Pakistan’s military continues to nurture a broad range of militant groups as part of a three-decade strategy of using proxies against its neighbours and US forces in Afghanistan, a prominent former militant commander said.
Phi Beta Iota: The details are compelling. What this really means is that the CIA and the Department of Defense are either incredibly ignorant of Pakistani plans and intentions, or remarkably cavalier and corrupt. What appears clear is that this is a sucking chest wound in US “intelligence” and national “defense” going back thirty years and multiple generations of so-called leaders who have no real grasp of reality in Pakistan.
Following below are several headlines about the prospects for the Defense Budget. As an overarching summary, what you need to know is that, at the working level, the fiscal decrements are already impacting heavily. We simply do not have the resources to do the routine work necessary to steward the force and plan for the future. The division I work in is currently operating at less than 60 percent of the people we need and we are supposedly one of the elite places. Money for necessary travel has dried up for all but Generals and SES's and our capability to conduct necessary planning conferences has been formally terminated. So, at most optimistic and charitable characterization, the future looks dodgy.
Phi Beta Iota: Defense cuts will be at least 30% over the next ten years, and hopefully as much as 50%. What we have now is a circle of outright lies among all pertinent executive and legislative officials. An ethical Secretary of Defense would be identifying contracts, starting with most of what DARPA and the services are doing in the way of futures, and present a list to Congress of needed cuts irrespective of contract law, the US now being in a state of war and the exingencies of the situation mandating a legislative override of contract law. Salami slicing is the idiot's path to temporary relief. The entire US government is bloated and broken, not just the Department of Defense. This is not a system that can be repaired in the absence of intelligence and integrity. It needs to be replaced–or not even replaced, just routed around and starved to death.
From a brave but frustrated front-line infantry leader. Shades of SLA Marshall!
as the Army stands down from conflict life will get very dull……
Yeah I am dreading that and honestly I LOVE the Army. It's always the politics. Just like the article I read on MSNBC talking about the new strategy is to do “surgical strikes”. One of my favorite quotes ever is “Bombing from a B-52 is very effective. The bombs always hit the ground.” I just think it is funny when you blow up a mud hut in some shit hole country people think it makes a difference. It doesn't and at the end of a week the mud hut is back and it's back to whatever it was doing before it
was destroyed. Bombardment denies enemy the terrain only as long as stuff is exploding. Once the explosions stop anybody can walk through there. That is why nothing has ever beat the infantryman. It's why the Infantry has been around since the dawn of armies.
People are complaining about the cost of the wars and here again it's Politics. Congressman and Senators
and the general public forcing equipment training and standards onto the military that is may not necessarily need or want. We have cooks in the army we don't need the KBR chow-halls. I have two good legs and feet I
don't need a truck most of the time. I definitely don't want these MRAP's that I am being FORCED to use. Give me a soft skin Humvee a mission, beans and bullets and look see what I can do. Body armor, armored vehicles and these chu's while yes they are nice they aren't necessary. Somewhere though somebody thought it should be the rule and not the exception and here we are trillions of dollars later and for what. I don't really blame
army leadership as much as politics. I don't mean politicians either although they are the cause of a lot of this pain. Family and friends back home, bystanders and people who think their opinion should matter are
complaining that people are dying in Humvee's and we need something better. Hence the MRAP. People wanna know why the military doesn't have body armor and hell cops do. Cops don't carry near the gear and ride
around on motorcycles or in cars. Take away some of my crap and let me walk, I won't get blown up as much cause I am not walking on a road, I will be able to think clearer because I am not so miserable and let me
kill the bad guys so I feel there is a purpose. To the victor goes the spoils, but since when is the spoils of war rebuilding the losers country then leaving it???
Released Wednesday by the sponsoring Watson Institute of Brown University, a new multi-author study of the costs of the post-9/11 wars is available. Most prominently, the study finds the appropriations thus far to have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion to already have been incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This would make a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion. (Find a summary of these costs at http://costsofwar.org/article/economic-cost-summary.) It is important to note that these are basically budget costs to the federal government, not the broader economic costs to the economy or other costs to state and local governments.
