The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Click on Graphic to reach the Briefing. Based on Chapter 15, “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” as first published in THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political (OSS, 2002).
Click on Graphic to reach the Briefing. Based on Chapter 15, “New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence” as first published in THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political (OSS, 2002).
Can Intelligence Be Intelligent? (Wall Street Journal)
By BRET STEPHENS JANUARY 12, 2010
Exhibit A is last week's unclassified White House memo on the attempted bombing of Flight 253 over the skies of Detroit. Though billed by National Security Adviser Jim Jones as a bombshell in its own right, the memo reads more like the bureaucratic equivalent of the old doctor joke about the operation succeeding and the patient dying.
[For Exhibit B…] turn to an unsparing new report on the U.S. military's intelligence operations in Afghanistan. “Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” it begins. “U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage successful counterinsurgency.”
That's not happy talk, particularly given that it comes from the man who now runs the Army's intelligence efforts in the country, Major General Michael T. Flynn. But Gen. Flynn, along with co-authors Paul Batchelor of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Marine Captain (and former Journal reporter) Matt Pottinger, are just getting warmed up. Current intel products, they write, “tell ground units little they do not already know.” The intelligence community is “strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.” There is little by way of personal accountability: “Except in rare cases, ineffective intel officers are allowed to stick around.”
Military is awash in data from drones
HAMPTON, Va.–As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007–about 24 years' worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
Army General Tells a Little-Known Tale of Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq (CQ Quarterly)
It’s arguable that the few passages devoted to Marks’ below-the-radar role says more about the performance of the $44 billion-a-year U.S. intelligence community than the tens of thousands of words written about Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice.
Why? Marks tells how U.S. troops went into Iraq with almost no idea where weapons of mass destruction were, and little idea of where units might stumble into sites holding chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological munitions.
When Spying Is A Gas (CQ Quarterly)
Desperate for intelligence on the movement of insurgents across the rugged landscape of Afghanistan, the Army is reaching back almost half a century for a surveillance craft that could linger in the sky for days to report on what it sees: the blimp.
How nation's true jobles rate is closer to 22%
By JOHN CRUDELE January 12, 2010
I've been mentioning that under-employed figure — called U-6 by the Labor Department — for years and I'm glad everyone else has finally caught up.
But that larger figure doesn't include a huge number of unemployed folks who have given up looking for work because they feel the search is hopeless. Last Friday's report said 661,000 such people left the labor force in December.
If you count these hopelessly unemployed, the real jobless rate is probably close to 22 percent.
Reviewed by BookList
Jack Hogan and Buzz Rucci are a couple of buddies in the modern U.S. Navy. They signed up to risk their lives defending their country, but instead they’re risking their sanity playing at war in a series of military maneuvers and preparedness exercises. They are “bathtub admirals,” performing meaningless exercises in the name of global peace . . . or something like that. In the spirit of Phillip Jennings’ recent Nam-A-Rama (2005), or Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 (to which Huber makes a brief reference, acknowledging his novel’s pedigree), this is a witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name, from military budgets to political machinations to America’s success as the self-appointed guardian of the world. Considering that Huber, a career navy man, has mostly written for military publications and Web sites (although he has turned out some short satirical pieces), and especially considering that this is his first novel, it is a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight. –David Pitt
Jeff Huber's Joint Coalition Blog
About the Author:
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) commanded an E-2C Hawkeye squadron and was operations officer of a Navy air wing and an aircraft carrier. Jeff's essays have been required reading at the U.S. Naval War College where he earned a master of arts degree in neoconservative studies in 1995. His satires on military and foreign policy affairs appear at Military.com, Antiwar.com, Aviation Week and Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon of America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
Professor Walter Dorn is the virtual Dean of peacekeeping intelligence scholarship, going back to the Congo in the 1960's when Swedish SIGINT personnel spoke Swahli fluently and the UN stunned the belligerents with knowledge so-gained. This is the final published version of the article posted earlier in author's final draft.
The UN is now ready for a serious discussion about a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN) but a Member nation must bring it up, as the Secretary General has kindly informed us in correspondence.
In the absence of US interest, we are asking Brazil, China, and India to bring it up. Should a UNODIN working group be formed, it will certainly include African Union (AU), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) counterpart groups, as the regional networks will do the heavy lifting and be the super-hubs for the UN (this is in contrast to a US DoD-based system in which military-to-military hubs would be established to do two-way reachback among the eight tribes in the respective nations). Both concepts are explored in the new book, INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH and in two DoD briefings that are also relevant to the QDR.
Despite the lack of a single terrorist profile, researchers have largely agreed on the risk factors for involvement. They include what Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry, political psychology and international affairs at George Washington University, calls “generational transmission” of extremist beliefs, which begins early in life; a strong sense of victimization and alienation; the belief that moral violations by the enemy justify violence in pursuit of a “higher moral condition;” the belief that the terrorists’ ethnic, religious or nationalist group is special and in danger of extinction, and that they lack the political power to effect change without violence.
Bleak Marriage Prospects: Skewed China birth rate to leave 24 mln men single
More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.
Phi Beta Iota: China is waging peace across the Southern Hemisphere, exporting single men is part of the deal.
Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?
That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.
For the past year the Executive Director of Earth Intelligence Network, “JZ” Jason Liszkiewicz has been pursuing a self-designed project to understand, deeply and in detail, the “true cost” of a plain cotton t-shirt. Click on either photo to read all about it and if you wish, to order one of these examples of citizen intelligence in action.
