Category: 08 Wild Cards

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Journal: Haiti Log-Jam Situation Report

08 Wild Cards, Gift Intelligence, Methods & Process, Military

With the Military in Haiti: Breaking the Supply Logjam

…after dozens of U.S. military 
helicopters began arriving in force Friday, using the aircraft carrier USS 
Carl Vinson a few miles offshore as their base, the delivery of food, water 
and medical supplies got galvanized. “We're still running out of water 
faster then we can deliver it,” Marine Maj. Will Klumpp told me above the 
deafening roar of copter rotors. “But at least we feel like we've started to 
keep up with what the Haitians need now.”

TIME Magazine's Comprehensive HAITI Home Page

Hunger And Misery Amid Haiti Aid Logjam

The log jam at the airport has put the 82nd behind schedule. An 800-man battalion was supposed to be on the ground Friday but by yesterday there were only 240.

World leaders have pledged aid to rebuild earthquake-hit Haiti – but survivors are still waiting for food, water and medicine.

Five days after the 7.0 magnitude tremor killed up to 200,000 people, international rescue teams were continuing to find victims alive under the rubble in capital Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of thousands of hungry Haitians desperately need help, but logistical logjams kept major relief from reaching them.

Beset by logistical challenges, Haiti relief presses on

WASHINGTON — With many nations vying to get urgent relief into horror-struck Haiti after the devastating earthquake, US officials acknowledged Saturday it was “critical” to better coordinate the massive influx of aid.

Though the aid operation was picking up steam, it was still not reaching many of the survivors desperately scrambling for badly-needed food and water four days after the quake believed to have killed tens of thousands.

Bringing the Military's Might to Aid Haiti

Water, water everywhere, and yesterday it finally got to people who need it.

Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne landed on a hill where survivors had gathered. So often these days, the face of America is that of a soldier – in this case, Captain Jonathan Hartsock.

The log jam at the airport has put the 82nd behind schedule. An 800-man battalion was supposed to be on the ground Friday but by yesterday there were only 240.

The main port is a disaster area, and until a second one can be opened up at Cap-Haitien on the north shore, the American military is trying to move into Haiti through that single-runway airport.

Your search – 95th civil affairs brigade haiti – did not match any documents

Phi Beta Iota: This is a fascinating peace challenge that the WWII D-Day planners would have appreciated–the US does not appear to leveraging all of the instruments of national power, including Sea Bees, landing craft, combat bridge repair, etcetera.

See also: Journal: Haiti Rolling Update (Chronology with Links)

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Journal: Haiti Op-Eds

08 Wild Cards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies

Guantanamo Base

Guantanamo To The Rescue

The base has two airfields, a state-of-the-art communication system and brand-new water and sewage lines that could accommodate as many as 45,000 refugees. And the base is large enough to stage an aid effort without impinging on prison operations.

Put The Pentagon In Charge

The other truth is that the only entity on the planet with the capacity to bring help to Haiti on the scale needed is the U.S. military. The United Nations will find it impolitic to admit this; the big international relief groups, proud of their noncombatant status, will shy from acknowledging it. But it is the reality

Frictions Between Nations Rise Over Struggle Of Getting Aid To Haiti

But there were growing tensions over which country's planes were allowed to land here first, with each nation insisting its aid flight was a priority, according to an official involved in the relief operation.

France, Brazil and Italy were said to be upset, and the Red Cross said one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of neighboring Dominican Republic.

Le Bret said that the Port-au-Prince airport has become “not an airport for the international community. It is an annex of Washington.”

Phi Beta Iots: Haiti is an Information Operations (IO) challenge.  Obviously the Pentagon is not addressing it as such, so they will continue to have log-jams because they are not pushing the “information perimeter” out to the take-off and loading points.  A needs matrix should be in place, and the stuff should be coming in via four landing masters (Air Wheels, Air Drop, Beach, Road) with an intelligence-driven load and deliver flow plan.  This is not rocket science.  It just takes the right mind-set and a global C4I grid that DoD does not have at the same time that it refuses to use the obivous existing public networks.