The study also addresses still other expenses, such as the human costs in terms of civilian dead, the wounded, refugees, and more.
There is certainly some you will find to disagree with, but it is clear that advocates of the various conflicts who pretend the costs have been only the $1 trillion that President Obama articulated last week are feeding the nation grotesquely inaccurate information. Others, like departing SecDef Gates, who pretend that DOD spending is not a major factor in the size of our deficit are not particularly skilled in “math,” an elementary skill for government types that Secretary Gates has chosen to deride and to leave to others to perform.
I participated in the Costs of War study; see my paper on the DOD . It makes two basic points on p. 14:
1) “… while [the Congressional Research Service] and others have done long, hard, and excellent work to capture the identifiable appropriations to the Pentagon for the Post-9/11 wars, the $1.2 trillion CRS has, for example, identified in current dollars is problematic, but the fault is not with CRS, CBO, or GAO. The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.”
2) “The $667 billion in 2011 dollars ($617 billion in current dollars) appropriated to the Defense Department's base budget since 2001 as a result of the wars, while squandered, should be included in any comprehensive attempt to capture the total cost of the wars. These amounts would bring the total DOD costs of the wars to $1.98 Trillion in constant 2011 dollars and $1.82 trillion in current dollars.”
A Reuters story below summarizes the overall “Costs of War” study.
(Reuters) – When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars.
Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above. Brown, like Rutgers, is a hotbed of left-leaning intellectuals who probably wonder how a Democratic President could have become a neo-fascist war-monger. The answer is simple: corruption has no ideology. It is pervasive. Interestingly, the wire services (AP, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg on occasion) and Russian Television as well as Al Jazeera, are emerging from this period as examples of integrity in action.
UPDATED to add photo. Guards at the front door, no guards across the totally exposed back end. Sheraton San Salvador was attacked from the ravine. Deja vu.
Gunmen and suicide bombers strike the tightly secured Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, which has large foreign clientele. It was not immediately known how many people were killed or wounded.
Phi Beta Iota: Well-intentioned professionals like to say that if the US only has enough will to persist, it can prevail against any enemy. That is not correct. When the US engaged in elective wars and lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the occupied public, it will inevitably lose. When the US Government is delusional and ignoring the harsh realities at home, it loses its domestic legitimacy. Events like the Tet Offensive, or the increasing attacks in the heart of Kabul, accentuate the cognitive dissonance among all parties. This will not end well for the US.
Phi Beta Iota: Based on in-country reporting from Cynthia McKinney and others, we are quite certain that it is NATO that is committing the war crimes, and the rebels who are genociding black Libyans. We are equally certain the International Tribunal does not have a clue in terms of validated intelligence (decision-support) and therefore conclude that in this instance the warrants lack legitimacy and credibility and are an act of state–similar to the act of state against Martin Luther King; the act of state that sanctioned Israeli murder of US personnel aboard the USS Liberty; and the act of state that told 935 lies to create an elective three trillion dollar war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Florida group is calling on state lawmakers to enact a law “against state-sponsored perversion and oppression” in the wake of an aggressive TSA patdown of a diapered 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport.
Phi Beta Iota: This is real simple. State by state, nullify the TSA and administer security as a state function. If the federal government does not like that, secede from the Union. TSA is not blocking flights from Europe or anywhere else that are fortunate in not having to put up with what passes for security in the USA.
The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion.
That's more than NASA's budget. It's more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
Phi Beta Iota: It is always helpful to remember Medard Gabel's graphic on the cost of peace versus war. For what we have spent on the military-industrial-intelligence complex these past ten years, never mind the legalized fraud of Wall Street, we could have eradicated the ten high-level threats to humanity. The US Government lacks both intelligence and integrity. Good people trapped in a very bad system–we need to set them free. An nation's best defense is an educated citizenry that pursues a foreign policy of peace and commerce with truth and trust as core value and core outcome.
Libya, Amnesty questions the Hague‘s findings: Are the rebels making up claims of mass rape?
