Insurgency & Revolution – Page 11 – Public Intelligence Blog

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Anthropologists in the Public Sphere–Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power

5 Star, Information Operations, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, War & Face of Battle

Publisher Lazy, Content Shines, June 6, 2009

Roberto J. Gonzalez

It infuriates me to run across mediocre publishers who refuse to use the simple tools that Amazon provides for loading a proper description of the book, providing the table of contents, or even offering “look inside the book” where an index can sell a book faster than the table of contents.

Minus one star for a rotten lazy publisher. Here is the table of contents. Buy the book, along with Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War this is fundamental reading that calls into question both the sanity of how we engage with foreign publics, and the incompetence combined with mendaciousness with which we seek to abuse the profession of anthropology for wrong ways and wrong ends.

The highest praise I can give to this book is that it forced me to think and it inspired new work–my forthcoming article on Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time (see comment for URL) was directly inspired by this book and the huge mess the U.S. Army is making of the Human Terrain Teams (HTT), code for abused pretend anthropologists without a clue. I have the fly-leaf note: our HUMINT is at war with itself.

The kindest thing I can do for the brilliantly selected and organized contributors to this volume is respect their work by providing the table of contents, which has reminded me better than my own notes of how diverse and valuable this collection is.

Part I: War, Peace, and Social Responsibility
01 Franz Boas, “Scientists as Spies” (1919)
02 Margaret Mead, “Warfare is Only an Invention–Not a Biological Necessity” (1940)
03 Marshall Sahlins, “Once You've Broken Him Down…” (1965)
04 Gerald Berreman, “Contemporary Anthropology and Moral Accountability” (1973)
05 Laura Nader, “Two Plus Two Equals Zero–War and Peace Reconsidered”
06 Beatriz Manz, “Dollars that Forge the Guatemalan Chains”
07 David Price, “Anthropologists as Spies” (2000)
08 Pierre Bourdieu, “Abuse of Power by the Advocates of Reason” (1998)

Part II: Prescient Anthropology: Diagnosing Crises Abroad
09 Robert Hayden, “West Must Correct Its Mistakes in Yugoslavia” (1992)
10 Robert Hayden, “NATO Fuels the Balkan Fire” (1999)
11 Anna Simons, “No Exit From Somalia” (1991)
12 Anna Simons, “Our Abysmal Ignorance About Somalia” (1992)
13 Anna Simons, “The Somalia Trap” (1993)
14 Winifred Tate, “Increased Military Aid to Colombia Won't Curb Drug Trafficking” (1999)
15 Winifred Tate, “Colombia” Rules of the Game”, 2001
16 Lesley Gill, “Unveiling US Policy in Colombia” (2002)
17 Marc Edelman, “The Price of Free Trade: Famine” (2002)
18 Ali Qleibo, “How Two Truths Make One Tragedy” (2000)
19 Jeff Halper, “The Matrix of Control” (2201)
20 Jeff Halper, “After the Invasion: Now What” (2002)
21 Hugh Gusterson, “If U.S. Dumps Test Ban Treaty, China Will Rejoice” (2001)

Part III: Prelude to September 11
22 Ashraf Ghani, “Cut Off the Arms Flow and Let Afghans Unite” (1989)
23 James Merryman, “US Can Strengthen African Ties in Wake of Terrorism with Aid, Clear Policies” (1998)
24 Robert Fernea, “Egyptians Don't Like Saddam, But….” (1991)
25 Barbara Nimri Aziz, “Gravesites–Environmental Ruin in Iraq” (1997)
26 Fadwa El Guindo, “UN Should Act to Protect Muslim Women” (1998)
27 Zieba Shorish-Shamley, Interviewed, “Women Under the Taliban” (2001)
28 William Beeman, “Follow the Oil Trail–Mess in Afghanistan Partly Our Government's Fault” (1998)

Part IV: Anthropological Interpretations of September 11
29 Catherine Lutz, “Our Legacy of War” (2001)
30 David Harvey etal, “Local Horror, Global Response” (2001)
31 William Beeman, “A War Our Great-Grandchildren Will Be Fighting–Understanding Osama Bin Laden” (2001)
32 Janet McIntosh, “What Have 9/11 Investigators Overlooked?” (2002)

