The Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees this week arguing that unless their budgets are augmented with still more money they will hollow out the armed forces. Most in the press and Congress didn't read their assertions that way, but two near simultaneous reports that provide some meaningful context for the Chiefs' demands recently became public. They put the Chiefs' behavior in a very different light.
America's generals are just as morally bankrupt as Congress.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER
Foreign Policy | FEBRUARY 14, 2013
I read two critically important reports this week on the impact that sequestration would have on national defense. That possible reduction in military spending — $48 billion, or 7.4 percent of the $645 billion currently appropriated for fiscal year 2013 — is being characterized by the stampede of hysterics who run the Pentagon as the virtual end of national security as we know it. What these two reports show is that we should now consider the Pentagon as morally and mentally broken as Congress.
The first report, by Chuck Spinney, who spent a few decades inside the Department of Defense evaluating budgets, weapons, and bureaucratic behavior, was published at Counterpunch and Time's Battleland blog. The second was a Congressional Research Service report by Amy Belasco, who has spent the last few decades at CRS and the Congressional Budget Office parsing defense budgets and their implications.
Both authors indirectly address the testimony this week of the deputy secretary of defense and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff at the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. To a man, they lent all the rhetorical and substantive support they could muster to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's depiction of sequestration as “doomsday” and to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey's description of it as an “unprecedented crisis” — a characterization he augmented by adding that he was “jumping up and down.” He truly was.
Put simply, the chiefs and their ostensible civilian masters plan to implement the cuts mandated by law in the most destructive, negative way possible, which has the convenient effect — for them — of pushing Congress and the White House to cough up more money. According to their testimony, the Army will reduce training levels to such a low point that units cannot be sent to Afghanistan. The Navy plans to postpone, if not cancel, maintenance for ships in a fleet already at historic lows for upkeep and repair, and deployments to the Persian Gulf have already been postponed. The Air Force is going to further reduce its historically low training of pilots, and maintenance will also hit new lows. Throughout the services, civilian maintainers, auditors, and program overseers will be furloughed, aircraft will be grounded, and ships held in port.
The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A Perfect Example of the Potential Benefits of Open-Source Governance in the Real World
The article: The Nature and Origin of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, (San Jose State University Department of Economics) says,”The guilt for the subprime mortgage financial crisis lies both with the lenders who knowingly put borrowers into booby trapped mortgages and the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making a market for such booby trapped mortgages thus giving the lenders the incentive for writing them.”
The article goes on to say, “It seems that everyone but the dimwits running Fannie Mae (into the ground) understood intuitively that a poor risk for a mortgage cannot be made a better risk by charging a higher interest rate.”
Of course its a complex problem, with many parties to blame (the article goes on to say). But if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been required to post their data online where the general public could access it, some citizen would have seen the mortgage crisis coming. And if there had been an open-source forum where they could drawn attention to the problem, and an open-source vehicle for proposing a solution, or at least writing up some kind of formal complaint to the government, then the disaster might have been averted before it grew so immense.
1. Threat to This Idea. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has fought against this idea, despite the fact that it originated within the CIA in 1969, and has been championed by multiple commissions including the 9/11 Commission (pages 23 and 413) and the WMD Commission. Both CIA and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) appear to fear the impact on the secret world’s budget if an Open Source Agency (OSA), as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), were to demonstrate that 95% of what the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security need to do strategy, policy, and acquisition, can be obtained ethically, legally, and inexpensively. This idea was sent to your predecessor via four separate channels, including from Lawrence Lessig to Alec Ross in the office for Public Diplomacy, and directly to a member of Hillary Clinton’s personal staff, and blocked all four times by INR acting on behalf of CIA. If is for this reason that I humbly and respectfully route this idea to you via your brother and my long-time colleague Jock Gill, a member of President Clinton’s communications staff.
2. Essence of the Idea. The OSA would provide to the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Commerce – and to all their Assistant Secretaries and desk officers – completely unclassified Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tailored to their needs in detail and in a timely fashion. Being unclassified, this intelligence (decision-support) could be provided at the same time to the Congressional committees, the media, the public, and foreign stake-holders. Stated in relation to the President’s needs at this time, the Open Source Agency would enable the Secretary of State to contribute immediately and forcefully to Open Government, Citizen Engagement, Participatory Budgeting, Global Engagement, and more tangibly, to the rapid creation of a Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting process that is rooted in ethical evidence-based decision-support that leverages unclassified decision-support such that the Secretary of State can lead a redirection of how the US Government spends money, toward peace and commerce instead of war.
