Ineptitude – Page 114 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/01/292013/01/29

Rob Dover: Intelligence Failures in Syria & Algeria — Is Open Source Everything an Alternative? Steele Comments

#OSE Open Source Everything, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Syria, Mali, Algerian gas-works and ‘Open Source Everything’

Read any government security document, any of the national security strategies produced by a now large number of states and you will get a feel for the proliferation in the number of threats they feel they face. The preamble will normally contain a paragraph explaining that after the Cold War or after 9/11 everything got a little more complex, a little less explicable.

Heightened complexity in the international system appears to have coincided (and is only partially causally linked) to the increased levels of activity/ improvements in technology, social media etc. The rate at which information can be collected has increased, even if the sort of information being collected is broadly the same.

The problem of accounting for events like the Algerian gas-plant siege a few weeks ago (or the development of the insurgency in Syria, or in the hijacking of the state in Mali) for state-based security organisations is that their resources allocated in such a way that it logical for them to be looking the wrong way when this happens. It would be unlikely – although we can’t be sure, obviously – that there’s a bod in every security community across Europe pondering the safety of gas-plants in the ME and Maghreb. So, when this happens the information required to rapidly come down the pipe needs to be hastily scoped and drawn in. And this got me thinking about Robert Steele’s ‘open source everything’ manifesto (I declare the interest that Robert has written a chapter for the Routledge Handbook on Intelligence that I, Mike Goodman and Claudia Hillebrand have compiled and which will be in a good bookshops from August, and that he and I have corresponded at length about these issues), and how it could be used or applied in these circumstances. I have my own take on this, and I’ve provided the link above to the source: Robert also has a good search on his name I think so I’d guess he’ll correct me in comments too! But my wonder is more in the aggregation of huge quantities of information.

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2013/01/272013/01/27

DefDog: CyberCom is a Joke. Does Boosting Its Numbers Fivefold Make it a Travesty? Memo to Hagel: Start Here.

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military

Cybercom is a joke. This is insane.

Pentagon to boost cybersecurity force

By Ellen Nakashima, Sunday, January 27, 5:42 PM

The Pentagon has approved a major expansion of its cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold to bolster the nation’s ability to defend critical computer systems and conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries, according to U.S. officials.

The move, requested by the head of the Defense Department’s Cyber Command, is part of an effort to build an organization that until now has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force. The command, made up of about 900 personnel, will expand to include 4,900 troops and civilians.

Details of the plan have not been finalized, but the decision to expand the Cyber Command was made by senior Pentagon officials late last year in recognition of a growing threat in cyberspace, said officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the expansion has not been formally announced. The gravity of that threat, they said, has been highlighted by a string of sabotage attacks, including one in which a virus was used to wipe data from more than 30,000 computers at a Saudi Arabian state oil company last summer.

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2013/01/262013/01/26

Marcus Aurelius: New Special Forces Command, Mexico as Rabbit Hole, Zetas on Steroids Coming Soon

Government, Ineptitude, Military

Invite your attention to both article immediately below and four comments on it, second below. Some of the comments appear pretty sound to me. Integrity of any institution of Mexican (MX) government seems questionable — “plata o plumba” is a long tradition in Latin America and the MX government has been in the press many times for corruption. They are reportedly using screening polygraphs on a very widespread basis and I'm not sure it's getting them what they thought it would. Of course, DHS law enforcement agencies operating along the border and recruiting Spanish-speaking employees from the region are having the same problems. I think the former SF weapons sergeant (18B) is sort of prescient — the proposed program for SF to train MX commandos may not turn out well for the US if it is in fact true.

Special forces create new command to train Mexican troops

January 18, 2013 12:00 am • Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is stepping up aid for Mexico's bloody drug war with a new U.S.-based special operations headquarters to teach Mexican security forces how to hunt drug cartels the same way special operations teams hunt al-Qaida, according to documents and interviews with multiple U.S. officials.

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2013/01/262013/01/26

Chuck Spinney: Into the Sahel Rabbit Hole….

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

This is a very important report by highly regarded scholar of the region, especially Algeria.

Call to arms will bring no peace to Sahel

Region cannot be returned to Mali’s control militarily, says Hugh Roberts

By Hugh Roberts, Financial Times, January 24, 2013 6:03 pm

The writer is Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University

David Cameron’s vision of decades of global counter-terrorist struggle in north Africa sounded like the promise of doom to anyone who cares about the region. The Sahel’s terrorism problem dates back no further than 2003 – the west’s global war on terror gave birth to it; the west’s part in the destruction of Muammer Gaddafi’s Libya aggravated it; and France’s decision to pursue another war in Mali is expanding it.

