Strategy – Page 22 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/01/112011/01/11

US Loses Face & Standing with China & Pakistan

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Policy, Strategy, Threats

NIGHTWATCH Extract China-US: Special comment. International news services broadcast video and translations of Chinese Minister of Defense Liang insulting and hectoring the US, represented by the Secretary of Defense. The Chinese tasked Secretary Gates to defend and to explain to the Chinese why the US sells weapons to Taiwan and conducts naval training in the Yellow Sea. China demanded they stop. Instead of rejecting the Chinese demands and leaving, Gates tried to defend what needs not defense in Asia – US national policy.

A couple of points are worth noting. The tongue lashing Gates endured at a Singapore conference last year by a Chinese general clearly was no accident. That insult focused on the same issues as the latest. Gates should have walked out of the Singapore meeting last year and should have walked out of today's session. It remains unclear what the US hoped to gain that merited humiliation.

China is not ready to be a cooperative partner in international security affairs as some analysts contend; resents and resists the tutelage or guidance that some analysts think the US must offer; and has no intention of becoming more open in response to US requests if only because the US wants it so badly.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: See our Memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare. The US Government has hit bottom in terms of lacking legitimacy at home and credibility abroad. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and civility is not a substitute for cultural understanding.

US bends to Pakistan's wish

By M K Bhadrakumar Asia Times Online

The unscheduled visit by United States Vice President Joe Biden to Islamabad this week underscores Washington's embarrassment and anxiety that it stands excluded from a regional initiative on Afghan peace process that could be about to take off. The rapid sequence of events over the past fortnight has taken Washington by surprise.

Read entire analysis of role played by Turkey, Russia, and Iran…

DefDog Comment: Most insurgencies last past 10 years it almost always requires a political settlement….thus we are seeing what could have been accomplished at the beginning by understanding the Pashtun and sitting down, Jirga style, and asking for UBL, who was granted sanctuary under the Pasthun Honor Code, Pasthunwali…..no cultural understanding has resulted in a 10 year waste…

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is suffering from multiple disconnects–from its public, from reality, from strategic analytics, from cultural intelligence–from ANY intelligence relevant to all challenges at all levels–and finally, from integrity. Integrity is what allows well-intentioned people to cope with ambiguity. When they give up their integrity, they yield the field to those with political, ideological, and financial ambitions, and the public interest suffers–as does the welfare of our Armed Forces in harm's way.

2011/01/092011/01/09

Reference: Harvard Discovers “Shared Value”

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Strategy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then it appears in the Harvard Business Review,
and then you win while Harvard claims it was their idea…

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (apocryphal)

The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value

by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer

How to reinvent capitalism—and unleash a wave of innovation and growth.

Read Key Ideas Summary

The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history. This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle. [Emphasis added.]

Read entire article…

Phi Beta Iota: Legitimacy is the foundation of good order and commerce. That Harvard is beginning to get this is a very good sign. The authors also skirt the most interesting point, which is that “who does what” is changing, and we (this they do not address) are moving toward HYBRID networks that accomplish things together, on the basis of SHARED INFORMATION and consensus sense-making. When Alvin Toffler introduced in detail the concept of PowerShift, the most powerful concept he brought forward was that of information being a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor–and violence over the same–he was setting the stage for moving beyond the age of date or information, and into the age of cyber-collaboration to create shared value–what one author calls Non-Zero. NOW we are finally starting to get somewhere…toward what Tom Altee calls Evolutionary Activism driven by advanced cyber-information operations: creating shared value begins with creating shared information.

2011/01/092011/01/09

Evolution and Social Change I

03 Environmental Degradation, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Strategy

Prior Conversations Leading Up to This One:

Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part II

Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part III

Journal: Get America Working-A Conversation Part IV Enter usfruct (husbandry of the planet) and Spiritual Ecology

Tom Atlee:

Dear Alexander,

I'm afraid I don't have much useful to offer to Robert's initiative at this time. But I wanted to briefly note, for you and others, that evolutionary science writer Connie Barlow and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian minister Michael Dowd offer another, complementary, angle on evolution and religion (including their own thoughts on the relevance of evolutionary psychology) at Thank God for Evolution and The Great Story.

Michael is translating Christian theology into terms not only consistent with but expressive of a sacred understanding of science-based evolution. (He half jokes that he is a CreaTHEist, while Connie is a CreAtheist!) He is currently doing some remarkable interviews with luminaries in the field of Evolutionary Christianity. At the very least, their work should provide you with some additional juicy quotes…

Review: Thank God for Evolution–How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World

Review: Earthspirit–A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Christianity

Continue reading “Evolution and Social Change I”

2011/01/092011/01/09

Journal: Will Pakistan Implode Because of US in AF?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off

Pakistan will implode if the US does not leave Afghanistan

The continuing US presence in Afghanistan fuels extremism in neighbouring Pakistan

Imran Khan The Observer, Sunday 9 January 2011

The assassination of Salmaan Taseer has shown only too clearly the growing extremism in Pakistan, the radicalisation of its society and the polarisation that is taking hold. This is not just between the religious and the secular, but also the polarisation that the “war on terror” has caused between the various religious sects.

