This is where the issue of Phil Schneider comes in. He is a UFO whistleblower who spent his short life saying what was, when he said it, seemed outlandish. We are now putting so many of his 30 year old technologies into use, so many are now public or at least to the advanced defense community that more and more of us accept all of it.
The Summer 2012 issue of Common Defense Quarterly is running my article, “MQ-9 Reaper: Not the ‘Revolution in Warfare' You've Been Told.” To sum it up, I conclude “The proclamation of drones, such as Reaper, to be the future of warfare, a revolutionary transformation, is an empty, data free proclamation. The MQ-9 neither saves money nor improves performance compared to analogous, even primitive, aircraft. Such equipment only has a future in a defense system that prefers to degrade combat performance while increasing cost.”
Barack Obama entered the White House as a savior. But he hasn't delivered. The ideological chasms in the US are as deep as they have ever been, with Republicans blocking the president at every turn. Who is responsible for his failure?
The United States of America, where yet another mammoth presidential campaign is taking shape, makes up less than 5 percent of the world's population. Yet it consumes about 25 percent of the world's oil. It has close to $16 trillion (€12.8 trillion) in debt, its expenditures will exceed its revenues by $1.3 trillion in this fiscal year alone, and the war in Afghanistan is costing it $2 billion. Each week. Many in this country are demanding peace in Syria, even as Washington quietly fights a dirty drone war in Pakistan. Some 169 prisoners are still stewing in Guantanamo. In Washington, D.C., the divide between the two political camps is so deep that it resembles an abyss. Is the current president of the United States really named Barack Obama? Is the era of George W. Bush really over?
Obama's first term in office will end in just a few months time. The giant, many-faceted country, 27 times the size of Germany, needs a new plan — a new project for the staggering global superpower. A president will be elected in November for 314 million citizens. A new president? Perhaps. It is conceivable that the first black president, Barack Obama, hailed as a savior when he came into office, will be replaced by the pale Mormon Mitt Romney, a Republican with somewhat dubious conservative credentials.
The office both men are vying for is the most difficult in the world. The US president's agenda is constantly jam packed with the weightiest and the most trivial of matters alike, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Sometimes major national projects and monumental global tasks are relegated to the periphery of that agenda, because domestic sports scandals or sexual improprieties capture the headlines, because lunatic pastors decide to burn Korans, or because new statistics are released showing that three-fourths of all Americans are overweight, more than 46 million live in poverty and gunshots kill more than 30,000 people a year, suicides included.
The fact that Kim Kardashian's marriage lasted only 72 days can have a longer-lasting impact on the news in America than any environmental policy initiative. High gasoline prices (in the US “high” means that a liter of gasoline costs the equivalent of €0.77, or less than half the price of gasoline in Germany) are so important to so many people that they could decide the election.
The fact that 52 percent of Republicans in Mississippi believe that Obama is a Muslim, or that 46 percent of Americans believe that man was created precisely as is written in the Bible can make political debates extraordinarily tedious.
Impossible? Not in America
Those who believe the above factoids have little to do with each other lack an understanding of the true situation inside the White House. Last year, for example, as Obama was sitting through what he called “the longest 40 minutes of my life,” during the Special Forces operation against Osama bin Laden, he was concurrently embroiled in a debate, instigated by his political enemies, over whether his birth certificate is genuine. Impossible? Not in America.
Obama and his staff are constantly making decisions about what happens to be important at any given moment, based on daily events, click rates and noise levels. They stand in the middle of tornado made up of thousands of tiny news items, Internet discoveries and artificial scandals that a tireless, highly professional media industry is constantly producing — in alliance with the world's busiest web community.
“The face of war, the face of how we do business, is changing.”
That’s retired Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharing how he sees the military’s future at a National Press Club session for reporters Tuesday. Cartwright, who was known for his forward thinking while on active duty, has apparently decided to share his ideas through a series of public appearances.
One area that he sees changing in the military is what he calls “the platforms” — by which he means tanks, troop carriers, ships, aircraft, heavy guns and even rifles. They are becoming less important in Cartwright’s view than the new electronics, sensors and other gadgetry.
He recalls being with then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Georgia reviewing an Army unit ready to deploy to Central Asia with new systems that included iPads and droids for individual soldiers. Cartwright said Gates asked one sergeant during a barracks walkthrough, “What do you think of all this stuff?”
The sergeant replied, “I’d sooner leave this barracks without my rifle as to leave without these things.”
The lesson for Cartwright was that the new electronics, which the military calls information technology (IT), will replace in importance the current platforms — in which the side with the most modern guns, tanks and aircraft often won. Platforms, however, take time to develop.
The wealth of American families plummeted by 38.8 per cent between 2007 and 2010, according to fresh data from the Federal Reserve, highlighting the deep damage inflicted by the housing crash, financial crisis and recession on the economic health of US households.
According to the Fed’s survey of consumer finances, which is released every three years, the median net worth of US families declined from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 two years ago, as millions of Americans witnessed a sharp drop in the value of their homes, in many cases their main investment.
The fall in wealth due to the mortgage collapse more than offset the gains of the housing boom. In 2004, family median net worth as measured by the same survey was $107,200, while in 2001 it was $106,100, meaning even much of the benefit of the economic expansion of the 1990s was wiped away.
In its report, the Fed noted that families living in the west with a head of household between 35 and 44 years old bore the brunt of the hit to the net worth, since “housing was a larger share of their assets”.
As their wealth plummeted, many Americans also suffered a steep drop in median income, with unemployment and underemployment rising. According to the Fed study, median income fell 7.7 per cent between 2007 and 2010, a sharp acceleration from a small decline in the previous three years.
This has been true since Vietnam (from my personal experience) and for all the money and technology that has been thrown at the IC, the return is dismal at best, criminal at worst….see my previous identifying your tribal summary as better than 99% of the intel I saw in Afghanistan.
Ten years of war have given the U.S. military more than its share of frustrations. According to an internal Pentagon study, two of them were as fundamental as they were related: Troops had terrible intelligence about Iraq and Afghanistan, and they told their own stories just as badly.
Those are some preliminary conclusions from an ongoing Pentagon study into the lessons of a decade of combat, authorized by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the multi-tour Iraq veteran and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The study doesn’t single out any sensor or spy platform for criticism. Instead, it finds that U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations.
. . . . . . . .
The study Dempsey ordered is ongoing and will have several volumes, each with multiple iterations, before the military produces a definitive assessment of what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is just the first volume. But it helps identify a series of problems that the military thinks it needs to fix to win the wars of the future.
That future military needs to “leverag[e] technology and social media” in order to consider “all relevant actors’ instruments of power; cultural, religious, and other demographic factors; and employs innovative, non-traditional methods and sources.” In other words, spin harder — and know what you’re talking about.
