The coming swarm
As the Air Force's drone program grows, so does the importance of pilot selection. What started in 2004 as five drone combat patrols — four aircraft each — will to swell to 65 patrols by 2014. By 2010, Predators had logged more than a million combat hours, more than any other military bird. And today's population of 1,300 combat drone pilots will be joined by 500 more in the next few years.
And as autonomous systems evolve, the capabilities of unmanned craft will, too. The Air Force will shift to a system with multiple vehicles flown in tandem, answering to a single pilot. These “swarm” handlers will have more complex tasks heaped on them earlier in their career.
“In terms of who we need to have, I think we're on a learning curve there,” Anthony Tvaryanas, a doctor of aerospace medicine and technical advisor with the 711th Human Systems Integration Directorate at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, told NBC News.
“If [a pilot is] operating a swarm, what are you looking for in that person? I don't think anyone's looking into those concepts,” Tvaryanas said.
“As we get from a pilot in an airplane to a pilot outside the airplane to a pilot controlling 100 airplanes, I think we're approaching the limits of what [prior experience and studies] can inform us. There's a need to look back at training,” he added.
By ALLEN G. BREED, MICHAEL BIESECKER and MARTHA WAGGONER
CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) – A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch's brew of cancer-causing chemicals.
But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure – mandated by the Navy – was ever conducted.
The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base's water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this “relatively primitive” test – required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 – would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune's sandy soil.
A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well – nearly 4,000 times today's maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a “careful analyst.”
“That's knock-your-socks-off level – even back then,” said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. “You could have smelled it.”
Biochemist Michael Hargett agrees that CCE, while imperfect, would have been enough to prompt more specific testing in what is now recognized as the worst documented case of drinking-water contamination in the nation's history
Watch more from this Senate hearing at http://owl.li/l96qm. A Pentagon official predicted May 16 that the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates could last up to 20 more years. The comment came during a Senate hearing revisiting the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, enacted by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. At the hearing, Pentagon officials claimed the AUMF gives the president power to wage endless war anywhere in the world, including in Syria, Yemen and the Congo. “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here,” said Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. “You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.”
I’ll bet that this one didn’t get much air time, if any, on SeeBS, CNoNews, Faux News or any of the other lamestream media, and it’s yet another sign of geopolitical and economic realignment underway:
This is one that requires a lot of reading between the lines, and I’m probably not any closer to the tea leaves on this one than anyone else, except on one very important thing: Argentina, like the other South American countries, has been persistenly and consistently under the economic and geopolitical thumb of big brother to the north for a long time. Indeed, the USA and its financial oligarchs have been treating South America as a kind of second class collection of “states” or colonies for some time, and particularly since the end of World War Two. The emergence of the BRICSA nations, and Brazil’s central role in it, has begun the decoupling process, a process that will go on for a long time.
So that brings us to the other great South American power, Argentina, and to President Cristina Fernandez, and to this article. I suspect that the tea leaves one needs to read are most prominent in the first and last paragraphs:
This is what I mean by the Theocratic Right's aggressive program to convert armed services personnel. Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army colonel, and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”
WILKERSON: Right. Well, one group in particular–and you can just Google them and you can see what they're about, called the Dominionist. This is a group that believes that its mission is to take over the Armed Forces of the United States and then use them in a crusade against all those who don't believe in Christ in the world. Mikey's clientele now is over 32,000, some 90 percent of whom are Protestant or Catholic. So you've got mostly Christians who were looking to Mikey's organization to protect them against the chain of command in their own military unit.
WILKERSON: They're everything from I've been ordered to go to a prayer breakfast to I'm being proselytized by my commanding officer or by my platoon leader or by my NCOs to be a Christian; or worse, if you will, on the other side of that coin, people being derided and even kept from promotion and from advancement, education, and training, and so forth because they're not the kind of Christian they should be, this sort of Dominionist Christian.
I'm currently working on a chapter on how the assessment of OSINT has changed over time and I think you could provide me with some missing pieces of the puzzle given your expertise in this area and your work in promoting the use of Open Sources.
01 Firstly, from what I have gathered so far, the US attitude towards OSINT started to change with the recommendations made by the WMD Commission in 2005. Is this correct?
No, this is not correct. Although the WMD Commission enjoyed several people deeply familiar with OSINT, it followed from the 9/11 Commission Report that actually recommended an Open Source Agency (OSA), and the Aspin-Brown Commission Report in 1996 that stated that OSINT should be a top priority for funding and a top priority for DCI attention. All such recommendations are ignored. The Central Intelligence Agency, at the time of its inception the ONLY national intelligence agency, was created by President Harry Truman to be a central bureau for collating and making sense of all that had already been collected by others — e.g. the Department of State, the military services, labor attaches, etcetera. Cf. Harry Truman, “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” Washington Post, 22 December 1963, p. A11. From inception, the Presidential intent was to achieve strategic analytics using predominantly open sources and methods, as well as such signals or other secret information covertly acquired by others. CIA was never intended to become a spy agency or a covert action gorilla mounting secret wars, funding dictators, or subverting the media to present both the US and foreign publics with a menu of lies.
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KEY POINT: The value of OSINT has never been in question. The absence of integrity in government has led to a loss of focus on definitions — what is intelligence, what is OSINT (versus information), who is responsible for doing OSINT, should government make decisions based on ethical evidence-based decision-support. At root, this question is about the soul of intelligence and the soul of the Republic. I trace the collapse of integrity in the US Government to the successful assassinations — and cover-ups — of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, all by elements of the US Government acting in concert with Texas oil and New York money, as well as Cuban exiles and New Orleans criminal families. That was the point at which the US Government stopped representing the 99% and became a wholly-owned front for special interests — the 1%. That in turn has inspired me to recognize that the foundation for predominantly open intelligence (decision-support) with integrity leveraging OSINT is ruthless, pervasive, most secret counterintelligence focused on enemies of the state and the public interest — on multi-billion dollar a year traitors — not on small million and multi-million dollar a year criminals, which is where the FBI has chosen to focus while being complicit in ignoring high crimes in both the public and private sectors. Today the US has neither OSINT nor effective counterintelligence, and no substantive decision made by the Executive or Congress is actually based on intelligence with integrity.
Gracias. Aqui mis dos precentaciones majores, uno para Chile y el otro para Espana, ambos entregado en el idioma, y tambian mis graficas en espanol. Todo lo que se encuentra aqui en ingles se puede traducir utilizando Google Translate, la primara funccion al alto mano de la segunda columna. Tambien mi presentacion,, pero escrito en espanol para la revista AAIntelligencia.
