Flagged by Marcus Aurelius. Bing West, former Marine and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration, has put some straight-forwawrd words into the Small Wars Journal with a bottom-line that has been known to all of us for decades, but merits repetition over and over again until we finally restore integrity to the national security decision-making process.
Our soldiers only get a small number of chances to engage the enemy. Our battalions average one arrest every two months, and one platoon-sized patrol per day per company that infrequently makes solid contact. On average, a US rifleman will glimpse a Taliban once a month.
Sometimes reality and fantasy collide in extraordinary ways. Below are four headlines and teaser editorial comments, click on the headlines to read the details, but the details do not really matter, here is the lunacy all together in one pot.
August's Communications of the ACM has an interesting article: “An Ethics Code for U.S. Intelligence Officers,” by former NSAers Brian Snow and Clint Brooks. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the code:
Draft Statement of Ethics for the Intelligence Community
Preamble: Intelligence work may present exceptional or unusual ethical dilemmas beyond those of ordinary life. Ethical thinking and review should be a part of our day to day efforts; it can protect our nation's and our agency’s integrity, improve the chances of mission success, protect us from the consequences of bad choices, and preserve our alliances. Therefore, we adhere to the following standards of professional ethics and behavior:
Our failure to plan for the return of our soldiers wounded in our Global War on Terrorism has made it necessary to examine our unprepared and overwhelmed military/veterans health care system. Much is at stake. We are engaged in de facto perpetual war that depends on volunteers for victory. On July 31, after five months of analysis and deliberation, the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors will present its recommendations. Co-Chairs Senator Bob Dole and former Secretary of Health Donna Shalala, both experienced and deeply committed to the task, will propose changes. The most significant effects of their recommendations upon the Nation and our maimed, cognitively impaired and traumatized service members and their families will accrue over a generation or more.
On that not yet foreseeable day when oil flows out of Iraq and international oil interests trumpet the event, wounded veterans will be reminded anew of their enduring courage and self-sacrifice, a gift to the Nation that made it possible for the rest of us to avoid conscription. Fraught with combat memories, flashbacks, and disabilities, that reminder could never be sweet, but it will not be bitter if they find themselves as welcome in rehabilitation as they were in recruitment.
When the Commission presents its recommendations, some 3,200 of our volunteer soldiers will have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about 900 will have died of “non-hostile” accidents, heat exhaustion and illness. Officially, about 28,075 have already been wounded: unofficial but authoritative analysis nearly doubles that number. But the signature wound of this war is a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) resulting from the blast forces of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Blast-TBI (bTBI) is invisible to the naked eye as is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Military doctors tell us that the official count underestimates the number of our soldiers who will return to their families, communities and employers with TBI’s slowed thinking, deficits in attention and concentration, headaches, memory loss, sleep disturbance, and irritability and with PTSD’s flashbacks and crippling emotional conditions. The number of invisibly wounded soldiers now exceeds the number of visibly wounded. We must not feign blindness to the epidemic we have brought home from this war.
The Intelligence Community’s Neglect of Strategic Intelligence
Commonly misunderstood, we neglect it at our peril. The architects of the National Security Act of 1947 would be greatly surprised by today’s neglect of strategic intelligence in the Intelligence Community.
