Category: Corruption

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Angst from Afghanistan: A Grunt’s Statement

10 Security, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
DefDog Recommends....

From a brave but frustrated front-line infantry leader.    Shades of SLA Marshall!

as the Army stands down from conflict life will get very dull……

Yeah I am dreading that and honestly I LOVE the Army. It's always the politics. Just like the article I read on MSNBC talking about the new strategy is to do “surgical strikes”. One of my favorite quotes ever is “Bombing from a B-52 is very effective. The bombs always hit the ground.”  I just think it is funny when you blow up a mud hut in some shit hole country people think it makes a difference. It doesn't and at the end of a week the mud hut is back and it's back to whatever it was doing before it
was destroyed. Bombardment denies enemy the terrain only as long as stuff is exploding. Once the explosions stop anybody can walk through there.  That is why nothing has ever beat the infantryman. It's why the Infantry has been around since the dawn of armies.

People are complaining about the cost of the wars and here again it's Politics. Congressman and Senators
and the general public forcing equipment training and standards onto the military that is may not necessarily need or want. We have cooks in the army we don't need the KBR chow-halls. I have two good legs and feet I
don't need a truck most of the time. I definitely don't want these MRAP's that I am being FORCED to use. Give me a soft skin Humvee a mission, beans and bullets and look see what I can do. Body armor, armored vehicles and these chu's while yes they are nice they aren't necessary. Somewhere though somebody thought it should be the rule and not the exception and here we are trillions of dollars later and for what. I don't really blame
army leadership as much as politics. I don't mean politicians either although they are the cause of a lot of this pain. Family and friends back home, bystanders and people who think their opinion should matter are
complaining that people are dying in Humvee's and we need something better. Hence the MRAP. People wanna know why the military doesn't have body armor and hell cops do. Cops don't carry near the gear and ride
around on motorcycles or in cars. Take away some of my crap and let me walk, I won't get blown up as much cause I am not walking on  a road, I will be able to think clearer because I am not so miserable and let me
kill the bad guys so I feel there is a purpose. To the victor goes the spoils, but since when is the spoils of war rebuilding the losers country then leaving it???

Phi Beta Iota: DefDog refers to Review (Guest): The Soldier’s Load and the Mobility of a Nation.  The USA does not have light infantry.  As MajGen Bob Scales has observed, we spend 1% of the budget on the 4% of the force that takes 80% of the casualties.

See Also:

New Army Chief of Staff: Out of Touch? NEW: Blistering Bullshit Flag Waved from Afghanistan

Review (Guest): On Infantry

Review: Phantom Soldier–The Enemy’s Answer to U.S. Firepower

Review: War is a Racket–The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

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Open Source Insurgency = System Disruption

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence
John Robb

Thursday, 30 June 2011

WAR NERD: How the IRA used Systems Disruption

I've enjoyed The War Nerd for years.  Great, colorful writing.  The author of the column, “Gary Brecher,” was never on the same page as me when it came to warfare.  However, that's changed.

He now thinks, and makes an excellent case for global guerrilla thinking.  In short: that blood and guts warfare is counter productive and that systems disruption (hiting network systempunkts/nodes to generate high ROI‘s and publicity) is a potential path to long term victory for guerrillas.  In short: in the modern context, if you keep the blood/guts to a min, and keep the cost ratio massively in your favor while staying alive, you will eventually win.

To demonstrate this, he has a great article on how the IRA eventually adopted systems disruption:

“In 1994, they took the idea of non-lethal warfare a notch up by doing one of the most revolutionary things any guerrilla army has ever done: IRA mortar teams dropped shells on the runways at Heathrow Airport, totally stopping air traffic… but the shells weren’t even designed to explode. Intentional duds. That’s amazing; I’ve never heard of anything like that. It shows how far they’d come by that stage, away from the simple Al Qaeda maximum-blood crap I bought into in that earlier article.  In contemporary urban guerrilla warfare, at least in Western Europe, killing civvies is counterproductive. What you want to do, what the IRA had mastered by the 1990s, was messing with the incredibly fragile and expensive networks that keep a huge city going. Interrupt them and you cost the enemy billions of dollars, and they don’t even have any gory corpses to shake in your faces. Fucking brilliant, and I was too dumb to see it!

Continue reading “Open Source Insurgency = System Disruption”

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Obama Honors Gates for Civility

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military
Who, Me?

Obama made it clear today….civility is the Washington D.C. substitute for integrity.  Go along with with military-industrial complex and you get the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Speak truth to power, and you lose your job.  Land of the free and home of the brave?  Not in Washington, D.C.

Phi Beta Iota: These are smart people.  To tell the lies they do, to behave as they do, is not out of ignorance.  It is the elevation of personal greed and political ideology over integrity.  The Republicans are just as guilty–one bird, two wings, same stink.

See Also:

Journal: Reflections on Integrity

Search: Gates sniffed

Bob Gates: Flat Out Liar or Just Feeble? + RECAP

Bob Gates Spins Exit from Afghanistan

Robert Gates: A Brilliant Career — As a Courtier

Bob Gates, Chief Maintenance Clerk, Talks Crap — and the Wall Street Journal Goes Along…

Robert Gates: Spendthrift Ace of Double-Speak

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TDL-4 Rules–Industrial Era Governments Helpless

07 Other Atrocities, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Corruption, IO Impotency, Key Players, Policies, Real Time, Standards, Technologies
Click on Image to Enlarge

New Botnet, Now 4.5 Million Machines Strong, is ‘Practically Indestructible'

Today in cyber threats: more than four million Windows PCs have been commandeered by a botnet that cybersecurity experts are calling nearly “indestructible.” Known as TDL-4 (it’s the fourth iteration of the malicious program), this particular little nuisance hides in places security software rarely checks and speaks with other infected machines and their overseers in a novel encrypted code. Some are calling it the most sophisticated threat out there today. Watch your back, Stuxnet.