Part V: On Afghanistan, Central Aisa, and the Middle East
34 Robert Canfield, “Nation is Home to Afghans, Mujahedeen, Taliban, Afghan-Atabs, to Name a Few” (2001)
35 Ashraf Ghani, “The Follow of Quick Action in Afghanistan” (2001)
36 Nazif Sharrani, “Afghanistan Can Learn From Its Past” (2001)
37 Zieba Shorish-Shamley Interviewed, “Women in the New Afghanistan” (2001)
38 David Edwards and Shahmahmood Miakhel, “Enlisting Afghan Aid” (2001)
39 Kamran Asdar Ali, “Pakistan's Dilemma” (2001)
40 Francesca Mereu etal, “War Destroyed Chechnya's Clan Structure” (2002)

Part VI: Examining Militarism and the “War on Terror”
41 William Beeman, “U.S. Anti-Terrorist Message Won't Fly in Islamic World” (2001)
42 David Price, “Terror and Indigenous Peoples–War without End”
43 John Burdick, “Afghan War Could be Recruiting Tools for Terrorists” (2001)
44 Dale Eickelman, “First Know the Enemy, Then Act” (2001)
45 John Burdick, “Sept 11 Exposes Futile Search for `Perfect' Missile Defense” (2001)
46 Roberto Gonzalez, “Ignorance Is Not Bliss,” (2202)
47 Mahmood Mamdani, “Turn Off Your Tunnel Vision” (2002)
48 Thomas McKenna Interviewed, “The Roots of Muslim Separatism in the Philippines” (2002)

Part VII Academic Freedom and Civil Liberties
49 Roberto Gonzalez, “Lynn Cheney-Joe Lieberman Group Puts Out a Blacklist” (2001)
50 David Price, “Academia under Attack: Sketches for a New Blacklist” (2001)
51 Hugh Gusterson, Interviewed, “Lynn Cheney's Free Speech Blacklist” (2002)
52 Laura Nader, Harmony Coerced Is Freedom Denied” (2001)

Epilogue: Unconventional Anthropology: Challenging the Myths of Continuous War

I was pleased to see several CounterPunch contributions. I respectfully encourage Amazon readers to seek out my CounterPunch short piece on “Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else.” Obama is a front for the Borg, he is not getting proper decision-support, and neither is any other element of the government. We need to get back into being the sovereign people.

In addition to the book cited above, I recommend:
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

2009/07/032009/12/03

Review: The Accidental Guerrilla–Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

2 Star, Insurgency & Revolution

Accidental American Accidentally Rediscovers Old Knowledge

June 21, 2009

David Kilcullen

The author is an accidental American given access to top secret information and inner circles much more appropriate to Ralph Peters, Steven Metz, Max Manwaring, Gunny Poole, and many others who knew all this–and have sought to teach all this in speaking truth to power–for decades. Someone liked him, he was given temporal admission to the closed circle, and this book is what he knows and what they hear.

While the author provides a commendable view for one man in isolation, he is wrong on multiple points, e.g. ethnographic studies are not about ethnic studies, but rather about deep local studies that contribute to a mosaic of global understanding that is more nuanced than top-down generics; CIA did not coin the term Irregular Warfare, the French study in 1999 was long preceded by Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, etc.) This author joins the crop of new-bees who rediscover old knowledge. Sadly, this book is probably a measure of where the Secretary of Defense is going to take the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2008, and that makes me want to gag.

The author's facile explanation of “the accidental guerrilla” is that we are intruding in our Global War on Terror (GWOT), the locals are resisting our intrusion rather than being “insurgents,” and they are fighting to be left alone. I have a note: “weak on history, weak on internal sources of disorder [see the image on predicting revolution], completely ignorant of the larger picture of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism.”

What I got out of this book:

+ Distinguishes between human and national security, implies correctly that USA and most still focused on state on state security and oblivious to the ten high level threats to mankind [which, I might add for the author's edification, are outlined in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.]