See also: Journal: Haiti Rolling Update (Chronology with Links)

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Journal: Haiti Earthquake Unconventional C4I

08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Real Time, Technologies, Tools

Sample Commercial Image

Apps for Haiti: An SMS 911, a People Finder, and more to come

Haiti Earthquate Person Registry (Seeking/Found) (Merged with Google Person Finder)

Spreadsheet of 152 Organizations Rendering Aid to Haiti

Wikipedia Page Participants on the Ground and Unconventional Communications

Haiti Crisis Camp Page and Feedback

GeoEye Post-Earthquake Sample Image

ESC Imagery Aid

See also: Journal: Haiti Rolling Update (Chronology with Links)

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Journal: Haiti, Obama’s Katrina, NGO-Foundation Rip-Off

08 Wild Cards, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Full Article Online

When Haitian Ministers Take a 50 Percent Cut of Aide Money It's Called “Corruption,” When NGOs Skim 50 Percent It's Called “Overhead”

Crushing Haiti, Now as Always

By PATRICK COCKBURN

The US-run aid effort for Haiti is beginning to look chillingly similar to the criminally slow and disorganized US government support for New Orleans after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005. Four years ago President Bush was famously mute and detached when the levies broke in Louisiana. By way of contrast President Obama was promising Haitians that everything would be done for survivors within hours of the calamity.

Phi Beta Iota: As we pointed out earlier, Haiti is both an OPPORTUNITY, and a Multinational Engagement decision-support and information-management challenge, nothing more—it demands open source everything, which the U.S. military especially and the U.S. government generally is simply not good at because they have spent 21 years refusing to listen to “not invented here” iconoclasts.  What we SHOULD be doing is using Haiti for a CAB 21 Prototype operation in which we flood the place with ground truth assets–civil affairs “wired” eyes and ears, and then create a global open back office that itemizes needs at the household level and connects those needs to resolution via guided paradrops and helo sling loads.  The infrastructure is not there for planes, trains, and trucks.  Use Guantanamo, McDill, Miami, and Norfolk.  Put amphibs out as parking lots and filling stations.  Any questions?  Just call.

See also:  Journal: Haiti Rolling Update (Chronology with Links)

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Reference (2010): Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan

08 Wild Cards, DoD, Ethics, Government, Military, Monographs, Peace Intelligence

UPDATE: A colleague from within asked us to highlight this quote with the observation that neither the US IC nor DoD have any clue how to execute.  We agree.  Both lack leadership with vision and multinational panache; they simply do not know what they do not know because they have both wasted the last 21 years refusing to listen or learn.

P.23.  They must embrace open-source, population-centric information as the lifeblood of their analytical work. They must open their doors to anyone who is willing to exchange information, including Afghans and NGOs as well as the U.S. military and its allies. As General Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, recently stated, “…[T]he best information, the most important intelligence, and the context that provides the best understanding come from the bottom up, not from the top down.”

The Cold War notion that open-source information is “second class” is a dangerous, outmoded cliché. Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, captured it perfectly: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other 10 percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic.

28 Pages Online

News Story with Links: Spies Like Us: Top U.S. Intel Officer Says Spooks Could Learn From Journos

USMC WM in AF

Good News: Some good people in the field have finally re-invented half the wheel–the company-level bottom-up half.  Unfortunately they have absolutely no idea what can be gotten from the rest of the world (non US citizens without clearances); they are jammed into a legacy system that demands at least a SECRET clearance; there is no Multinational Engagement Network that is totally open albeit commercially encrypted, and therefore this is going nowhere.  We could fix this on leftover loose-change, but ONLY if DoD intel leadership will accept the iconoclastic multinational solutions that have been in gestation for 21 years.

Bad News: CIA and DIA are still broken and not likely to get fixed anytime soon.  The Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are an utter disgrace.  DoD commanders still have not figured out Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and OSINT does not appear in this report, nor does Reach-Back, 24/7 tribally-nuanced on demand web-cam translator services, and on and on and on.  Army G-2 is non-existent–Army is simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to do tactical intelligence in small wars.  Neither is the Marine Corps, but they adapt better.  What is so very tragic is that this is a problem that can be  fixed FAST with Multinational Engagement and a proper use of distributed linguistic and cultural assets.  All it needs is an internationalist mind-set, which no one now serving in DIA or CIA actually can muster. All of the pathologies we have been writing about since 1988 are to be found in Afghanistan, and none of the solutions that many, many authors have written about for the last 21 years are even on the table.

See also:

Continue reading “Reference (2010): Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan”

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Journal: Haiti Public Intelligence Emergent

08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Tools

Full Story Online

Google Maps updates with new Haiti pics: Hours-old satellite images show destruction

Google has released a new KML overlay — tech speak for map layer — that includes fresh images of Port-au-Prince.

