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Journal: Special Operations Forces Vital in War

Military
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Marcus Aurelius Recommends
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Very hard to disagree with anything this article says.    ((HOWEVER)), increasing special operations forces (SOF) is constrained by a set of iron laws, the five “SOF Truths”:
1.  Humans are more important than hardware.
2.  Quality is more important than quantity.
3.  Special Operations Forces cannot be mass produced.
4.  Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after an emergency occurs.
5.  Most special operations require non-SOF assistance.
To put a fine point on it, if we try to crank up the pipeline now, we may not get significant benefit before the Presidentially-mandated disengagement point for Afghanistan.  Then, we could find ourselves, as we did after Vietnam, over-resourced with special operators.  Some of us can remember standing on a PT field at Fort Bragg every morning in 1976-77-78 and receiving the latest play-by-play as to whether our Special Forces Group was going to be deactivated in the post-Vietnam drawdown.  Other elements of the US Government can relate similar experiences.
If there is a bright side to this, IMHO, it would be that there does not today appear to be the antipathy toward SOF on the part of conventional forces that existed during the Vietnam era.  A former colleague, well known for competence and dedication to some of you, visited his Army assignments officer while assigned as an A-Detachment commander in the 10th Special Forces Group, then at Fort Devens, MA.  His assignments officer told him, “… see, you're not soldiering. …”  I think that is less of a problem today, but I'm not sufficiently sanguine to believe that the knife fights will not recur as resources tighten while conflicts and attendant requirements persist indefinitely.
V/R,
Bill
(BEGIN TEXT)

USA Today
December 27, 2010
Pg. 6

Special Ops Forces Vital In War

U.S. increases the elite troops to meet demand

By Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today

Phi Beta Iota: Not mentioned in the article are the fact that Private Military Contractor (PMC) firms have been allowed to rape, pillage, and loot the ranks of Special Forces.  Retaining highly-qualified individuals and outsourcing indiscriminately are a contradiction.
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Journal: Taliban Address in Turkey?

08 Wild Cards
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An address for the Taliban in Turkey ?
Reuters, Dec 28, 2010

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has supported a proposal to open an office for the Taliban in a third country such as Turkey.  Such a move could help facilitate talks with the  insurgent group on reconciliation and reintegration of members back into society, and Kabul was happy for Turkey to be a venue for such a process, he said last week, following a trilateral summit involving the presidents of Turkey and Pakistan.

The question is while a legitimate calling card for the Taliban would be a step forward, the insurgent group itself shows no signs yet of stepping out of the shadows, despite the best entreaties of  and some of his European backers. The Taliban remain steadfast in their stand that they won’t talk to the Afghan government unless foreign troops leave the country. More so at the present time when U.S. commander General David Petraeus has intensified the battle against them and the Taliban have responded in equal measure.

Read full article online….

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Journal: Who’s Better for the U.S. Economy? Democrats or Republicans? A Second Look

03 Economy
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Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Last November, I distributed a blaster that compared changes in the debt burdens to Presidential administrations from Harry Truman to George W. Bush.  For readers who missed it, James Fallows of the Atlantic Magazine picked it up and published it here.  At the time, its stark pattern generated considerable interest and criticism, but I suggested that assigning responsibility for was a complex issue and that this chart was only a “first cut.”  Attached herewith is an analysis that could be considered a “second cut” into the general question of whether Democrats or Republicans are better for the economy.  Like my table on changing debt burdens, this “2nd cut” is by no means a definitive answer to the general question of what politics are more responsible for our current economic mess, but it is also interesting in its starkness of patterns.

The author must remain anonymous, because he is an apolitical career civil servant in the Senior Executive Service (SES) of the US government.  I can say that he was hired during a Republican Administration.  He is  relatively conservative (probably center right and certainly not a partisan member of the so-called left). He is not an economist, but has a PhD in a hard science; he is extremely well read; and I have long had enormous respect for his wide-ranging curiosity.

The attached analysis has three tables which may not convey in some email systems; therefore, for those readers having I am attaching this report in pdf format and MS Word format for those of you who have trouble reading this.

