Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Franklin E. van Kappen

Alpha I-L, Peace Intelligence
Senator General van Kappen
Senator General van Kappen

Senator General Franklin E. van Kappen was a transitional and tranformational figure as Military Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, setting the stage for General Patrick Cammaert and the campaign to implement the Brahimi Report recommendations and establish intelligence (decision-support) as an acccepted term of art in UN circles.

Strategic Intelligence and the United Nations

Senator van Kappen was born in 1941 in Semarang, the former Dutch East Indies  (Indonesia). He is married and has two sons.

In 1964 he graduated from the Naval Academy in Den Helder and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps.

In the course of his career he completed Special Forces (Commando) training with the Green Berets in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and was trained as a Mountain and Arctic Warfare Survival Instructor in Norway. He was also trained as a Naval communications and warfare officer and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.(USA).  During his career he served in numerous operational and staff billets in the Netherlands and abroad.

His two last postings are listed below.

In July 1992 he was promoted to Brigadier-General and assumed command of the Netherlands Forces in the Caribbean and of a joint US/Netherlands Task Group working Counter Drug operation in the Caribbean.  He is also one of the founders of the Coast Guard for the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba.

In 1995 he was promoted to Major-General and served simultaneously as the top Military Adviser to the Secretary General of the U.N. and as the Director of the Military Division in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at U.N. headquarters in New York.  He provided daily input into the management of all active UN peacekeeping operations.  He also directed the planning process to field new operations as mandated by the Security Council.

In August 1998, Major-General van Kappen returned to the Netherlands and retired from the Marine Corps.  From 2004 until 2008 he worked as a Senior Mentor for NATO and the Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT) programme sponsored by US Pacific Command to enhance regional cooperation and multinational force readiness for Crisis Response in the Asia Pacific Region.

From 2007 until to date he works as Senior Concept Developer for NATO/ACT. He is a Senior Policy Advisor for the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific (Defence) Research (TNO) and the The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS). He is the chairman of the supervisory board of the Institute for Security, Experimentation and Transformation Institute (ISETI). In 2007 he was elected to take a seat in the Senate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He lectures internationally as an expert on security issues.

Peace Book One
The Book

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Memorandum: OSS CEO to DNI One-Pager

Memoranda

The US Intelligence Community does not lack for well-intentioned leaders, but somehow, despite the efforts of Jim Schlesinger in the 1970's and many others through the 1980's and 1990's and into the new century, transformation eludes us.  We speculate that secrecy has a great deal to do with it–and one leader commented, the only person who could brief him on a program he wanted to terminate was the person who stood to lose their fiefdom if he did.  Below is the single page summing up 20 years of endeavor, as delivered to the DNI.  It remains valid today (6 August 2009).

DNI 22 Jul 07

The two short-cut links no longer work. They are provided below in full title mode.

2007 Amazon as Hub of World Brain — 2013 Clean Movie Has Just Become Available

2006 Briefing to the Coalition Coordination Center (CCC) Leadership at the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM)–Multinational Intelligence: Can CENTCOM Lead the Way? Reflections on OSINT & the Coalition

 

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Del Spurlock Jr.: Our Obligations to Wounded Warriors

07 Health, Ethics, Military
Del Spurlock Jr.
Del Spurlock Jr.

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.

Continue reading “Del Spurlock Jr.: Our Obligations to Wounded Warriors”

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Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Pauline Neville-Jones

Alpha M-P, Peace Intelligence

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones is Chairman of QinetiQ Group plc, formerly the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) which is in the process of privatisation by the British Government. She is also International Governor of the BBC with special responsibility for BBC World Service (radio) and BBC World (TV). She was previously a Managing Director in NatWest Markets, the then investment-banking arm of the NatWest banking group, and Vice Chairman of Hawkpoint Partners, a corporate Advisory house in the City of London. Prior to that, she was a career member of the British diplomatic service serving, among other places, in Singapore, Washington DC, the European Commission in Brussels and Bonn. She was a foreign affairs adviser to Prime Minister John Major, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in Whitehall and leader of the British delegation to the Dayton peace conference on Bosnia. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1996 and is an honorary Doctor of London and the Open Universities. She is a Council member of the Royal United Services Institute, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and of the Advisory Council of the Centre for European Reform in London.

Foreword

The Book
The Book