Chuck Spinney is still the best “real” engineer in this town–almost everyone else is staggering after fifty years of government-specification cost-plus engineering. Also, as Chuck explores in the piece on Complexity to Avoid Accountability is Expensive we in the “requirements” business are as much to blame–Service connivance with complexity has killed acquisition from both a financial inputs and a war-fighting relevance outcome point of view. The Services have forgotten the basics of requirements definition and multi-mission interoperability and supportability.
The Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIC) was created by General Al Gray, USMC (Ret), then Commandant of the Marine Corps, for three reasons:
1. Intelligence support to constabulary and expeditionary operations from the three major services was abysmal to non-existent.
2. Intelligence support to the Service level planners and programmers striving to interact with other Services, the Unified Commands, and the Joint Staff was non-existent–this was the case with respect to policy, acquisition, and operations. The cluster-feel over Haiti and the total inadequacy of our 24-48 hour response tells us nothing has changed, in part because we still cannot do a “come as you are” joint inter-agency anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