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3. Harmful Gaps Today. At a time when LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and other members of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change have identified and prioritized the ten threats shown here, the USA and its military-industrial complex persist in obsessing on inter-conflict and terrorism, the latter a tactic, not a threat. Meanwhile the secret intelligence world is spending over $75 billion a year on secret collection, most of which is not processed, and producing what General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret) has said is “at best” 4% of what a major commander or Cabinet official requires – to which I would add, “and nothing for everyone else.”
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4. Strategic Value of the Idea. The greatest casualty of the Cold War and the Global War on Terror has been the truth. America has become morally and intellectually disengaged from reality.
The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.
The most advanced thinking – far beyond the current concepts of any element of the US Government or any think tank – has converged on the combination of two ideas: Open Source Everything (OSE), and Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2).
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5. Operational Implementation of the Idea. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has twice before agreed that an OSA is needed, and also agreed that it should be under diplomatic auspices rather than an element of the secret world. The first time the idea was approved was in 2000 by Sean O’Keefe, then Deputy Director of OMB, who felt it appropriate as a Presidential Initiative to be funded at $125M Initial Operating Capability (IOC), toward $2B at Final Operating Capability (FOC). In 2010 Kathleen Peroff, the Associate Deputy Director for National Security, and her colleagues responsible for Program 50 (Military) and Program 150 (International Affairs) reiterated their agreement in principle with the idea, contingent on a Cabinet officer sponsoring the idea. Now we are in severely constrained budget circumstances, and it may be appropriate to start with a smaller pilot project, perhaps $25M for year one, but the idea is so powerful that it should quickly demonstrate that it merits funding as a means of helping the President decide of both cuts and redirections of funding.
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The OSA offers the additional advantage of being able to create a Global Range of Needs Table and a transparent fulfillment dashboard capable of both inspiring donations from the 80% of the one billion rich that do not contribute to charity today; and also capable of holding accountable the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations (UN), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and all other non-governmental organizations – as the public “sees” that many of them deliver less than 20% of their total budget to those in need, the Secretary of State will have increased influence over funding from others.
6. Tactical Implementation of the Idea. The original budget, when the OSA was proposed as a Global Engagement capability, was suggested by Keith Hall, then Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and former director of the budget staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mindful that the secret world does not do “Global Coverage,” Mr. Hall suggested $10M a year for each of 150 countries and topics not reliably covered – if at all – by the secret world. Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) and myself added $30M per year for each of the 50 states, to create Community Intelligence Networks that would also help integrate education, intelligence (decision-support) and research across America, creating a Smart Nation. A one-page summary of the Smart Nation Act is attached. At the tactical level we can address three distinct advantages for the Secretary of State of sponsoring the OSA.
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a. Whole of Government Planning, Programming, and Budgeting. OMB does not manage in the grand strategic sense. The OSA can restore the Secretary of State as the senior Cabinet officer with a mastery of decision support that is as valuable here at home as it is abroad. For the first time, the OSA will provide ethical evidence-based decision-support that treats poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation – as well as genocide, trade in women and children, proliferation, and all forms of organized crime – as legitimate intelligence challenges. Decision support that can be shared will mobilize consensus.
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b. Common Technical Solutions – Open Source Everything (OSE). Open Government and Open Data are not achievable nationally – nor scalable globally – without an “all in” approach to all the opens. Especially important are Open Cloud, Open Hardware, Open Science, Open Software, Open Spectrum, and Open Standards. A prior endeavor funded by DARPA, STRONG ANGEL, created a suite of collaboration tools on a flash-drive that could be shared with anyone – called TOOZL, it is the first step toward being able to do secure collaboration world-wide with an infinite number of constantly changing information partners.
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c. Real Estate – A Once In A Lifetime Opportunity. Congress approved a privately funded Potomac Plaza over the mess of roads between the South-Central Campus and the river. Lauded as a transformative project that would reconnect the city to the river in this sector, the project could be combined with a publicly funded endeavor on the South-Central Campus, putting the OSA there, and funded by the OSA, the other five national educational, intelligence (decision-support) and research endeavors. This will be a tangible manifestation of the Secretary of State’s legacy, a legacy certain to last over a 100 years.
7. Select Planning Group Available. A select group of independent minds are available to discuss this.
Proposed Legislation: The Smart Nation Act
• Within the Department of State, expands the capabilities for Open Government, Citizen Engagement, Participatory Budgeting, Global Engagement and Whole of Government planning, programming, and budgeting, by providing the Secretary of State with oversight authority of the Open Source Agency (OSA) and the Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements.
