UNITED NATIONS | Declaring “the United States is back,” the Obama administration pledged Wednesday to turn more frequently to the United Nations and work with the world body on the basis of decency and mutual respect, rather than condescension and contempt.
Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment:
This is not really sincere. It is lip-service for four reasons:
After appointing Gen. Stanley McChrystal the new commander in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave him two months to write an analysis of the situation there in yet another review of U.S. strategy. But after rumors leaked out that McChrystal would ask for another increase in U.S. troops, it appears that Gates decided he would not wait for McChrystal's finished report. On Aug. 2, he summoned McChrystal and his deputy, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, to a hastily arranged meeting in Belgium which also included Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis, McChrystal's direct boss Gen. David Petraeus, and under secretary of defense for policy Michele Flournoy.
On Aug. 5, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrellbriefed reporters on the results of the unusual Sunday meeting. According to Morrell, Gates instructed McChrystal to consider a few additional, and unspecified, issues in his report. Gates also instructed McChrystal to take more time, likely postponing the delivery of the report into September.
Finally, Morrell explained that McChrystal's report will not include any discussion or request for additional “resources” (meaning U.S. troops and money) for Afghanistan. If McChrystal wants to make such a request, Morrell said, he will do so separately and at a later time.
In an era when changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three;
In an era when all information in all languages all the time is the non-negotiable first step to achieving holistic understanding of the Earth's system of systems as well as all the chaotic sub-systems;
In an era when the Nordics are far ahead of everyone else in thinking about Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2),
it is helpful to have a sense of what the U.S. Department of Defense is going with respect to it's own Global Information Grid (GIG).
Below are a few headlines as well as pointers to a couple of devastatingly critical reviews from the General Accountability Office (GAO).
Phi Beta Iota has just one question: when, if ever, will DoD plan, program, budget, and implement for a world in which 96% of the information DoD needs to exploit is not secret, not in English, and not originating from a DoD device?
After the GAO reports, click on the Frog Left to read what we said to the National Research Council about the Army Communications Architecture in the early 1990's and Frog Right to read about our recommendations for National Information Infrastructure (NII) cyber-security in the mid-1990's.
DoD needs a Chief Knowledge Oficer (CKO)–someone that knows the difference between knowledge management, network management, content capture and exploitation, and the Holy Grail, organizational intelligence.
SANCTIMONEOUS HERESY: Right-wing Israelis demonstrate in Jabal Mukabber after hundreds ransacked the village in occupied East Jerusalem, destroying Palestinian property, March 2008. (Meged Gozani/Activestills)
A third uprising?
Gary M. Burge,The Electronic Intifada,3 August 2009
Gary M. Burge is professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Chicago. He is author of Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians are not being told about Israel and the Palestinians (2003). He will soon release Jesus and the Land. How the New Testament Transformed “Holy Land” Theology.
I recently returned from the Holy Land after leading about 40 Presbyterians from Galilee to Jerusalem. This isn't new territory for me. I've been in the country many times leading students, working at archaeology digs, speaking at conferences, and occasionally taking a church such as this. And this time what I saw and heard was worrying.
Many important developments have taken place over the last six months. There was Israel's winter invasion of Gaza and a few months later, right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister. Even recently US President Barack Obama has called for a change in America's posture toward Israel's settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. For Middle East news junkies, these have been solid months. Continue reading “Journal: Chuck Spinney Flags Israel's Use of Economic Strangulation (A Form of Genocide or Other Atrocity)”
After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.
Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.
. . . . . . .
To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.
The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
Most readers will focus on the beginning of Friedman's story and completely miss the ending. What Friedman does not state that needs stating over and over again is that the U.S. taxpayer is being cheated by a foreign policy that substitutes technology for thinking, military sales for strategy, and convenient dictators for democracy. Until we have an Undersecretary of State for Democracy with one Assistant Secretary for those dictators that agree to a five-year exit strategy, another for those that do not; and a counterpart Undersecretary of Defense for Peace who can move beyond the lip service that Defense continues to give to Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Stabilization & Reconstructions (S&R), Humanitarian Assistance (HA), and the mother of all military strategies, Irregular Warfare properly defined as Waging Peace by All Means Possible, we will continue to betray the public interest at home as well as abroad.
Click on NYT Logo Above for the Full Story Online.
What does maritime domain awareness mean, and does it represent a flawed analytic agenda?
A pillar of the new maritime strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, published by the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in October 2007, is an “increased commitment to advance maritime domain awareness” (MDA).1 It is unclear, however, whether the lessons the Navy has learned in almost a decade of operations prosecuted in support of the global war on terrorism, or the current manifestations of terrorism and illicit behavior at sea, are reflected in the prominence played by MDA in the maritime strategy.
