Category: Key Players

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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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Journal: US Response to Haiti Reveals Old Mindsets

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Threats, Tools
Full Story Online

The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust

By Greg Palast

Blackwater before drinking water

6. From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, “I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people.” Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.

7. Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.

8. But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.

Any Questions?

Phi Beta Iota: This is what we were thinking of when we laid out the CAB 21 Peace Jumpers scenario.  The Pentagon is out of touch with reality because they have such a narrow mind-set that is uninformed about the possibilities and simply does not compute Whole of Government resourcing or clean drinking water as a security device vastly more effective than a Marine standing guard over nothing.  With all humility, if DIA goes not get its act together in the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Multinational Engagement arena, and help the Pentagon learn about the new craft of waging peace with Whole of Government non-secret campaign plans and multinational virtual harmonization of resource needs identification and fulfulfillment at the Twitter level, we will continue to fail ourselves and everyone else.  As we pointed out early on, Haiti's disaster was/is an OPPORTUNITY.   Evidently no one in the Pentagon is thinking that way.

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

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Journal: Haiti Highlights Death of US C4I

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats
Full Story Online

Things are going to get a lot worse in Haiti before they get better, and that was never clearly articulated by the President, State Department, SOUTHCOM, or Rajiv Shah to the American people, who may begin to doubt our governments efforts in the very near future. President Obama is positioned to take a political hit for what happens over the next 48-72 hours for apparently having advisors who are treating Haiti as anything but the most important event of his political career to date.

Phi Beta Iota: The USG, the US IC, and DoD have been told for 21 years, beginning with General Al Gray's 1989 article, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's,” and ending most recently with General Mike Flynn's Fixing Intel–A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, that they are not being serious about Open Sources, Multinational Engagement, the Eight Tribes, and on and on and on.  We need a Defense Open Source Center (DOSC) with an embedded Multinational Decision Support Center (MDSC) that simultaneously creates a global grid with the 90 countries that have OSINT centers within their military C4I structure, and regional grids that are under the control and in the service of the various regional unions, beginning with UNASUR and then AU and SCO and ASEAN, and so on–our money, their information.  Haiti is Obama's Katrina–not because he's a bad President or has an inattentive Cabinet, but because the “system” of governance is Industrial-Era C4I totally out of touch with modern possibilities.

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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.

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