Pakistan: A Pakistani military court convicted five military officers, including Brigadier Ali Khan, for maintaining links to a banned organization. The Brigadier is the most senior of the five and received a sentence of five years in prison. The others received sentences of 18 months to three years.
The army did not name the banned organization, but officials have in the past identified it as Hizb ut-Tahrir – a British-based Islamist group that is banned in Pakistan.
As he has gotten older , Barnett has gotten a lot wiser. He has put together a really good analysis of the current U.S. military strategic thinking or lack thereof.
Nice WAPO piece (by Greg Jaffe, of course) on the great COIN counterattack that is the AirSea Battle. As scenario work goes, what CSBA has done in its war-games has to rank right up there with the most egregiously implausible efforts ever made to justify arms build-ups. These games, done for Andrew Marshall's Office of Net Assessment, enthusiastically embrace what I have long dubbed the exceedingly narrow “war within the context of war” mindset – purposefully zeroing out all outside existing reality that readily contradicts the core operational concepts behind AirSea Battle.
Several HOPES ago, Robert Steele started doing separate Q&A sessions using his knowledge as a former spy, pioneer of open source intelligence, advocate of multinational sense-making, and #1 Amazon reviewer for nonfiction. At The Next HOPE (2010), with help from those who stayed with him, he set what may be the world record for Q&A, eight hours and one minute, from midnight Saturday to 0801 Sunday.
UPDATED 8 August 2012 with comments from Common Cause, others.
Buyer Beware – A New York Shill Takes to the Highway
The Hon. David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General, today announced a first-of-its-kind national bus tour to engage Americans about our nation's deteriorating financial condition and show them what they can do to help restore fiscal sanity.
The “$10 Million a Minute Tour” will help voters understand that we face a fiscal cliff in January 2013 and a possible U.S. debt crisis within the next two years.
ROBERT STEELE: David Walker quit his job as Comptroller General at year 9 of a 15 year appointment. He substituted loyalty for integrity in failing to publicly challenge the deregulation of the banking industry in the Clinton Administration (1999, perhaps feeling too new to the office he was given), and when he finally did sound the alarm in 2007 on the fiscal crisis, he failed to publicly challenge the two presidential candidates, then sitting Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, for failing to heed his alarm.
He accepted a golden parachute offer from Peter Peterson, a Wall Street magnate, and has done little of value since leaving the government in 2008, the highlights being a mediocre website, a movie nobody has seen, and a rather nice back-door beefing up of the Wikipedia Page on Balance Budget, something that was reprinting in ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (2008).
The title of this post is my interpretation of what ADM James Stavridis, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and Commander of United States European Command (USEUCOM), says in a new TED Talk. To be fair, what he actually says is that strategic communication should be the means by which the partnerships of an open source security strategy will be knitted together.
I’ve been admirer of ADM Stavridis for a long time, especially his embrace of social media and public diplomacy (In the interest of full disclosure: In addition to my role as a scholar of strategic communication, narrative and social media at the CSC, I am also US Navy Reserve officer assigned to NATO ACT; my remarks here reflect my own opinions and not those of the US Navy nor NATO). The admiral’s TED talk unites his own personal advocacy for transparency and connectedness in his leadership roles with NATO and US DOD (he has a substantial presence on Facebook and Twitter) with a broader vision of sustainable security efforts globally.
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One of the biggest misunderstandings about the civilian-military gap is that it is cultural — the national security version of the red state-blue state divide.
But the distance between those in and out of uniform isn't fundamentally a matter of Texas vs. Massachusetts or NASCAR vs. Wimbledon. At the most basic level, it encompasses deeply different understandings of how we think — how we plan, how we evaluate risk, even how we define problems in the first place. Ironically, the one place where the gap should be the most avoidable is the place where its effects are the most pernicious: Washington.