+ Four models for thinking:
– Backlash against globalization
– Globalized insurgency
– Civil war within Islam
– Asymmetric warfare

On the latter, while the author has two insights: that cost asymmetry matters and that US will not develop because the military-industrial complex cannot profit from low-cost capabilities development, it infuriates me to find no reference to any of 20 or more pioneers of the asymmetric challenge from General Al Gray in 1988 to all of the speakers at the Army Strategy Conference in 1998. See my articles, “The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate”, and it's 10-year reprise, “Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A 20-Year Retrospective”.

I am especially annoyed by the failure to acknowledge and integrate anything at all by Max Manwaring or Ralph Peters, thus confirming my own view that this book is an immaculate conception of what passes for thinking at the high table, and totally disconnected from larger reality. Cf.
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series)

On the first, I am totally amazed that anyone could earn a PhD and observe that globalization has created haves and have-nots, without any reference to solid literature such as:
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

There are many other books the author has not had an opportunity to explore, in the comment I provide URLs for Gray, the two articles mentioned above, and an annotated bibliography leading to 500+ non-fiction books about reality organized into 20 or so categories.

The author has a diagram of the four phases of Al Qaeda operations: infection, contagion, intervention by others, and rejection by locals of foreign intervention.

There are some false notes, e.g. one explanation mounted for villagers joining the Taliban to pin down a US force, “Do you have any idea how boring it is to be a teen-ager in Afghanistan?”

I agree with the point on page 44, that insurgent successes seem as much due to inattention and inadequate resourcing on our part as to talent on theirs. Of course Charlie Wilson and Steve Metz said this first. Cf.
Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy

The author's assessment of the Taliban as the most competent tactical enemy faced by the US anywhere is interesting, along with his ground observations on use of snipers, prepared positions, and scouting-intelligence.

He largely ignores the Pakistani support for the Taliban, taking it as a given, and the involvement of Karzai and his brother in the drug trade. He does agree with the author of Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia with respect to Karzai compromising himself and his government.

For anyone who has actually studied real-world conflict and especially revolutionary conflicts, this is a very annoying book that can be summed up with “Focus on the population, not the enemy; good governance works.” Duh.

The author appears unwitting of the fact that SOF went into Afghanistan in the first place with a tribal map from the Royal Academy in Sweden that was color-coded and backed up by current research, or that SOF is really beginning to excel at social network analysis and that company commanders are creating intelligence cells out of hide to do more of that.

I would recommend the book for its description of the “dialog of the deaf” where US officers speaking fast English show powerpoint slides to Afghan leaders, who then respond with a range of questions and complaints and observations that must be translated, neither side “getting” what the other was seeking to communicate.

The author is still a command and control loyalist: he says on page 150 that the fundamental problem is one of control–of people, terrain, and information. Sorry, but wrong. Sun Tzu today would say that “to gain control one must give up control,” and he would refer the aspiring commander to the concept of Epoch B leadership (see image posted above).

He itemizes the mistakes in Pakistan without mention of their British training:
01-Focus on enemy vice population
02-Large-scale-operations
03-Statis-garrison-posts
04-Overextended-active, reserve-deficiency
05-Inetic-overall
06-Discounting of local-assets
07-Lack-of-helicopters
08-Lack-of-mine-protected vehicles
09-Desire to copy US (?)

Five classes of threat facing Europe:
01-terrorist-cells
02-subversive-networks
03-extremist-political-movements
04-insurgent-sympathizer-networks
05-crime/terrorism overlap

Nothing on corruption, incompetence, failure to assimilate, waste, even organized crime and rotten education.

I have no argument with the author's basic premise, spelled out on page 263:

“…concepts such as hybrid warfare and unrestricted warfare make a lot more sense than traditional state-on-state, force-on-force concepts of conventional war.”

I agree with the author when he says counterterrorism is not a strategy, proposed an ARCADIA Conference, salutes the limits of our influence, and describes the emergence of an anti-Powell doctrine.

