Key Players – Page 219 – Public Intelligence Blog

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

The American public is getting a very high return on its investment in our current crop of junior officers. The are bright, industrious, and typically working significantly above their experience and training. And, day after day, they deliver for us. Iraq and Afghanistan are junior leaders' wars. And OUR junior leaders — officer AND non-commissioned officer — are serving us very well.

Phi Beta Iota: Viet-Nam deja vu, El Salvador deja vu, MASINT deja vu– in 1988-1989 the Marine Corps' highest priority for MASINT was the detection of mines based on explosives not the container, at a safe distance. $80 billion a year and the IC still cannot find anomalous objects buried in the ground. As MG Robert Scales points out, 4% of the force is taking 80% of the casualties, and we are spending less than 1% of the Pentagon's total budget on protecting them.

New York Times
December 21, 2010
Pg. 1

A Year At War: In Command

Life And Death Decisions Weigh On Junior Officers

By James Dao

Articles in this series are chronicling the yearlong deployment of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, based in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan. The series follows the battalion’s part in the surge in northern Afghanistan and the impact of war on individual soldiers and their families back home.

QURGHAN TAPA, Afghanistan — The hill wasn’t much to behold, just a treeless mound of dirt barely 80 feet high. But for Taliban fighters, it was a favorite spot for launching rockets into Imam Sahib city. Ideal, American commanders figured, for the insurgents to disrupt the coming parliamentary elections.

Read entire article (every word recommended)….

2010/12/212010/12/21

Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020

About the Idea, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Strategy, Threats

From Virtual Secretary of Defense

Purpose

The purpose of this memorandum is to establish priorities for my strategic objectives through 2012 and pending the concurrence of a new president with a proper staff, 2020. There is no such thing as strategic guidance for one year. This document informs without directing anyone.

Intent

My intent is to establish a baseline of truth–the truth at any cost reduces all other costs–so as to return our Armed Forces to a condition of readiness, responsiveness, and effectiveness in the face of all threats to the Republic, both domestic and foreign. At a minimum this means an Air Force capable of long-haul lift; a Navy capable of distributed littoral operations; an Army able to fight uncomfortable wars while also reinforcing legitimate governments and where appropriate helping insurgents holding the moral high ground to displace despotic regimes. It also means a Marine Corps able to put air-land-sea forces on any spot in 24 hours (platoon landing team), 48 hours (company landing team) and 72 hours (battalion landing team), along with a Coast Guard able to fulfill all of its homeland safety and security missions. Underlying my intent for the Armed Forces is a strategic intent to demand clarity, integrity, and sensibility from the Whole of Government–sustainable legal orders consonant with our public's culture.

Our blood must only be shed when our brains are engaged and all other means–cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and political–cannot achieve the objectives that are open, legal, ethical, moral, and validated by both Congress and the public. My intent therefore consists of creating the conditions for getting a grip on reality and being able to deal with reality, with a particular emphasis on assuring that all information necessary to inter-agency effectiveness and multinational engagement is both known to us, and shareable with others.

Continue reading “Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020”

2010/12/192011/01/01

ClimateGate Rolling Update CLOSED

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Academia, Collaboration Zones, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Non-Governmental, United Nations & NGOs

REMINDER: Environmental Degradation, not Climate Change, is High-Level Threat #3. Climate Change is less than 10% of that, and within Climate Change, mercury and sulfer are more important than carbon. Furthermore, it is not possible to address any one threat without addressing the other nine (e.g. #1 Poverty) with harmonized policies from Agriculture to Water, so the bottom line is that these talks are isolated and worthless. The world needs a serious global strategy with serious analytics, a commitment to understanding true costs of every product and service, and a commitment to bringing the five billion poor into a prosperous world at peace. Anything less is a betrayal of the public trust.

19 Dec Top 10 Bad Developments For Global Warming Alarmists (HumanEvents)

Continue reading “ClimateGate Rolling Update CLOSED”

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Multinational, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

One hears again and again Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked but that the US is distrusted, even hated

Patrick Cockburn – The Independent 18/12/10

During the mid-1960s, America's goal during a crucial stage in the Vietnam war was to defeat the enemy militarily. But it had no realistic political strategy to underpin the goal, and it was this which ultimately led to failure.

America's strategy in Afghanistan is now suffering from a similar weakness. Barack Obama made the edgy claim this week that the US army is stabilising the military situation, but neither he nor his national security advisers show any signs of understanding the speed at which, politically, the US is losing ground.

Again and again in Kabul one hears Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked, but that the Afghan government and its US allies are increasingly distrusted, even hated, by the mass of the population.

2010/12/172010/12/17

Obama’s March to Folly: The Myth of Liberal Intervention & the Arrogance of Ignorance

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Weekend Edition
December 17 – 19, 2010

The Myth of Liberal Intervention and the Arrogance of Ignorance

Obama's March to Folly

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12172010.html

In a recent opinion piece, “Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention,” Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's “precision” bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, “statistical” estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's “humanitarian” bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find — once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori

Continue reading “Obama's March to Folly: The Myth of Liberal Intervention & the Arrogance of Ignorance”

2010/12/17

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Iran-Pakistan, Iran-Turkey-India, Israel

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Peace Intelligence

Iran-Pakistan: Iranian officials on 16 December accused Pakistan of being linked to a 15 December suicide bombing in southeastern Iran. Iran's deputy minister and chief of security at the Interior Ministry, Ali Abdollahi, said Pakistani officials had ignored Iranian warnings about bases in Pakistan for anti-Iranian elements and had allowed the terrorists to cross into Iran.

Iranian lawmaker Kazem Jalali said initial reports and confessions from arrested Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi showed that the bombers had been trained in Pakistan. Pakistan must clarify its position on the terrorists and on the Iranian government, Jalali said.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: On the 15th two bombers detonated themselves at a mosque in Chabahar, killing 41 people and injuring at least 50 on the eve of the Shiite holy day Ashura, which honors the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed.

The results of Iran's custodial interrogation and Iranian accusations against Pakistan are virtually identical in substance to Indian interrogation of the surviving Mumbai terrorist and Indian accusations about Pakistan and terrorists.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Iran, Turkey, and India are now seeing common cause with respect to the threat from both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. We anticipate new forms of multinational information-sharing and sense-making emerging in the region.

2010/12/162010/12/16

Reference: The Private War of LtCol Tony Shaffer

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.

Private War JPEG — Playboy Article Online

PDF Copy without Advertising

Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.

See Also:

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail

Journal: Wall Street Financial Crime Spree Spins On….

Journal: The Wall Street Pentagon Papers–Biggest Scam In World History Exposed–Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?