Chuck Spinney

The US Economy: Are Republicans or Democrats Better?

by SES X

PDF Report

Conclusion:

Continue reading “Journal: Who's Better for the U.S. Economy? Democrats or Republicans? A Second Look”

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Who’s Who in Cyber-Intelligence: Robert Garigue

Alpha E-H, Cyber-Intelligence
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Dr. Robert Garigue passed away 10 January 2007 at the age of 55.  He was the only person we knew then or know of today that was deliberately and completely integrating belief systems, knowledge, information, data, security, and technology as a single cyberspace.

He rose to early prominence and global respect among the information security and information warfare professionals who understood in the early 1990's that cyber-space was becoming a rat's nest of unmanageable and very vulnerable combinations of kludge hardware and sofware with built-in vulnerabilities–500 of them found by the National Security Agency (NSA) in just one year of checking shrink-wrapped products coming across the loading dock (1992).

He emerged as a leader from within the Canadian military, where as a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy of Canada he quickly became the leading specialist in this field, an advisor to flag officers and policy leaders.  After retirement he went on to become one of the leading proponents for deep broad cyber-security across the Canadian financial system.  As Vice President for Information Integrity and Chief Security Executive for Bell Canada, and as Chief Information Security Officer for the Bank of Montreal, he led the way in striving to recognize information security as a guarantor of truth & trust that enabled multinational information-sharing and sense-making, not as a series of Maginot Lines destroying both internal productivity and external effect.

Principal Works:

2006: Technical Preface by Robert Garigue from Information Operations – All Information, All Languages, All the Time

Robert Garigue on Advanced Information Operations

Robert Garigue: The New Information Security Agenda–Managing the Emerging Semantic Risks

Robert Garigue: The Evolving Role of the Chief Information Security Officer within the new structures of Information Systems

Gunnar Peterson on Robert Garigue’s Last Briefing

Robert Garigue: Early Work on Information Warfare (1995)

Robert Garigue: Carleton University Research Page

Graphics:

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Journal: Life in Industrial-Era Cyber-space–a Snap-Shot

Methods & Process
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Seth Godin Home

Sadly stuck with the status quo

JetBlue is ordinarily smart with their web site, which is why their broken system is particularly useful to take a look at. I'm guessing that at some point, management said, “it's good enough,” and moved on to more pressing issues. And then, of course, it stays good enough, frozen in time, ignored, and annoying.

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they're way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it's not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

Here's an illustrated guide to things to avoid, JetBlue style:

Click here to read full illustrated catalogue of break-downs ending with session time-out.

Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine doing this 80 times, one time for each intelligence community database, each built by the lowest  bidder to statements of work written by individuals that were never meant to be web czars, all immune from any kind of coherence and all largely ignorant of both collection biases and analytic tradecraft.  See Robert Garigue for why this defeats the entire point of online access.

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NIGHTWATCH Extracts: Self-Delusions About AF-PK

08 Wild Cards, Officers Call
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Afghanistan: A Coalition officer told the US press today that “There is no practical way to secure the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the U.S. military will fight insurgents outside Afghan villages where they are vulnerable.” The officer remarked that securing the border would take an inordinate amount of resources and would require more cooperation from tribes inside Pakistan.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: NightWatch Readers should understand that the fight in Afghanistan primarily is waged by Afghan Pashtun fighters who live in Afghanistan and hate foreigners, especially from Christian nations. The data show that Pakistan is important as the channel for logistic support to the Afghan fighters. Pakistan is not a recruitment base for anti-government fighters in Afghanistan and not a winter refuge.

The Afghan Pashtuns fight where they live. They get ammunition and supplies from Pakistan. They do not spend the winter in Pakistan, which well informed Readers and old hands recognize as complete nonsense.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extracts: Self-Delusions About AF-PK”

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Journal: Aid Groups Question US Claims on Taliban Set-Backs

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption
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KABUL, Afghanistan — Citing evidence that Taliban insurgents have expanded their reach across Afghanistan, aid groups and security analysts in the country are challenging as misleading the Obama administration's recent claim that insurgents now control less territory than they did a year ago.

“Absolutely, without any reservation, it is our opinion that the situation is a lot more insecure this year than it was last year,” said Nic Lee, the director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, an independent organization that analyzes security dangers for aid groups.

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