He makes eight recommendations:
01-political-strategy
02-comprehensive-approach
03-continuity of key personnel and policies
04-Population-centric
05-cueing and synchronization
06-close-genuine-partnerships
07-emphasis on building local security forces
08-region-wide approach

He says that ambiguity arises because the conflict [GWOT] breaks existing paradigms. Quite so, but for 20 years no one in Washington has been willing to listen to thousands saying this over and over.

His conclusion:
01-develop-new-lexicon
02-get-grand-strategy-right
03-rebalance-instruments-of-national-power
04-identify-the-new “strategic services” [not mentioned: Civil Affairs, Air Peace, Open Source Agency, Multinational Decision Support Centre]
05-develop-strategic-information-warfare

I put this book down with great sadness. Those who provided jacket blurbs did so with good intentions, but the conclusion that I come to is that this “closed circle” neither reads nor learns. The author is an accidental guru as well as an accidental American.

I regret Amazon limits me to 10 links, see 2008 Chapter: Annotated Bibliography on Reality for 500+ relevant works including The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

2009/06/172013/09/02

Review: Descent into Chaos–The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

5 Star, Cultural Intelligence, Insurgency & Revolution, Peace Intelligence

Ahmed Rashid

5 out of 5 stars Broad but Nuanced, Exudes Intelligence,Absorbing Speaking of Truth, June 17, 2009

Among the observations from the author”

1. U.S. has destabilized the world after 9-11, not made it safer.

2. Pakistan is the key to peace in the region, but the US has been totally taken in by Musharraf and his army and ISI colleagues, all of whom have played the US (easily) for the total fool.

3. “No coherence to US tactics and strategy” combined with a collapsed Cabinet system and “ruinous laws” making torture the norm.

4. Pashtuns lacked leadership on the ground for decades, a major reason why they did not counter the Taliban

5. If Pakistan is the key to peace in the region, Uzbekistan is the key to future war, mixing as it does the worst of dictatorial tyranny (I know, tautologically redundant, enjoy) with deep Islamic fundamentalism.

Continue reading “Review: Descent into Chaos–The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia”

2009/06/092009/12/04

Review: Seeds of Terror–How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda

4 Star, Insurgency & Revolution

Stops where we need to start: USG and US Bank Complicity, June 9, 2009

Gretchen Peters

The ultimate cold call was made by the head of the SEC who went to Colombia to meet the FARC leadership and urge them to invest their drug money with Wall Street.

The Los Angeles crack cocaine plague was fueled by Blandon, a Nicaraguan contra drug dealer protected by CIA and DEA while Ricky Ross paid for being the street-level entrepreneur.

OF COURSE the top leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan are major drug dealers–their political US Government counterparts are in on the deal and the bureaucrats go along.

This is a GREAT book and the kind of investigative journalism melded with academic research that we no longer do as a Nation, so kudos for that. However meritorious, it joins other similar books from the past and does not address the core brackets: the money provided by the US Government to Pakistan in the 1980's, and the money laundering and cash liquidity that Wall Street enjoyed in the 1990's in large part because of its close alliance with global drug dealers, arms merchants, and traders in women and children as well as 40+ dictators happy to loot their commonwealths while pretending to support our “war on terror” with rendition and torture.

Until the US Government itself has integrity, and imposes integrity on Wall Street, this book is a superb account that will go absolutely nowhere in terms of impacting on the problem. WE are the problem in so far as we persist in lying to the American people about all that we do, and do not do, in their name.

Note: the annotated bibliography in the latter book, free online, covers 500+ non-fiction books, each with a link to my summary review. The URL is http://www.oss.net/BOOKS

2008/10/092009/12/04

Review: Seven Pillars of Wisdom–A Triumph

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Culture, Research, Insurgency & Revolution, War & Face of Battle

$4 extra avoids abridgement,October 9, 2008

T.E. Lawrence

I own an original first edition (and did not realize its value until recently), but in searching for this book to add a link from within my new book on Irregular Warfare: Waging Peace, I realized the reader is faced with two choices today, one costing $4 more than the other. I believe I found the explanation in the less expensive version, which is described as “severely abridged.” So all things being equal, buy this version instead.