According to GeoEye , the satellite imagery company that provided the photos, they were taken at 10:30 a.m. yesterday from a satellite 423 miles up.

By toggling the new image layer on and off, it’s easy to compare what the city looked like before the earthquake with the way it looks now.

Aside from the obvious destruction, one of the most striking features of the new images is the large number of presumably homeless people in the streets of the ruined neighborhoods.

Click here to see the new images in Google Maps.

Phi Beta Iota: Finally, but kudos never-the-less.  This should always be the first thing done, perhaps with a global arrangement that has regional cost-sharing in place and can use military air breathers where commercial are not immediately available, but respecting Google's software and end-user delivery offering.  There is still the matter of getting to shared Spacial Reference Systems (SRS).  This could and should be used to “plot” Twitter messages that identify need, and in the back office, matching RapidSMS messages that can be aggregated to fund need resolution.

Where Are Haiti Earthquake Relief Funds Going?

Millions in donations have been raised since the earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday, but where is the money going?

Like Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti which is urging people to text “Yele” to 501501 to donate $5 to the cause — which has raised more than $2 million so far — many other relief organizations have used mobile messaging to quickly gather funds.

Phi Beta Iota: What is most interesting about this is the fact that fund-raising (financial incentive for the organizers that take a 5% to 50% “cut) is very well developed and moving money, while the other end (requirements definition, logistics coordination, and “by household” delivery” is NOT developed at all.  This is a good start toward the Global to Local Range of Needs Table, when that is developed, this will “flip” in that people will give for SPECIFIC itemized needs, not as a leap of faith in intermediaries that generally do NOT deliver full value.

What is LACKING is a single trusted Multinational Decision Support Center with both regional and global non-profit “cachet” as well as two-way reachback into all eight tribes of all nations, that can be the single point orchestrating the receipt and integration of all information in all languages in near-real-time, and the trusted point for validating both needs and the resolution of needs through the application of fundss.

See Also:

Continue reading “Journal: Haiti Public Intelligence Emergent”

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Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence

British Search And Rescue Team Turned Away From Port-Au-Prince

There were reports that the airport at Port-au-Prince had run out of aviation fuel, one of the factors that is understood to have led the US military to close it. . . . The scene at Santo Domingo airport was one of chaos, uncertainty and often despair for aid workers.

Ethno-Colonial BIG Africa

Phi Beta Iota: Lesson learned by the USMC the hard way (as of 1992):  need Forward Area Refueling Points (FARP) in the FIRST lift.

U.S. Army Africa Boss: ‘I Feel Like The Lone Ranger…'

“Africa’s not high on America’s priority list these days.

Sometimes I feel like the Lone Ranger trying to get people to bring resources to bear out here.”

I had pointed out in an earlier interview that U.S. Army Africa and Africa Command in general are notably absent from the wars in Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, conflicts Garrett said are “currently the world’s two deadliest.”

Full Story Online

For Israel, a Reckoning

A new global movement is challenging Israel's violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid

Phi Beta Iota: Israeli influence on the US Government has been as bad as post-war Nazi influence on the Cold War ubbas–both have spawned policies that have murdered and displaced millions, with attendant atrocities.

Pakistan: U.S.-Backed Broadcast Begins

Phi Beta Iota: Too little too late and they almost certainly have no idea about the history of the Pashtun Peace Army.

Full Story Online

Taliban steps up violence in Afghanistan

Recent Pakistani military operations in insurgent strongholds in Pakistan also have driven greater numbers of Pakistan-based Taliban back into Afghanistan, the officer said.

UK plans ‘trust fund' to woo Taliban fighters

Phi Beta Iota: Turn in one weapon, get enough money for two…or go enlist and training and food along with a new weapon.  Money corrupts and it is not a substitute for Whole of Government Stabilization & Reconstruction accomplishments.

How To Apply ‘Smart Power' In Yemen

Developing a coherent strategy focused on the right objectives is important, and hard to do. The country team in any normal American embassy (like the one in Sana) does not have the staff, resources or experience to do so. The limited American military presence in Yemen does not either. Despite years of talk about the need to develop this kind of capability in the State Department or elsewhere in Washington, it does not exist. It must be built now, and quickly.

Phi Beta Iota: Start with Tony Zinni's The Battle for Peace and implement Robert Steele's DoD OSINT-M4IS2  Strategy along with Whole of Government Intelligence (Decision-Support).