In 2005, the U.S. Army issued a new field manual on the military use of dogs, which it said were being “employed in dynamic ways never before imagined.” The field manual was approved for public release and marked for unlimited distribution. See FM 3-19.17, “Military Working Dogs” (pdf), 6 July 2005.
But in May 2011, the same Army manual on military working dogs (redesignated as ATTP 3-39.34) was updated, and this time its distribution has been limited to DoD and DoD contractors only. Public access to the document is barred. At the same time, copies of the unrestricted 2005 edition have been removed from Army websites. (A copy is still available through the Federation of American Scientists web site.)
The net loss of public access to information in this case illustrates a new trend that is at odds with the Obama Administration's declared policy. Although the President promised to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government,” in practice new barriers to access to unclassified information continue to arise.
Anyone who believes we are winning the War on Terror doesn't understand the goals of AQ. They wanted us to be afraid and to spend our money, both of which the government is doing in spades…..one really has to ask, then, who is winning?
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
NEW YORK – As a foreign correspondent for NBC News, I haven’t spent much time in the United States during the last decade. I return only occasionally to check in with colleagues, visit family, or, this last time, to research a documentary for MSNBC.
The documentary, still in the works, is about the Global War on Terrorism, and what it has done to our military, economy and American society in general. Perhaps because the subject was on my mind, I found a recent travel experience especially meaningful.
Through my work I travel to some of the busiest airports in high-risk areas. Just this year I have been in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain, Libya, France, Italy and many other countries. But I have yet to feel so angry, so embarrassed or so scrutinized as I did going through airport security for a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to New York’s JFK while visiting home.
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I’ve watched American troops fight, and sometimes die, to drive the Taliban and al-Qaida from Afghanistan, and to secure free elections in Iraq. They have been fighting for other people to be free. I was horrified to see that despite their sacrifices we’d let ourselves become a nation that appears to be driven by fear.
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But at the airport, watching a 7-year-old girl go through a full body scan in public – just so she could fly out of the city of Los Angeles – made me wonder how much we have lost.
Phi Beta Iota: The Founding Fathers do not approve….
Thomas Jefferson:A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.
Thomas Jefferson:Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
James Madison:Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Below is an important and interesting analysis of John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World of the “mood” of the House on defense issues. I do not agree with all of the characterizations or implications (and I agree with some), but I do believe John (whom I have known professionally with respect for almost four decades) has collected some significant information. From this and other data, I conclude:
1) No one should be surprised at the House' ambivalence on a defense issue like Libya. It has been the hallmark of Congress for longer than I can recall to permit presidents to do as they please internationally while sniping from the sidelines and avoiding taking responsibility;
2) Congress pats itself on its own back for pretending to support frugality in the Pentagon by taking easy votes such as against the second engine for the F-35 (which SecDef Gates successfully painted as a pork program) and against a piece of the DOD funding for military bands (see below). The size of the votes on matters that are actually significant, such as the Barney Frank/Ron Paul and the Mulvaney amendments to cut from $8.5 to $17 billion from the 2012 DOD budget, shows a new high-water mark for budget cutting in the Pentagon not seen in Congress since — by my recollection — in the mid-1980s when the so-called Military Reform Caucus and budget cutters like Chuck Grassley were fully active.
The Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) is a direct descendant of the failed U.S. Army Future Combat System Program (FCS) which was cancelled in 2009 after a cost of some $18 billion dollars. The goals of the FCS Program were always somewhat ambiguous, but included the concept of “Network Centric Warfare”; the principal military advocate of which was the late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (U.S. Navy). Since his death his total vision of Network Centric Warfare (NCW) has found no strong advocate, but one component of NCW has been adopted by both the U.S. Navy and the Air Force namely an information focused command and control system under the acronym of C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers (C4) Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR)).