The national and Navy plans to achieve MDA are predicated on the assumption that automated systems can identify terrorists, pirates, or other illicit actors such as smugglers by passively detecting “anomalous” or unusual behavior, an assumption unsupported by any review of the events of the recent past. In the post-Cold War maritime environment, terrorism and other illicit activities have instead been conducted by those who conform to accepted norms of maritime activity precisely by not doing anything that can be described as uncommon or unexpected. An MDA plan focused on finding anomalies will be good for little more than identifying unusual (yet probably explainable) ship movements, ignoring smaller craft and elements of maritime behavior conducted on land, thus not providing the deep understanding of maritime activity necessary to both provide sufficient warning and drive future operations, especially against nonmilitary targets.
Both the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness and the Navy Maritime Domain Awareness Concept define MDA in broad and unobjectionable terms. They describe MDA as “the effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States.”2 This vision of a “multilayered, multi-domain picture that links the identity, location, known patterns and present activity of ships, cargo, people, and hazards within and adjacent to the maritime domain” is an affirmation of exactly the kind of all-source analysis that forms the bedrock of what Naval Intelligence believes it has provided to the Fleet throughout its history.3 MDA is ideally not “just vessel tracking,” “just intelligence,” or “just more sensors,” but an attempt to gain a truly comprehensive understanding of what is happening at sea, a task much more daunting than simply monitoring tracks on a display.4
Ship-centric Focus
Unfortunately, the details of the national and Navy MDA plans reveal a course of action not well suited to achieve this ambition, and instead provide the framework for what amounts to the implementation of a platform-centric ship tracking system, rather than a system that provides a broad and deep comprehension of activity at sea. According to the Navy's MDA concept, it will be achieved through “Maritime Change Detection,” a process defined as “the identification of anomalies from established trends and patterns.”5 The assumptions of this anomaly-focused form of MDA are misguided, however, because this anomalous behavior at sea (especially when defined solely in the context of vessel movements) is not necessarily suspicious or even important, particularly if what the system has defined as a trend or pattern does not serve as an accurate or explanatory model of maritime behavior.
Despite claims that it is not “just vessel tracking,” the Navy's MDA concept is clearly ship-centric, due to its repeated assertions that identifying anomalous behavior will be the critical element in developing actionable intelligence capable of targeting maritime terrorists or other illicit activity. Claiming that “forensic analysis has discovered that most terrorist activity is preceded by criminal events or aberrant behavior,” the MDA concept calls for “correlating seemingly unrelated criminal activity with anomalous maritime behavior” through “continuous assessment of the maritime domain and automated tools that alert commanders when suspicious items are uncovered.”6
The fundamental flaw with this premise is the assumption that maritime terrorism or other illicit maritime activities are correlated with suspicious, illegal, or unusual behavior. A review of recent maritime terrorist acts demonstrates that this is clearly untrue. The boat used to attack the USS Cole (DDG-67) in Yemen in October 2000 was bought (not stolen) in the Saudi port of Jizan.7 The “most destructive act of terrorism in maritime history,” the bombing of Superferry 14 in the Philippines in 2004, was conducted by a passenger who concealed the explosives in a television he brought aboard.8 Better security and safety practices on board Filipino ferries may have prevented that attack (or saved lives), but there was nothing anomalous about how the attack happened. Until they turned to ram the structures, there was nothing particularly unusual about the boats that attempted to strike the Al Basra and Khor al Amaya oil terminals in April 2004, killing three U.S. servicemen in the Persian Gulf.
In November 2002, al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists used small boats to escape after attempting to shoot down an Israeli airliner and destroying a hotel near Mombasa, Kenya. Such travel was not at all unusual in a region where small craft are commonly used to move along the East African coast.9 Loai Saqa, a Syrian associate of Abu Musab Zarqawi, was arrested by Turkish authorities in August 2005 while reportedly planning to attack Israeli cruise ships. The Turks were led to Saqa not through unusual maritime behavior, but because of an explosion and chemical fire in an apartment where attack preparations were being conducted.10 All accounts of the interrogations of the lone surviving gunman from the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, indicate that the attackers traveled on board at least two vessels from Pakistan to Mumbai, hijacking at least one of them along the way.11 It is unclear, however, whether even a perfect, NORAD-like system for maritime traffic control would have detected that the routes used by those ships to transport the attackers to India were somehow anomalous.
Anomalies fail as an effective indicator or predictor of other forms of illicit maritime activity as well. For example, widespread smuggling of fuel has taken place in the northern Persian Gulf since the 2003 Coalition invasion of Iraq, with “an estimated 1,000 tons of diesel fuel per day” being smuggled on board Iraqi vessels during 2006.12 Meanwhile, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 43,500 Africans were smuggled across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in 2008, an increase from 29,500 in 2007.13 Are illicit activities such as these two examples actually anomalous if they are also normal in the sense that they occur daily and in large numbers? Would the algorithms and systems currently being devised as part of the Navy and Coast Guard's MDA efforts provide advanced warning of these activities?
