Ineptitude – Page 56 – Public Intelligence Blog

The Intelligence Community Needs a New Workforce Model

It’s a new world for the 17 agencies within the intelligence community. Their budgets are shrinking in the face of an undiminished threat landscape and a growing list of cyber-adversaries.

The IC can do a lot of things, but it can’t make money grow on trees. It faces a grand workforce challenge: Smaller budgets. Reduced hiring. Increased uncertainty. The problems are magnified significantly during national security events that require a surge of talent.

With all that in mind, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance developed a task force of former senior intelligence officials and stakeholders from industry and academia to explore potential solutions. The resulting white paper released May 7, titled “Smart Change II: Preparing the Intelligence Community Workforce for an Evolving Threat and Fiscal Environment,” is a sequel to an initial INSA-led effort in 2011.

The white paper outlines several ways the IC could ensure a continuous assessment of strategic risk related to workforce reductions and proposes an overarching framework for civilian, military and contractor components of the IC that would guide strategic planning and management decisions.

“Budget constraints are the reality now,” said Deborah Kircher, Chief Human Capital Officer for the Office of the National Director of Intelligence, speaking at a Strategic Manpower Planning event hosted by Nextgov.

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2014/05/062014/05/07

Mini-Me: US Army DCGS-A Failures — and Palantir Keeps Trying to Over-Sell Its Shallow Pit

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

Huh?

Internal Army Report’s Damning Conclusion on a System Meant to Protect Our Troops

Editor’s Note: This is the third part in an investigative series by TheBlaze into how top Army officials failed to provide necessary technology to troops on the battlefield, choosing to promote their own flawed software instead. Read part one and part two here.

In January, members of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team trained to track enemy combatants and bombs were inputing data into a $4 billion software system developed by the Army.

ADVANCE EXTRACT: A total of 60 companies were involved in the Army’s DCGS-A program. The four largest were defense weapons developers, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. “They have no play in the global commercial IT market, no standing at all,” said an IT specialist who works with both the government and private sector and is familiar with Defense programs. The specialist spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. “The cost to the taxpayer is extraordinary for products that already exist.”

The software was intended to give military analysts the life-saving tools they needed to be one step ahead of the enemy.

Instead, it shut down, losing all of the valuable data the unit members had uploaded, according to an after-action report obtained exclusively by TheBlaze.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: US Army DCGS-A Failures — and Palantir Keeps Trying to Over-Sell Its Shallow Pit”

2014/05/052014/05/05

SchwartzReport: US Nuclear Infrastructure a Radioactive Time Bomb — We Are Not Ready and USG Lies to the Public About This…

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Officers Call

Here we have a pretty realistic take on the state of the U.S. nuclear industry. We have been so lucky not to have had a crisis like Chernobyl. Click through to see the supporting graphics.

Our Nuclear Infrastructure Is a Radioactive Time Bomb
BRENDAN SCOTT – Vice News

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has had a busy few weeks. Last month, thanks to Freedom of Information Act queries filed by numerous organizations, the Commission was forced to disclose a dossier of emails showing the lengths it had gone to in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster to downplay the risk of a similar catastrophe happening in the US. The correspondence showed a startling lack of preparedness.

In one example, NRC public affairs officer David McIntyre offered his opinion on what Energy Secretary Steven Chu should have done when asked by CNN whether American nuclear plants could withstand a force 9.0 earthquake: ‘He should just say, ‘Yes, it can.’ Worry about being wrong when it doesn't. Sorry if I sound cynical.”

The documents also show a background briefing for then NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko and other commissioners that split intelligence into ‘public answer” and “additional technical, non-public information.” In some cases the NRC withheld crucial details and misdirected the media.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: US Nuclear Infrastructure a Radioactive Time Bomb — We Are Not Ready and USG Lies to the Public About This…”

2014/05/032014/05/04

Anonymous Feedback on Robert Steele’s Appraisal of Analytic Foundations — Agreement & Extension

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, IO Sense-Making, Military, Officers Call

Robert,

I read your appraisal over several times. Essentially, in my opinion, your understanding of the problems continues to be on the mark and remarkably consistent over the last twenty or so years. Yet your work on both the process and products of intelligence is very high level and in this latest appraisal, as in your previous works, you leave it up to the imagination of the reader to figure out how to actually implement the ideas you so eloquently express. This I think is a mistake in that potential employers, impressed with you macro ideas, would be interested in how these ideas could be brought to the implementation stage. Attached is a supplement to your appraisal on collection and analysis.

In any event I hope that this finds you well and upbeat. You deserve a position that would reflect both your knowledge and your commitment to saving the IC from itself.

A Fan

ROBERT STEELE: The time has indeed come to create an alternative to the existing system. I have started to work with a select group across the emergent M4IS2/OSE network, on a firm geospatial foundation. While many of my ideas have been mis-appropriated and corrupted over the past 20 years, no one has actually attempted to implement the coherent vision — sources, softwares, and services all in one, and this time around, all open source, all multi-everything. The PhD thesis, the School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance, and the World Brain Institute — and perhaps even the Open Source Agency as a non-US international body — are the beginning of my final twenty-year run. Intelligence with integrity. Something to contemplate.

Extention of Appraisal Details

Continue reading “Anonymous Feedback on Robert Steele's Appraisal of Analytic Foundations — Agreement & Extension”

2014/05/012014/05/01

Berto Jongman: Out of Africa – $2 Trillion Since 1970 — Low Estimate?

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Non-Governmental

Out of Africa: The great money migration

Almost $2 trillion has left Africa illicitly since 1970, thwarting poverty reduction and economic growth.

This is far more than the external aid the continent received over the same period, and almost five times its current external debt. According to researchers, the continent also loses at least $100bn a year in this financial haemorrhage.

African leaders convened this week in the Ethiopian city of Bahar Dar to discuss illicit financial flows and what can be done to staunch them. A study commissioned by the Tana High Level Forum on African Security, which organised the conference, found that illicit flows from Africa grew at an average rate of 12.1 percent per year since 1970, and that capital flight from West and Central African countries accounted for most of the illicit flows from sub-Saharan Africa.

Illicit financial flows consist of money earned illegally and then transferred for use elsewhere. The money is usually generated from criminal activities, corruption, tax evasion, bribes and smuggling. Yet the numbers tell only part of the story – a story that exposes how these highly complex and deeply entrenched practises have flourished, with a devastating impact on Africans' efforts to extricate themselves from grinding poverty.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Out of Africa – $2 Trillion Since 1970 — Low Estimate?”

2014/04/302014/04/30

Chris Hedges: The Crime of Peaceful Protest

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

The Crime of Peaceful Protest

Truthdig.com, 27 April 2014

NEW YORK—Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.

The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest. But the judge, who has issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press, was visibly impatient, snapping, “This debate is going to end.” He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.

The trial of McMillan, 25, is one of the last criminal cases originating from the Occupy protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

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2014/04/282014/04/28

Eagle: Deadly MERS virus spreading out of control in Saudi Arabia, leaps to Egypt [and Malaysia] as global pandemic begins

07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

Deadly MERS virus spreading out of control in Saudi Arabia, leaps to Egypt as global pandemic begins

Healthcare workers increasingly infected: 7% death rate reported

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) more effective than Western medicine

Camels and bats suspected as contagion carriers

SARS-Like MERS Virus Spreads to New Countries

Cases of the MERS Coronavirus have significantly increased in the last few months, and in recent weeks there have been reports of the virus in new countries including Egypt, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, leaving officials struggling to figure out why infections have increased.

Category: Ineptitude

Berto Jongman: US Intelligence Community Needs a New Workforce Model