Read rest of article Chuck Spinney is commenting on…

Is the Global War in Terror Creating More Problems than it is Solving?

Chuck Spinney

The late historian Chalmers JOHNSON popularized the term “blowback” to describe the unintended grand-strategic consequences resulting from interventionist foreign policies and military actions. The term blowback dates to the CIA's internal history of the US’s 1953 Iranian coup that threw out the Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (a progressive social reformer who wanted to nationalize the oil industry among other things) and replaced him with the tyrannical American puppet Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. No one can doubt that contemporary problems with Iran today are rooted in resentments dating back to the 1953 coup.

Continue reading “Journal: Will Pakistan Implode Because of US in AF?”

2011/01/062011/01/06

Indications & Warning: Army Spirit and Public Fat

04 Education, 07 Health, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Officers Call, Strategy

Army's “Spiritual Fitness” Test Comes Under Fire

Jason Leopold

TruthOut Wednesday 05 January 2011

Test Was Designed by Psychologist Who Inspired CIA's Torture Program

An experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative designed by the same psychologist whose work heavily influenced the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program is under fire by civil rights groups and hundreds of active-duty soldiers. They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a “higher power” in order to be deemed “spiritually fit” to serve in the Army.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million “holistic fitness program” unveiled in late 2009 and aimed at reducing the number of suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases, which have reached epidemic proportions over the past year due to multiple deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the substandard care soldiers have received when they return from combat.

Read rest of article….

Tomgram: William Astore, We're Number One (in Self-Promotion)

Posted by William Astore at 9:40am, January 6, 201

EXTRACT: In April 2010, for instance, a group of retired top brass and others released a report claiming that 27% of Americans between 17 and 24 are “too fat to fight.” “Within just 10 years, the number of states reporting that 40 percent of their 18- to 24-year-olds are obese or overweight went from one [Kentucky] to 39.” No reason to focus on that, though. After all, it was so last year.

Just as the year ended, however, the Education Trust issued a report indicating that nearly a quarter of all applicants to the Armed Forces, despite having a high-school diploma, can’t pass the necessary military entrance exam. This isn’t Rhodes Scholarships we’re talking about, but not having “the reading, mathematics, science, and problem-solving abilities” to become a bona fide private in the U.S. Army. We’re talking the sort of basic that, according to an Education Trust spokesperson, makes it “equally likely that the men and women who don't pass the test are [also] unprepared for the civilian workforce.”

includes

Freedom Fighters for a Fading Empire
What It Means When We Say We Have the World’s Finest Fighting Force
By William J. Astore

EXTRACT: As for our armed forces, though most Americans don’t know it, within U.S. military circles much criticism exists of an officer corps of “tarnished brass”that is deficient in professionalism; of generals who are more concerned withcovering their butts than leading from the front; of instruction at military academies that is divorced from war’s realities; of an aversion “to innovation or creativity… [leading to] an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism” that undermines strategy and makes a hash of counterinsurgency efforts. Indeed, our military’s biting criticism of itself is one of the few positive signs in a fighting force that is otherwise overstretched, deeply frustrated, and ridiculously overpraised by genuflecting politicians.

Read entire article (second half of same link)…

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular. He welcomes reader comments atwjastore@gmail.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Astore discusses the military nightmares of a fading empire, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

2011/01/052011/01/05

Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Military, Officers Call, Strategy, Threats, White Papers

Phi Beta Iota: The author, Michael O'Hanlon, remains one of our most respected commentators on defense, and his suggestions within this document are entirely reasonable. However, he does not go far enough. A 10% reduction of a military-industrial complex budget that has nearly tripled in 30 years is not serious, nor is there innovation in this document. The military-industrial complex must be reduced by 40% if not 50%: one third direct cuts; one third reallocation to Program 150 (diplomacy & development); and one third to thinkers and actual shooters–Cyber and Advanced Information Operations, Civil Affairs, Multinational Decision Support Centres, and long over-due investment in tactical intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance that is Of, By, and For the Strategic Sergeant, NOT Of, By, and For Lockheed, Harris, or the U.S. Air Force.

2008 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

Continue reading “Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP”

2011/01/052011/01/06

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Trusted Bodyguard Executes Governor in Pakistan for Being a Blasphemer–Observations on Meaning for Church & State

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, History, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy

Pakistan: An elite police commando from the provincial police force who was assigned as a bodyguard for the governor of Punjab Province murdered the governor today in Islamabad. The commando dropped his weapon and surrendered to the police, bragging that he was proud he killed a blasphemer. With that, Pakistan's political crisis deepened.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: Trusted Bodyguard Executes Governor in Pakistan for Being a Blasphemer–Observations on Meaning for Church & State”