Here’s how serious the U.S. is about its African war on terror. The Pentagon is preparing to spend millions to create a privatized flying taxi service to fly its commandos everywhere from Libya to Congo.
That’s according to details in a recent solicitation notice for a Defense Department contract worth up to $50 million, expected to be handed over to a private contracting firm in August. Among the two main tasks contractors will be expected to carry out: medical evacuations during “high risk activities” — capable of being launched within a three-hour notice — as well as transporting equipment and commandos from Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara (or JSOTF-TS) within the borders of potentially 20 African nations. When you want to keep a U.S. military footprint small, you have to contract out a lot of logistics services.
Based at a secretive military airfield in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the contractors will be tasked with missions across central and northern Africa, with the most likely destinations being Chad, Libya, Mali, Mauritania and other countries including Algeria, Cameroon and Nigeria. Less likely, but within the contractor’s “primary operating areas,” are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan and Uganda — all suspected to be likely hiding spots for warlord Joseph Kony.
Someone smarter than me wrote this in an email. Scary stuff, seems to be right on target.
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The freight train bearing down on us is the Millennials – 80 million strong, 15% unemployment, that's 6 million 18 to 34 males who are fucked. How many have hardcore urban combat experience from Iraq or open country insurgency skills from AfPak?
Oklahoma City & D.C. Sniper came from 38 days of ground combat during Desert Storm. Now we get TBI guys who've done three tours and get screwed out of benefits with a PDO discharge because the VA doesn't want to deal? Ticking bomb, size XXXXL, and it's all around us.
So when does it flip from an edgy theory into a “holy shit how do we stop THAT?” Can't say for sure, but it'll be like trying to un-tornado a house once it gets moving …
Phi Beta Iota: The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.
Since the defense budget roll out on Wednesday, April 10, Pentagon budget geeks all over Washington have been popping Ibuprofen trying to unscramble the mess that DOD and OMB have made out of the 2013 and 2014 defense budgets. My take on this dysfunction is explained below.
By the way, I don't blame Secretary Hagel for this junking of budget ethics and smarts; he's too new to the job, but his time for using that as an excuse is fast running out.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, unveil the Pentagon's 2014 budget request Wednesday.
Budgets are important documents: they are the ultimate expression of policy by a President or Congress.
Budgets are also a useful revelation of the character and competence of those who put them together.
President Obama's budget presentation for the Department of Defense and national security-related activities outside of the Defense Department is useless for understanding what he and Congress have enacted for the current 2013 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
The budget material for 2014 also shows there is no new thinking in the Obama Administration for putting U.S. national security spending on a constructive path. Given the dysfunctional Congress that's getting the new budget, we should expect the worst: delay, chaos and decisions to increase, not control, costs.
Some $4 billion is being cut from the National Intelligence Program this year as a result of sequestration, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing today. He said that the consequences will be severe. Acquisition programs will be “wounded,” ongoing programs will have to be curtailed, and the ensuing degradation of intelligence capabilities will be “insidious” with unforeseeable effects, he said.
Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed yesterday that the FY 2014 budget request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) is $48.2 billion. However, this figure excludes the pending funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), so it cannot be directly compared to previous budget allocations, such as the $53.9 billion that was appropriated in FY 2012, or the $52.6 billion that was requested for FY 2013. A summary of the FY 2014 budget request is here.
The Secretary of Defense also disclosed the FY 2014 budget request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) yesterday, which was $14.6 billion. It also did not include the funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations. This is a slight decline from the $14.7 billion base request for the MIP last year. (An additional $4.5 billion was known to have been requested for OCO in the past fiscal year.)
Total intelligence spending (NIP plus MIP) peaked in Fiscal Year 2010, and has been on a downward slope since then. Intelligence budget disclosures from the last several years are tabulated here.
The NIP intelligence budget request was publicly disclosed for the first time in February 2011, in response to a requirement enacted by Congress in the FY 2010 intelligence authorization act. The MIP intelligence budget request was disclosed for the first time in February 2012, even though there was no specific statutory requirement to do so.
Phi Beta Iota: With Special Operations now playing a greater intelligence role, one could argue that both the black and the green budgets should be considered together to get a true total of US Government secret and covert operations — and of course that is only what is on the books, not all the stuff funded by Saudi Arabia, indirectly via Israel, and other third party players. The “priorities” in the highlights are vapor — and reaffirm that the US IC is not at all interested in actually producing decision support for Whole of Government planning, programming, budgeting, and execution (PPBS/E).
Since the 9/11 attacks, a dramatic shift has occurred in the way the United States deploys its military and intelligence forces. In his new book, “The Way of the Knife,” Mark Mazzetti documents the militarization of the CIA and the stepped-up intelligence focus of Special Operations forces. As Mazzetti observes in his deeply reported and crisply written account, over the past decade “the CIA’s top priority was no longer gathering intelligence on foreign governments and their countries, but man hunting.” The bin Laden operation was far from the only deadly mission that Panetta presided over.
The CDC has produced junk science that demonstrates absolutely nothing, but claims it shows no connection between autism and the vaccine schedule. It's now spinning it as if it proves that there's no link between the modern day nightmare of autism and the vaccines that they push for Big Pharma. Here's the evidence.
U.K. businesses waste billions a year on tech investment
According to new research, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the U.K. habitually waste money on IT products and services they don’t need.
IT software provider SolarWinds released a new study today which examines what challenges IT staff face in small and medium businesses this year. Reaching out to 500 firms in the U.K. and Germany, the study found that although IT budgets have remained the same or increased over the last five years in 93 percent of SMEs, over 75 percent of firms are wasting money.
On average, IT employees said that roughly 12 percent of software, once purchased, remained in its box gathering dust. However, in 87 percent of businesses, this figure reached 50 percent. The researchers note that on average, £11,962 is spent on IT management software annually by 4.8 billion U.K. SMEs, and so this can translate into £6.89 billion a year being wasted.
