not torment them. Now we have a government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong way, and failing to LISTEN to common sense solutions from its citizens.
sensible memo from BTC: Aviation Security After Detroit
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS: Aviation System Security
Business Travel Coalition December 27, 2009
By Kevin Mitchell
The Christmas attempt by a Nigerian man with PETN (one of the most powerful explosives known) affixed to his body to cause harm to an internationally-originated Delta Air Lines flight on approach to Detroit shone a bright light on much that is wrong with the U.S. approach to aviation system security. It is welcome news that President Obama has ordered an airline industry security review so long as it is strategic in nature.
. . . . . . .
The immediate post 9/11 security priority for the U.S. was to prevent a commercial airline from ever again being used as a weapon-of-mass-destruction. Airport screening was strengthened substantially, the Air Marshall program was expanded, cabin and cockpit crews were trained in advanced anti-terrorism techniques, many pilots were armed, F-14s were placed on alert, and most importantly, cockpit doors were reinforced and passengers were forever transformed from passive participants in a time of threat to able defenders. All of this was accomplished within a relatively short period of time after the U.S. was attacked on 9/11.
From that point forward the highest and best use of each incremental security dollar spent should have been on intelligence gathering, risk-management analysis and sharing, and on fundamental police work such that terrorists would never reach an airport, much less board an airplane. What does the immediate investigation into the near-calamity on Christmas reveal?
• The father of the accused terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, informed U.S. officials months ago that he was concerned about his son’s extreme religious views. Not a friend, not a teacher, but his very own father issued the warning!
• The accused Nigerian is in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database (550K names) maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. While not on the selectee list (14K names) or no-fly list (4K names), should not some of our scarce security dollars have been used to ensure that he was placed on the selectee list, questioned and subjected to extra searching prior to being allowed to board the Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam?
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano appeared today on ABC’s This Week show and unabashedly steered clear of government accountability arguing that the U.S. did not have enough information to keep the accused man from boarding the flight or to add him to the selectee or no-fly list. However, his very father warned us! Moreover, the UK’s Daily Mail reports that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was banned from Britain; his last visa request refused! That the suspect did not but should have received additional questioning and physical screening is where the U.S. government’s focus should be, versus on the in-flight security illusion of restricted passenger movement, if it is intended to be more that temporary.
