Journal: Selected MILNET Headlines

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism

The New Rules Of Engagement: Nine imperatives for our post-9/11 world

Statutory rules to authorize preventive detentions;

Adoption of the isolation-and-quarantine statute;

Establish new laws to govern the use of federal troops (domestically)

Major-General Andrew Mackay Says MoD Is ‘Institutionally Incapable' In Afghanistan

“From the top of the MoD through to the Army’s staff colleges, the structures, despite the best will in the world, are institutionally incapable of keeping pace with rapid change and the associated willingness to adapt — and quickly — at the same time,” the paper says.

Mobility Helps Al Qaeda Extend Reach

Al Qaeda's decentralized structure across the Middle East is proving one of its biggest advantages over American firepower.

Terrorism's Triumphant Techniques:Why the US is behind the power curve (Ralph Peters)

The terrorists are “inside the wire.” Everywhere. From eastern Afghanistan to Texas. And we're stalled. For all of our wealth, technology and power, our enemies have the strategic and psychological initiative.

Our enemies have done what we refuse to do. They've analyzed the problem objectively and engineered ruthless solutions.

EDITORIAL: Obama's failed freshman year

President Obama's freshman-year foreign policy was the worst in living memory. At the dawn of 2010, the United States finds itself noticeably weaker in international affairs than it was when Mr. Obama took office, and there are no signs of improvement in the year ahead.

Use of potentially harmful chemicals kept secret under law

Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States — from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners — nearly 20 percent are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

Journal: Blast from the Right (Half-Right)

09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players

Full Story in Washington Post

A terrorist war Obama has denied

Charles Krauthammer

Friday, January 1, 2010

. . .

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face.

. . . . . . .

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius

Phi Beta Iota: The commentator, an extreme partisan from the right, confuses laxity with partisanship.  Both parties are partisan extremists, and blinding America to the reality that it must acknowledge if it is to adapt to the unprecedented complexity that threatens us–many of the threats of our own making and many of the cost of our own volition, bad decisions made in the aftermath of what would otherwise be minor decisions.  America lacks a non-partisan intelligence community able to get a grip on the Whole System; America lacks a Whole of Government capacity to balance means, ways, and ends; and America lacks above all any means of restoring comity and consensus in Congress, without which Congress will not fulfill its Article 1 Constitutional duty.

Journal: Walking Into Al Qaeda’s Trap in Yemen

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Very important article from one of the very best reporters covering the Middle East

Walking Into the Al-Qaeda Trap

Touch Yemen, Get Burned

By PATRICK COCKBURN
December 31, 2009
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It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq. What it is doing is much to al-Qa’ida’s advantage. The real strength of al-Qa’ida is not that it can ‘train’ a fanatical Nigerian student to sew explosives into his underpants, but that it can provoke an exaggerated US response to every botched attack. Al-Qa’ida leaders openly admitted at the time of 9/11 that the aim of such operations is to provoke the US into direct military intervention in Muslim countries. It is a formula which worked under President George W Bush and it still appears to work under President Barack Obama.

In Yemen the US is walking into the al-Qa’ida trap. Once there it will face the same dilemma it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It became impossible to exit these conflicts because the loss of face would be too great. Just as Washington saved banks and insurance giants from bankruptcy in 2008 because they were “too big to fail,” so these wars become too important to lose because to do so would damage the US claim to be the sole super power.

In Iraq the US is getting out more easily than seemed likely at one stage because Washington has persuaded Americans that they won a non-existent success. The ultimate US exit from Afghanistan may eventually be along very similar lines. But the danger of claiming spurious victories is that such distortions of history make it impossible for the US to learn from past mistakes and instead to repeat them by intervening in other countries such as Yemen.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq‘ and ‘Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq‘.

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Journal: Yemen–Opening A New “Front” in the Long War

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts

Operation Barbarossa

Recent events like the Fort Hood Massacre and the bungled attempt to fire bomb the airliner bound for Detroit have focused attention on and encouraged our escalating intervention in Yemen, which has been taking place quietly, as if Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were not enough to keep our strategic planners and stretched out military forces occupied.  Our reactions to events in the  so-called Long War on Terror suggest an aimless spreading of effort throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.  This aimlessness brings to mind a comment General Hermann Balck, a highly decorated German officer in WWII, made to a small group of reformers in the Pentagon in the early 1980s.  The subject was Operation Barbarossa, or Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.  Balck pithily dismissed the German strategy shaping that invasion with the words: “Nicht Schwerpunkt.”  Balck was saying there was no focus or main effort to the German invasion, and without a focus, there was no way to harmonize the thousands of subordinate efforts. The result was a spreading of effort that led to eventual overextension as can be seen in the following map.