Read rest of story….

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the known fact that the US Government ignored documented warning from Winn Schwartau, Jim Anderson, Bill Caelli, and Robert Steele in 1994, what we have here is the culimination of fifteen years in which governments continue to operate as Industrial Era hierarchies, choosing secrecy to protect incompetence rather than multinational sharing to achieve resilience–they are as a result inept beyond belief.  The cloud–given the plethora of proprietary and therefore generally insecure hardware and software–is not going to be cleaned up on the present course, where spam is 75% of all email despite the best (isolated) efforts of all concerned.  M4IS2, anyone?

See Also:

Journal: Army Industrial-Era Network Security + Cyber-Security RECAP (Links to Past Posts)

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

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Cost of War: Obama and Dr. Gates Both Lie….

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Winslow Wheeler

Released Wednesday by the sponsoring Watson Institute of Brown University, a new multi-author study of the costs of the post-9/11 wars is available.  Most prominently, the study finds the appropriations thus far to have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion to already have been incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This would make a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion. (Find a summary of these costs at http://costsofwar.org/article/economic-cost-summary.)  It is important to note that these are basically budget costs to the federal government, not the broader economic costs to the economy or other costs to state and local governments.

The study also addresses still other expenses, such as the human costs in terms of civilian dead, the wounded, refugees, and more.

There is certainly some you will find to disagree with, but it is clear that advocates of the various conflicts who pretend the costs have been only the $1 trillion that President Obama articulated last week are feeding the nation grotesquely inaccurate information.  Others, like departing SecDef Gates, who pretend that DOD spending is not a major factor in the size of our deficit are not particularly skilled in “math,” an elementary skill for government types that Secretary Gates has chosen to deride and to leave to others to perform.

I participated in the Costs of War study; see my paper on the DOD .  It makes two basic points on p. 14:

1) “… while [the Congressional Research Service] and others have done long, hard, and excellent work to capture the identifiable appropriations to the Pentagon for the Post-9/11 wars, the $1.2 trillion CRS has, for example, identified in current dollars is problematic, but the fault is not with CRS, CBO, or GAO. The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.”

2) “The $667 billion in 2011 dollars ($617 billion in current dollars) appropriated to the Defense Department's base budget since 2001 as a result of the wars, while squandered, should be included in any comprehensive attempt to capture the total cost of the wars. These amounts would bring the total DOD costs of the wars to $1.98 Trillion in constant 2011 dollars and $1.82 trillion in current dollars.”

A Reuters story below summarizes the overall “Costs of War” study.

Cost of war at least $3.7 trillion and counting

By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK | Wed Jun 29, 2011

(Reuters) – When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars.

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above.  Brown, like Rutgers, is a hotbed of left-leaning intellectuals who probably wonder how a Democratic President could have become a neo-fascist war-monger.  The answer is simple: corruption has no ideology.  It is pervasive.  Interestingly, the wire services (AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg on occasion) and Russian Television as well as Al Jazeera, are emerging from this period as examples of integrity in action.

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Landmark Afghan hotel attacked

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military
Click on Image to Enlarge

UPDATED to add photo.  Guards at the front door, no guards across the totally exposed back end.  Sheraton San Salvador was attacked from the ravine.   Deja vu.

Landmark Afghan hotel attacked

Los Angeles Times, 28 June 2011

Gunmen and suicide bombers strike the tightly secured Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, which has large foreign clientele. It was not immediately known how many people were killed or wounded.

Read full article…

Phi Beta Iota: Well-intentioned professionals like to say that if the US only has enough will to persist, it can prevail against any enemy.  That is not correct.  When the US engaged in elective wars and lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the occupied public, it will inevitably lose.  When the US Government is delusional and ignoring the harsh realities at home, it loses its domestic legitimacy.  Events like the Tet Offensive, or the increasing attacks in the heart of Kabul, accentuate the cognitive dissonance among all parties.  This will not end well for the US.

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Structural Power and Federal Feudalism

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Nathan Allen

While the U.S. government may be described as a massive wealth transferring scheme, looting the middle class for the elite, I’d suggest that ‘wealth’ and ‘elite’ are not precisely correct. The transformation in Western power structures over past three centuries is such that the ‘elite’ was formerly indistinguishable from the government, which is the hallmark of feudal government; whereas now, the locus of power is the government itself, not any particular group of people.

We still find the old system at work in dictatorships – Libya, N. Korea – in which the government is indistinguishable from a small group of people and for whom wealth accumulation is the primary goal.

But wealth isn’t the primary goal of western governments; they have a nearly unlimited ability to create their own wealth (debt and printing money) – or destroy it (debt and printing money). The primary concern of these supposedly post-feudal governments is stability and power, and their primary means to securing these ends is patronage.

Patronage existed in feudal governments, but it was a means to an end (wealth accumulation), and not the end in itself. As such, it’s then not surprising that the primary purpose of most government endeavors – the education and court systems, intelligence communities, healthcare – is to employ the greatest number of people, thus securing widespread government support. Critical mass is reached when a simple majority of the voters earn >50% of their income from government sources – there are people who work for a living and people who vote for a living, and once the latter reaches >50%, the former becomes politically irrelevant.

Continue reading “Structural Power and Federal Feudalism”