There is no finer summary of this work that I have encountered in my literature search than “T.E. Lawrence And the Mind of An Insurgent” by James J. Schneider, Ph.D., a professor of military theory at the School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Previously published in 2005 in varied works, it can be easily found online by searching for the author and title.

My preliminary research for the new book shows that the Lieutenant Colonels/Commanders and some Colonels/Captains of the Navy get it, but the flags do not. Even the vaunted counterinsurgency handbook avoids dealing with three realities:

1. Absent a moral legitimizing strategy that includes a commitment to sufficiency of presence, no occupation will succeed.

2. Absent a national intelligence community willing and able to jump deep into Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2), no commander will succeed.

3. It costs asymmetric irregular warriors $1 for every $500,000 they force us to spend with our present idiotic emphasis on technology as a substitute for both thinking and human presence. They can keep this up forever, we cannot.

IMHO, Dr. Schneider's distillation is utterly brilliant, and if the publisher issues a new edition, I urge the publisher to obtain permission to include Dr. Schneider's distillation as a new professional preface.

Although I have a very very large personal library (photo at oss.net), here are the books I bought today as part of my homework. In the comment I provide the URLs for the pieces I have had printed locally.

Modern irregular warfare: In defense policy and as a military phenomenon
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War (Stanford Security Studies)
Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the 21st Century
Guerrilla Warfare: Irregular Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Stackpole Military History Series)
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
Never Surrender: A Soldier's Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom
Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man

Two other books I already own within my ten link limit:
War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

And everything written by H. John Poole, but especially Tactics of the Crescent Moon, Phantom Soldier, One More Bridge to Cross, and Tiger's Way. Also Col Hammes on Sling and Stone, Mao and Che, Max Manwaring's various works including Search for Security, Uncomfortable Wars, and Environmental Security….and on, and on, and on….IRWF is finally “in” now we just have to spend ten years waiting for the current flags to retire.

2008/10/092009/12/04

Review: Modern Warfare–A French View of Counterinsurgency

5 Star, Insurgency & Revolution, War & Face of Battle

Core Source for AWC Paper on Intelligence in Counterinsurgency, October 9, 2008

Roger Trinquier

I was led to this source by the excellent paper on “Intelligence Gathering in a Counterinsurgency” by Captain Daniel J. Smith, U.S. Navy, as posted for public dissemination 15 March 2006. I have pulled the conclusions from that paper, and will be seeking permission to include them in a new book, they are as perfect and holistic as it gets. Capt Sullivan's paper is easily found online.

For a list of the books that I have decided to buy (this is not one of them), see my review and the ten links provided at Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. I had to draw the line someplace, and on balance, believe the wisdom of this book is best acquired second hand, while the penchant for torture and other unethical means is best left behind.

For an alternative perspective on how to win hearts and minds (apart from integrity and morality as core), see:
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World
Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century

The various books I offer free online as well as on Amazon could also be helpful. E Veritate Potens.

2008/06/282009/12/04

Review: Looking For Trouble–Adventures in a Broken World

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Force Structure (Military), Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Security (Including Immigration), War & Face of Battle

What Humans Knew in 1990's That Secret Mandarins Refused to Hear, June 28, 2008

Ralph Peters

This book is not, as some might expect, a collection of past Op-Eds, but rather an extraordinary retrospective at the 1989-1996 time frame when officers like Ralph (and General Al Gray, myself, and a number of others in the Army and the Marines) were seeing the writing on the wall: the end of big war and the emergence of global instability in every clime and place). Ralph actually walked the ground and had “eyes on.”

I was immediately charmed anew by the poetic writing and the visually elegant turns of phrase. I have in my notes: chuckled, amused, reminded.

This review is going to combine my fly leaf notes with as many short quotes as I can fit in within my 1,000 word allotment.

Notes first:

Deep reading of Tolstoy and others set the stage for *understanding* today's culture and mindset in Russia. Earlier in his life, a subscription gift from an aunt to National Geographic opened his eyes to the rest of the world.

Early on, disdain for how we spend billions on satellites and nothing on officers walking the ground. He notes that overt human intelligence can absorb and articulate what no satellite can provide: “the temper of the people, the taste of the land.”