Ignoring the Variables
A system using anomalous or unusual vessel movements to identify suspicious behavior is inherently skewed, and misses out on many of the most important aspects of commercial maritime behavior. There are numerous reasons, for example, that a ship calling at a port where it had never previously visited would not be suspicious, including new ownership, new management, an emergency, engineering casualty, service to a new port, the particular cargo it is carrying, etc. Multiple scenarios are plausible for a maritime terrorist event in which the crew of a ship could be completely unaware that illicit cargo is on board. By focusing analytic effort on where a ship moves, one ignores many other variables that may provide better indicators of a potential illicit event. The ability of intelligence analysts to answer a broader set of questions and explain a vessel's behavior (including that of its cargo, crew, or passengers at a particular time) in the context of commercial maritime practices is much more important than being able to point out that a particular ship has never called at Djibouti or Singapore before. A ship is simply a tool. Making her movements the decisive variable in an anomaly-detecting algorithm will ensure that analysts miss out on truly important data.
Models that try to identify other anomalies, such as unusual passengers or cargo, may prove to be more useful than one analyzing vessel movements. But even those approaches have weaknesses, as author William Langeweische notes in his description of a new generation of illicit maritime actors capable of using “the methods and operational techniques of the shipowners,” in order “to escape the forces of order not by running away, but by complying with the laws and regulations in order to move about freely and to hide in plain sight.”14
The notion that systems will be able to detect unusual or suspicious maritime behavior automatically, and provide the cue to bring in human analytic power to solve the maritime intelligence problems of the future, is seductive. Yet while that idea has some merit, the MDA concept instead lays out a process focusing primarily on one element of maritime behavior. That element, vessel movement anomaly detection, has proved irrelevant in terms of providing indicators before most recent examples of maritime terrorism.
Statistical analysis can be a powerful tool, and the Navy should be making a greater effort both to use it and expand its potential applications for solving new problems. Making anomaly detection the primary analytic workhorse, however, will ensure that indicators of future maritime terrorism will be missed, and if not accompanied by a significant investment in training and hiring people truly knowledgeable in the maritime realm, will contribute toward the atrophy of that knowledge and expertise.
The new maritime strategy and maritime domain awareness concept have the right goal-a Navy, working hand-in-hand with the other Sea Services and interagency partners, maximizing its ability to collect data and truly understand what is happening at sea around the globe. The manner in which these documents call the Navy to accomplish these goals are very narrow and not particularly insightful, however. If implemented, the Navy of the future will have the computing power to sift through mounds of vessel movement data. However, that Navy may not have analysts who deeply comprehend how the maritime world works (particularly its commercial component), or the ability to leverage the unprecedented collection opportunities of the future to enhance that understanding.
1. A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, October 2007, http://www.navy.mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf.
2. National Strategy for Maritime Security: National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness, October 2005, http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/docs/MDA%20Plan%20Oct05-3.pdf (accessed 8 July 2008).
3. Navy Maritime Domain Awareness Concept, 29 May 2007, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/Navy_Maritime_Domain_Awareness_Concept_FINAL_2007.pdf (accessed 8 July 2008).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. James Risen and Raymond Bonner, “A Nation Challenged: Fatal Attack; Officials Say Bomber of the Cole was in Yemeni Custody Earlier,” The New York Times, 7 December 2001, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html-res=9C0CE5D7133CF934A35751C1A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (accessed 25 June 2008).
8. Peter Chalk, The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States (RAND Corporation, 2008), 51.
9. Counter-Terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds? (Nairobi/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2005), 9.
10. Amberin Zaman, “Syrian Charged in Plot to Attack Israeli Ships; The suspected Al Qaeda militant planned to use a speedboat filled with explosives, a Turkish court alleges. The Jewish state will lift travel alert,”Los Angeles Times,12 August2005, http://www.proquest.com (accessed 25 June 2008).
11. Geeta Anand, Matthew Rosenberg, Yaroslav Trofimov, and Zahid Hussain, “India Names Mumbai Mastermind,”The Wall Street Journal,3 December2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122823715860872789.html(accessed 11 January 2009).
12. Terence B. Moran, “Port of Umm Qasr: Challenges and Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 1 July 2006, 72-74, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed 21 February 2008).
13. “Gulf of Aden: 20 Die as Smugglers Force Migrants Overboard,” UNHCR Briefing Notes, 2 December 2008, http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/49351e202.html.
14. William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004), p. 7.
Lieutenant Munson currently serves as the intelligence officer at Naval Special Warfare Group Four, at Little Creek, Virginia. He has previously served on board the USS Essex (LHD-2), and at the Office of Naval Intelligence. He received a M.A. in security studies in Middle East Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School.
[1] M4IS2: Multinational, Multi-Agency, Multi-Disciplinary, Multi-Domain (M4) Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (IS2). Originally a Swedish concept, it has been enhanced by the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3.
Commandant of the Marine Corps
Click on portrait to read General Gray's “Global Intelligence Challenge in the 1990's” as published in American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990).