• Creates an Open Source Agency (OSA), redirecting the necessary funds on a non-reimbursable basis from Program 50 to Program 150, as a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with the same arms-length independence that Congress wisely mandated to assure journalist independence, but in this case, to assure the integrity of public intelligence in the public interest across Whole of Government and in all exchanges with foreign and non-governmental entities. The small Headquarters will be constructed on the South-Central Campus, adjacent to both the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), which could serve as a partner in global information peacekeeping, and to George Washington University as well as the John F. Kennedy Center conference and parking facilities. All information obtained by open means will be a public good and a copy also provided as acquired to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who shall make no claim on the disposition of original open sources and methods. The OSA will be the national proponent for Open Source Everything (OSE) across the education, intelligence (decision-support) and research sectors.
• Creates an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, to negotiate no-cost information sharing treaties with Nations, and no-cost information sharing agreements with non-governmental and private sector organizations including universities world-wide, while also adopting OSE standards facilitating both sharing and semantic web sense-making across all languages (33 initially, 183 at full operating capability).
• Creates a Multinational Warning & Decision-Support Center (MWDC) and related global information-sharing and sense-making network.
• Creates a Multinational Multiagency Conference Center to serve as a foundation for local to global outreach and cross-fertilization across all education, intelligence, and research topics.
• In partnership with academic, civil society, and non-profit organizations, creates the World Brain Institute and the Global Game to foster whole systems true cost economics thinking.
• Creates, in partnership with a university providing accreditation and administrative services, a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance, a Horizons College, and a Multidisciplinary Research Consortium.
• Support the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) with an Internet dissemination capability that offers free universal access to all unclassified information acquired by the OSA, with a robust man-machine translation capability that offers free online education in at least 33 major languages and 12 dialects of Arabic as an important new foundation for public diplomacy and information peacekeeping.
• Supports the roles of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA) as executive level partners of the Open Source Agency, with priority on decision-support from the OSA in support of all federal needs of common concern.
• Expands and enhances the role of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the General Accountability Office (GAO) with direct access to all available information, advanced analytic processing tools, and sufficient personnel to provide each jurisdiction of Congress with unclassified decision-support that can be shared with constituents and the media. –o–
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’ ”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”
Little by little science is showing us that all life is interconnected and interdependent, refuting the corporate exploiters' proposition that nature is just an unconscious bank account of resources. This is one of the major reasons the Right's disinformation machine has sought to unde! rmine a fact based world.
This is why the U.S. has been so slow to deal with climate change. This is the funding source of the disinformation campaign that has crippled good sense. This is also a significant part of the reason the Republican Party has become what it is today. Notice that once again to get an accounting of what is going on I had to go to a non-U.S. source.
Yet another facet of the vast Far Right funding apparat that is responsible for changing the fabric of America. This is what Citizens United permitted to blossom like an evil growth.
Mali: Special comment. Western news reporters have discovered in Timbuktu confidential guidance documents that the fleeing jihadists failed to destroy.
On the 13th The Telegraph reported that one of its reporters had discovered some confidential documents in the building used by the jihadists in Timbuktu as their command post. One was an account of a meeting in March 2012, but only the first page survived.
According to The Telegraph, the one page document confirmed that al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had decided to take command and control of all operations in the Sahara. The Telegraph reporter observed that al Qaida seemed to be very bureaucratic.
To understand the scale of the problem, you only need to look at the numbers.
For example, the mobile giant Ericsson has been tracking the growth in mobile traffic for years. But 2009 was a landmark year, according to the firm’s Patrik Cerwall: “That year saw more data traffic than voice traffic over the mobile networks”. And the data traffic has been doubling every year since – far outracing Cooper’s law.
The big accelerator was the smartphone, which suddenly made the data-carrying capacity of 3G networks attractive. “People didn’t really understand the benefit of 3G until the app concept changed everything,” Cerwall elaborates.
Data-hungry video is also driving demand. Networking firm Cisco has just reported video downloads last year crossed the 50% threshold, accounting for half of all data transferred over the mobile networks.
At the moment, there are around 1.1 billion smart phones across the world; by 2018 (the horizon for the Ericsson forecasts) that will treble to 3.3 billion. If you think that in 2012, smartphones represented only 18% of total global handsets, but represented 92% of total global traffic, you begin to see the problem.
And the growth will continue relentlessly, according to the Cisco analysis. In 2012, for example, global mobile data traffic grew 70% from 2011, to 885 petabytes per month – that is 885 million gigabytes of data. And in the next five years, it is expected to increase 13-fold, eventually reaching 11.2 exabytes (11, 200 million gigabytes) per month by 2017, according to Cisco.