USSR in 1991 was potholes and rust. In his “walk-about” he gained direct invited access to an MVD commander's office, to all of the local “secret” messages, and had invited “eyes on” the MVD special intelligence communications room.

In the Bosnia-Kosovo run-up, which he and others anticipated, he learned that Europe cannot be trusted to act in unison or decisively in the absence of strong US leadership–France, Germany, and the United Kingdom all revert to their historical animosities, and despite their large standing armies, lack the political will or the deep strategic analytics necessary to use those armies in a coherent manner.

His respect for Armenia is deeply rooted in his on the ground experience among them.

Col Stu Herrington, whose book Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World I have praised, is strongly praised in this book. He and the author were part of a team that worked with the Russians to address the long-standing concern over Americans being held in the Gulag, and the pages in this book, covering each of the wars from World War II onwards, are a complete surprise and essential reading for anyone interested in POW/MIA accounting.

He blasts the US policy of crop eradication, and his devastating criticism of arm-chair politicians and ivory tower diplomats warms my heart.

Late in the book he focused on Pakistan and I find this chapter especially vital for the public understanding of how the US is destroying its once-close ties to the Pakistani officer corps. The older officers are fully trained by the British or the US. The company and field grade officers are not, and are so delusional about Islam and so ignorant about the rest of the world as to be very dangerous to us.

Throughout the book he laments the lot of women across most Islamic countries (with Indonesia and Malaysia as notable exceptions; I add this from my own knowledge and Ralph's official report to the Marine Corps in the 1990's).

Now the quotes. Page number, then words:

8 On [the Russian and Central Asian] frontiers, humanity is a brotherhood of smugglers.

29 Only its women allowed the Soviet Union to endure as long as it did.

38 …I am convinced there is no Russian word for maintenance.

45 …worry too much about dead facts and too little about their antagonist's delusions.

66 Artist and intelligence challenges similar: an eye for detail and ability to reduce complexity to coherence

73 …no one in the US intelligence community was interested. If the data didn't come from a satellite, it didn't count.

87 What Belgrade lacked … was human dignity.

108 I knew we could overpower [Iraqi] military….I had seen…his officer corps…drunk and whoring.

132 Conquest of Central Asia is a chronicle of…cruelty….Soviets are the champs….[others] tortured human beings. The Soviet Union tortured the earth itself.

141 Bukhara is where Islam turned dark…

146 The Clinton Administration was run by intolerant dreamers… With neither self-critical faculties nor experience of the world …

151 Islam froze by the mid-fifteenth century when science-fearing zealots….

172 And there you have our diplomats. Unwilling to talk to our enemies… Unwilling to learn.

200 Azerbaijan was the first place where I got n inside look at the nastiness of our Saudi “friends.”

204 Everywhere, the Saudis took an interest in human suffering only if it offered them an entry point for missionary activities. And any Muslim who wouldn't sign up for … Wahhabi Puritanism was welcome to die.

218 …the callousness with which our government had treated the family members of our MIAs…

231 [General McCaffrey] wasn't getting an adequate tie-it-all-together picture of the cocaine problem. Not from his staff, and not from the alphabet-soup agencies…

239 You cannot take away the livelihood of the poor [coca crops] unless you have the wherewithal to replace it immediately and enduringly.

244 Found wealth, when immature countries…hit the natural-resources lottery, is uniformly destructive of the souls of men and nations.

251 [Army saw the future coming.] It was impossible, however, to persuade the Clinton White House, the intelligence establishment, or even our own services (except for the Marines) that our enemies, rather than our desires, would shape the future security environment.

319 [Drug Czar] was not allowed to differentiate between hard and soft drugs.

335 [At the Plain of Jars] I saw my country's dark side….we go mad now and then. And when we do, we leave desolation behind.

This is an amazing book and for anyone who is concerned with strategic warning, honest intelligence, strategy, force structure, the need to rebalance the instruments of national power, and the future of humanity, will find this book inspiring.

E Veritate Potens–From Truth, We the People Are Empowered