(See Network-Centric Warfare by Norman Friedman (Naval Institute Press 2009))
Since each of the U.S. Military Services operate in a vacuum, to my knowledge the U.S. Army never approached either the Navy or the Air Force to share their experiences with NCW before or after launching the FCS Program. The DCGS is of course the information management component of a C4ISR decision making system. From the sound of it the U.S. Army spent over $2 billion dollars on an information system that not only did not benefit from Navy or Air Force experiences with similar systems, but whose designer had no understanding the basic analytic needs of troops who were going to use the system. Indeed the various program managers apparently did not talk to each other let alone the analysts in the field that were going to use it. This is all the more inexcusable because ten years ago the necessary applications to retrieve multi-source data, organize it, and display it using GIS was already in use. (I and many other analysts routinely used this combination for analysis and production.) To design a system today which cannot do this with ease is criminally incompetent. This is what happens when the Military Services, in this case, the U.S. Army are devoid of institutional memory and operate in nearly complete isolation. This is an area where the near somnolent Joint Chiefs ought to act, but are clearly too wrapped up in enhancing their own parochial interests.
Phi Beta Iota: The above remarks were inspired by DefDog: US Army Blows Intelligence Computing (Again)…. All signs point toward the complete collapse of the US Government, including the Department of Defense (DoD), as a legitimate capable entity in both international and domestic state and local eyes. More and more we are seeing hybrid constellations that have come to the realization that they cannot trust the US Government, they cannot rely on the US Government for valid actionable information or intelligence (decision-support), and they need not fear the US Government as long as they are “not an expensive enough problem.” We now look to selected Governors, chambers of commerce, universities, professional associations, and perhaps a few enlightened national governments to begin shaping the new world network. Through its own arrogance and ignorance, the US Government has cut itself off from reality and is unable to adapt to the new paradigm where sharing rather than secrecy, integrity rather than ideology, and intelligence rather than force, are the new rules of the game.
The Distributed Common Ground System, the US Army's 2.7 billion dollars computing system that was designed to share intelligence with troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, has proved to be a bit of a dud because ‘it doesn't work' properly, analysts have said.
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However, analysts believe that the DCGS-A was unable to perform simple analytical tasks in the past, and complained that its search tool made finding the information difficult. They also said that the software that is used to map the information was not compatible with the search software.
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They also detailed problems with the hardware, insisting that the system is vulnerable because it is prone to crashes and faces dangers of going off-line frequently.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the norm for all acquisition now. Apart from needing integrity in all matters, the information paradigm must change, as so many outlined from 1988 onwards.
Wall Street often tries to play down its influence in Washington. As Congress pushed through financial regulations that seemed to get watered down last year, Wall Street’s chief executives tried to suggest, somewhat surprisingly, that their highly paid lobbyists did not have much sway.
If there is still any question about how much power Wall Street actually has in Washington, here is some fresh evidence worth examining.
In a piece of legislation recently passed by the House and the Senate to revamp patent law, a tiny provision was inserted at the last minute called Section 18.
The provision, which my colleague Edward Wyatt detailed in an article ahead of the House’s vote on the bill last month, has only one purpose: to allow the banking industry to skirt paying for certain important patents involving “business methods.”
The provision even allows “retroactive reviews of approved business method patents, allowing the financial services industry to challenge patents that have already been found valid both at the U.S. Patent and Trade Office and in Federal Court,” according to Representative Aaron Schock, an Illinois Republican who tried to strike the provision.
Phi Beta Iota: In the absence of accountability, holistic analytics, and transparency, it is very easy for specific individuals to give up their integrity. The implications of this are breath-taking: Wall Street is showing it can legislate retrospective and ex post facto crime, not just future crime.
Phi Beta Iota: This really excellent article is highly recommended along with a look at the only book in English out just now, Geo-Engineering Climate Change: Environmental Necessity or Pandora's Box?. The fragmentation of knowledge, the corruption of governments and industry, and the abuse of secrecy to conceal the real dimensions of earthquake and tsunami creating technologies–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP being one set–all suggest that precautionary science has been set aside, and catastrophic initiatives are being undertaken on a foundation of very inadequate understanding. This is the kind of global challenge and response that should be within the purview of a Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) Centre that can be relied upon to produce “The Virgin Truth.”
