I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
“Whenever the people are well informed” an optimistic Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” Sure – but what if the people have no clue?
Most of the big challenges facing America and the world today – from climate change to disease to population growth – revolve around science and technology. If we – We, the People – are going to make smart decisions on what to do about these problems, we need to have at least a rough understanding of the basic science involved. Problem is, we don't.
Aleksandra Mir collage via The Daily Beast. Blake Gopnik says “…when you think about it, a satellite and Jesus really do fit together in interesting ways. The cosmos has always had some place in our religious thought – we think of God as superlunary.”
Pete Cochrane at TedX Brussels, speaking on the requirements for intelligence, entropy, singularity, the Internet and evolution. “Are we going to be smart enough to recognize new intelligences and new life forms when they spontaneously erupt on the Internet?”
It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”
Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.
O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”
Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?
Syria is heading for a bloody sectarian civil war. The mutual kidnappings, torture, beheadings and displacement of populations taking place between the Sunni and Alawi communities in the central city of Homs — often described as “the capital of the revolution” — send a fearsome signal of what might be in store for the rest of the country.
To avert this descent into hell must surely be the immediate priority of Arab leaders and the international community.
The Iraqi example next door is there for all to see. The Anglo-American invasion destroyed a major Arab country. The country’s institutions and infrastructure were shattered; sectarian demons were released, triggering a civil war. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes or forced to flee abroad. The country was dismembered as the Kurds established their own semi-independent statelet.
Syria needs the intervention of a high-powered, neutral, contact group to stop the killing on both sides.
Phi Beta Iota: This article, written in 2007, remains the standard in the field for both brevity and authoritativeness.
Business Intelligence is data mining, not intelligence. Competitive Intelligence focuses on competitors and does not do 360 degree holistic analytics.
The modern term for a full service program is Commercial Intelligence, which uses only open sources and ethical methods. It should not be confused with secret government intelligence or with illegal industrial espionage.
Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
After today’s column by Justin Raimondo, in “Notes in the Margin,” he recounts some unusual happenings regarding a soldier policeman charged with espionage. But the story gets much stranger with the mention of the Northcomm connection during the recent US Emergency Alert System testing.
Raimondo’s says:
“The strange case of Army Specialist William Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman from Owensboro, Ky., continues to mystify. Millay was arrested and charged with espionage, but the military and the DOJ are keeping their cards pretty close: reports indicate he gave military secrets to a “foreign power,” but the country is not specified. Now we learn that he was nabbed because of emails scooped up by NSA snoops that warned his mother to “prepare for the end of the world.” Associated Content reports:
“Millay had growing concerns over a massive military buildup of NorthCom. This buildup is said to include troops and equipment being shipped in from Afghanistan, Japan and South Korea through the Alaskan base and then to “staging areas” in the US. NorthCom was created on October 1, 2002 after 9/11. NorthCom is charged with protecting the United States homeland in support of local, state, and federal authorities. This support is limited by the Posse Comitatus Act . AFNORTH would take charge of the situation or event in the case of national emergencies, natural or man-made.
“Specialist Millay believed that the redeployment of these tens of thousands of US troops to America was “somehow” related to the November 9 testing of the United States Emergency Alert System (EAS) that is occurring “coincidentally” with a vast number of disaster drills and exercises being planned for the same time period.”
