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Phi Beta Iota: This website is focused on public intelligence in the public interest and strives to avoid favoring any specific policy proiposition.  Our view is that an informed public is a nation's greatest strength.  When we post information that takes a strident position, it is for informational purposes, not as an endorsement.  Below, linked from the photograph, is a speech delivered in the House of Lords of the British Parliament.

EXTRACT:  Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t have a problem and my party does not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

Islam strives for world domination. The Quran commands Muslims to exercise jihad. The Quran commands Muslims to establish shariah law. The Quran commands Muslims to impose Islam on the entire world.

Germany- Russia: German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today that Russian President Medvedev should discuss his security initiative “within the framework” of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, RIA Novosti reported. Merkel said, “President Medvedev and I spoke by telephone last week and we reiterated that we should discuss his initiative on partnership in the security sphere.”

Note: The Russians are proposing a new European security treaty that rivals and might eventually replace NATO, but with Russia, Germany and France as the new leaders. The Germans plus some of the original NATO members appear to want more balance in their foreign relations, meaning they appear to be seeking to reduce their subservience to the US by establishing offsetting relations with Russia.

While that might seem odd, that is the way it looks. Even stranger is that the US is presented as supporting European NATO’s call for a withdrawal of nuclear weapons from western Europe, potentially leaving Russia and Frances as the only states possessing nuclear weapons in Europe.  Of course, the French will not dismantle their nuclear weapons, even while they support withdrawal of American weapons.

US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past nine years have forced the maturation of relations and attitudes in Europe and Asia. The security regime of the post-World War II era is finally ending, albeit slowly and a decade after it should have ended.

US strategic planners need to be thinking about the implications of being first among equals, more than of being the only superpower.

EVENT OVERVIEW

Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) has jbeen the force behind the world’s largest annual gathering of the competitive intelligence community: This year we are proud to mark our 25th Silver Anniversary.

We’re bringing you five all new tracks in 2010:

• CI Professional Growth
• CI Tools and Techniques
• Competitive Strategy to Drive Growth: C-Suite CI
• The Globalization of CI
• Strategic Marketing Research and Intelligence

Linked below is a very long, but I believe critically important analysis of the blowback effects of Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza, which began in Dec 2008 and ended days before President Obama took office.  The author, Norman Finkelstein, is the son of Holocaust survivors, and the bête noire of the worldwide Zionist establishment, especially in the United States and Israel.  He has written widely on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the contemporary politics of the Holocaust.

“Blowback” is a term coined by historian Chalmers Johnson to describe the unintended and counterproductive grand-strategic effects of aggressive strategies.  Grand strategy can be thought of as the way in which your strategic actions:

• Pump up your own resolve and increase your country’s internal political cohesion
• Drain away your opponent’s resolve and weaken his political cohesion
• Reinforce commitments of your allies to your cause and and make them more empathetic to your success
• Attract the uncommitted to your cause and make them empathetic to your success
• Isolate your adversary and induce his allies to stop supporting him
• End conflicts on terms on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds of future conflicts

Continue reading “Journal: Grand Strategy, Gaza In, Israel Out”

The MICC Moves to Hose the Taxpayer One More Time

Eisenhower's Nightmare Arrives

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Dwight D. Eisenhower,  President of the United States   Farewell Address,

17 January 1961

As I indicated in CounterPunch on 3 February 2010, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) just released by the Obama Pentagon is a bad joke. That bad joke is about to be given the good housekeeping seal of approval by a special panel appointed jointly by the Secretary of Defense and the defense barons of the Armed Services committees in Congress. When this happens, rest assured, any desire to get control of the out-of-control defense budget will plunge far below its already low level. Chalk up another victory in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) war on the Constitution, the American taxpayer, and programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are hallmarks of civilized society.

To understand why this QDR review panel is gearing up to paint lipstick on the QDR pig, it is first necessary to describe what the QDR did not do.

Today, the Pentagon is now spending more in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time since the end of WWII to support a military force structure that is much smaller and older than at any time since the end of World War II. But the QDR did not even acknowledge the three mutually reinforcing problems that are now combining to produce a catastrophic meltdown of the Pentagon’s budget plans, let alone the cynical modes of conduct that virtually guarantee even more force structure reductions, even if defense budgets will continue to increase:

Most interesting.  This is two different concepts that need to be broken out.

Intelligence Cycle with Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). When used as a stand-alone discipline–OSINT is the only all-source intelligence discipline that is ALSO a “full-spectrum” multi-INT in its own right with commercial imagery, commercial signals monitoring, commercial measurement & signatures–the OSINT “cycle” is identical to the properly done all-source intelligence cycle:

• Requirements Definition
• Collection Management
• Source Discovery & Validation
• Multi-Source Machine-Speed and Human Processing and Exploitation
• Human 360 degree historical-cultural analytic tradecraft in context and in time
• Visualziation and presentation to “deciders”

Most secret communities–and certainly including the US Intelligence Community–stink at most of the above.  The US Intelligence Community does not do requirements definition (Exhibit A: National Intelligence Strategy), does not do proper collection management (FIND, GET, BUY, TASK), is abyssmally ignorant in historical and cultural 360 degree analysis, does not do machine speed all-source processing in part because the machines only speak English and do not have geospatial attributes tagging all daums, is retarded in presentation (PowerPoint dumbs anything down to idiocy levels) and generally is nothing more than classified news–the US IC has forgotten how to do time-sensitive decision-specific intelligence.  To compound their error, most do not do holistic analysis, i.e. considereing each subject in the context of all ten threats and all twelve policies and all eight demographic challenges, AND they fail to isolate nuances relevant to policy versus acqusition versus operations.

OSINT within the All-Source Cycle. This is the really cool part.  The ONLY intelligence senior we have ever heard who actually “gets it” is the head of the South African National Intelligence Agency (NIA), who described OSINT in support of the intelligence cycle as a “DNA spiral” in which OSINT is an active participant in each of the intelligence cycle steps, helping define the requirement, narrow the collection management process, and so on.  This is not how most secret communities work, they continue to make the two long-obvious mistakes: either they treat OSINT as the red-headed step-child locked in the closet and largely useless (CIA) or they treat OSINT as an analytic convenience function, a form of direct-control library, which makes it worse than useless (DIA).

This entire site is about OSINT and its evolution toward M4IS2, the Swedish concept of multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making.  That in turn leads to the third era of intelligence, Smart Nations, Clever Continents, and the World Brain.  See the new book for the whole story.