Now the Eastern Front of WWII is very different from the ridiculously misleading label of a Central Front in the Long War on Terror.  But the idea of schwerpunkt is germane to both efforts, and the US is showing all the signs of spreading and over extending its efforts which accompany a nicht schwerpunkt.

This is no small thing.  As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed in his famous briefing, Patterns of Conflict, the idea of a schwerpunkt is central to organizing all effective military operations.  It is far more than a simple question of concentrating forces.  According to Boyd, the idea of a  “Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.”  Now this is a very compressed statement, pregnant with information, and based on a lot of research, but it nevertheless makes it self evident that there is no comparable unifying medium in America's Long War on Terror.  Our failure to form a schwerpunkt is just as much a prescription for paralysis and defeat by a thousand cuts in a guerrilla war as it is in a mechanized conventional war between standing armies.

To see why, consider please the following three attachments:

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Journal: Historian’s View of CIA, Yemen, and Air Threat

03 India, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Ethics, Government, IO Secrets, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence
Webster Griffin Tarpley

Russia Times Lead Story

Detroit jet terrorist attack was staged – journalist

The recent failed attack on a US passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit was a set-up provocation controlled by US intelligence, author and journalist Webster Tarpley stated to RT.

“[The terrorist’s] father, a rich Nigerian banker, went to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 and said ‘my son is in Yemen in a terrorist camp, do something about this.’ Nevertheless, the son is allowed to buy a ticket in Ghana, paying cash, $2,800, for a one-way ticket,” Tarpley said.

After that, a mentally deficient young man who doubtfully could make it from one gate to another managed to illegally enter Nigeria and get on a plane to Amsterdam.

“There was a well-dressed Indian man who brought him to the gate and said, ‘my friend does not have a passport, get him on, he is Sudanese, we do this all the time – that is impossible!” said Tarpley.

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Journal: Strong Signals–Las Vegas as Next 9/11

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process
Ground Zero Las Vegas--Full Story Online

Monday, December 28, 2009

SPOOK'S JOURNAL

Nine of the ten largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas. Four of them share one intersection: Las Vegas Boulevard (The Strip) and Tropicana Avenue. Together, these four corners comprise 12,953 rooms, most of which enjoy high occupancy year-round and are often full. Figure 25,000 people huddled on four corners.

The imagery is also appealing to terrorists: Occupying one corner is New York, New York, with a “skyline” that features the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Statue of Liberty.

This thought: It is no longer necessary for al-Qaeda terrorists to hijack two Beechcraft C99 planes out of Vegas, as easy as this would be. Instead, why not drive (three-and-a-half hours from Vegas) to Grand Canyon West Airport with a few vans filled with ammonium nitrate (fertilizer) and diesel fuel? Armed with a few baseball bats, one could take command of the airstrip in less than a minute. Then wait for the Beechcrafts to arrive. Loaded with ammonium nitrate (or a low grade chemical or biological agent), these vector weapons could then be dispatched back at Las Vegas, a mere 15 minutes away at full throttle, or Hoover Dam, half the distance.

Phi Beta Iota: This posting was brought to our attention by a patriotic citizen who finds a great deal of common sense on this web site, and none at all within the so-called Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  We recollect the period 1990-1994 when Peter Black, Winn Schwartau, and Robert Steele, among others, tried to warn Congress and the Executive about the cyber-threat, to include substantive correspondence to the top National Information Infrastructure security officer, Marty Harris, sounding the alarm.  We vividly recollect testifying on behalf of Hackers and trying to tell the Secret Service it should hire them, not torment them.  Now we have a government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the wrong way, and failing to LISTEN to common sense solutions from its citizens.

Journal: Weaponizing Web 2.0

Memorandum: Talking Points on Homeland Defense Intelligence

1999 Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21st Century: Three Issues of Common Concern to DoD and the Rest of the World

Journal: Tora Bora Revisited by Peter Bergen

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Collective Intelligence

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

The Battle for Tora Bora

How Osama bin Laden slipped from our grasp: The definitive account.

PeterBergen

I am convinced that Tora Bora constitutes one of the greatest military blunders in recent U.S. history. It is worth revisiting now not just in the interest of historical accuracy, but also because the story contains valuable lessons as we renew our push against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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