In 2003, two drastic changes occurred. Washington launched its Pan-Sahel Initiative, soon renamed the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative; and a branch of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known by its French acronym of GSPC) migrated from north-eastern Algeria to the far south of the Algerian Sahara, announcing its arrival with the abduction of 32 European tourists that year.

These developments were linked. In its drive to involve itself in the Sahel, where it blithely trespassed on France’s traditional sphere of influence, the Pentagon massively hyped the terrorist threat. But what really made the PSI feasible was Algeria’s involvement. Algiers had seized on the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 to align itself with US President George W. Bush’s war on terror. One reason for this was to avoid being marked for destruction, like Iraq. But the country also saw an opportunity to resume normal relations with its western partners, following a French-led boycott begun after a 1994 terrorist attack on an Air France flight.

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2013/01/262013/01/26

Chuck Spinney: Why we lose wars at ever increasing cost…

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Don't hold your breath: One impediment to understanding what works and what does not work in war is an out-of-control secrecy system that clogs up DoD's own OODA loops with over-classified needlessly compartmented information. The barriers within this system work to stretch out our own decision cycles. But, as the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed, one of the central objectives implicit in any military strategy is to stretch out the OODA loops governing your adversary's decision cycles. Operating inside your adversary's OODA loops enables you to disconnect his decisions from the reality and collapse him into confusion and disorder (short explanation here, longer explanations here). So, stretching out your own loops is, ipso facto, really loopy.

The attached report by Scott Shane may seem hilarious, but it is really an outward symptom of the much deeper strategic problem posed by the compartmented nature of this self-inflicted wound. Think about the mentality that fuels a predilection to burn books that reveal harmless chickenshit details — like, for example, the widely used nickname for National Security Agency and the real name of Baghram Air Force base, a name that became well known to the entire world during the Soviet Union's aborted occupation, or the reclassification of an unclassified citation for a bronze star medal. Is this the behaviour of decision making system that is tightly connected to its own environment and is trying to improve its performance by learning from experience? To ask this question is to answer it.

Of course, understanding how we disconnected our own decisions from reality in hot wars does not matter: The epistemological essence of a mindset ruled by the secret compartments of the military-technical revolution is that the future will be different from the past. We are leaving the hot war in Afghanistan and an intensification of the secrecy system will be necessary to extract ever larger amounts of taxpayer dollars to fund the super-secret deep strike ‘precision' weapons which lie at the heart of the Obama's strategic pivot to a new cold war focused on China.

Pentagon Reverses Some of Its Censoring of a War Book

By SCOTT SHANE

New York Times, January 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — In an illustration of the government’s changeable ideas of what should be secret, Pentagon censors have decided that nearly half of more than 400 passages deleted from an Afghan war memoir can be printed without damaging national security.

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2013/01/252013/01/25

Penguin: Open-Ended Global War on “Terrorism”

08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, Military, Officers Call

Cannot help but remember the graphic on terrorism as a boil.

Haven't We Seen This Movie Before?

The Open-Ended Global War on Terrorism

PEPE ESCOBAR

Asia Times, 23 January 2013

And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to… The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It’s now official – coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at theAFRICOM site, the Pentagon’s weaponized African branch.

Exit “historical” al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey’s words, AQIM “is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if… left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat.”

With Mali now elevated to the status of a “threat” to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn’t do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression “The Long War”, they really meant it.

Even under President Obama 2.0′s “leading from behind” doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali – and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will “attack American interests”.

Thus, the first 100 US military “advisers” are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana – the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.

Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending “advisers” was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.

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2013/01/232013/01/23

Hillary Clinton: Covering Up Benghazi

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

Phi Beta Iota: Our interpretation of today's live broadcast of testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

01 She was not consulted about Ambassador Rice being the point person for publicly presenting the talking points butchered by the White House. She was allegedly in town and monitoring demonstrations in Egypt rather than the security situation in Libya. She may actually have been in Iran.

02 She dissembless on when and how Washington knew the Benghazi attack was a full scale attack rather than a protest.

03 She dissembles on the lack of military response, drawing on Admiral Mike Mullen's nonsense about no military assets being available. Everyone is covering up for Leon Panetta, including John McCain.

04 She dances very elegantly around the fact that Benghazi was a CIA base for which the Department of State was in no way responsible for security.

05 The precise circumstances of how a US Ambassador got into Benghaze and was left to die in a room with no ventilation have not been addressed.

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