Citizen Intelligence, Core Good Idea Well Presented, June 9, 2009
Steve Shafarman
This book is the one that in combination with other things that are going on including Ron Paul's endorsement of the book Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny, has caused me to see 2008 as a tipping point. We the People are restless and on the prowl.
This particular book is the single best current exposition on the need for individual economic security as a citizen's right, in the book called the Citizen Dividend, also known as negative income tax or guaranteed income.
The author is clear on this being a modest sum, on the order of $500 to $1000 a month, a safety net, and the author also speaks to the Citizen Service that is made possible in return.
As a great admirer of the book by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats and Challenges, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, I am totally blown away by the intelligence in all its forms of this author, who nails the essential better and more concisely than anyone I have seen anywhere else: poverty, crime, health care, education, social security, family values, racism, pollution and global warming, farms and all, local communities, national security, globalization, other countries, world peace. This is a SERIOUS citizen not to be triffled with. See Earth Intelligence Network and the strategic analytic model there to understand why I am so very impressed.
The author has done a great deal of work in putting the book together, and among the things about it that I really like are the 26 Frequently Askewd Questions (FAQ) with detailed answers; the superb quotes from the Founding Fathers onward on why this kind of thing is needed; and the two Appendices, the first on previous attempt to implement the idea, the second on current efforts.
I put the book down well-satisfied, and feeling that if every citizen were as serious as Steven Shafarman, We the People are certain to triumph in the 2010-2015 timeframe as we seek to restore the Constitution and free open elections.
My complex annotated bibliography is free online at oss.net/PIG. It is also the only way to get to many of my reviews now that Amazon buries any reviews that are not 100% positive about the book they are trying to sell.
More Religion Than I Expected, But Totally Righteous, June 9, 2009
Marcia Ford
This is one of the books that I bought at a transpartisan event (the Republican term is post-partisan. It is one of the books,I list ten others below, that have persuaded me that 2008 is the tipping point year for burying the two parties that have been in breach of the public trust, and restoring the Constitution, the Republic, and the sovereign We.
This is a small book, a serious book, with a wonderfully educational gloassry, very serious endnotes, and a list of ten web sites that I am immediately adding to the home page of Earth Intelligence Network.
The author introduces herself as a voter without a party and a Christian without a church, and having myself been so very angry with the parties and the churches this immediately grabs me.
She credits Barney Frank early on with being the originator of the “purple states” term from which is derived “purple voter,” and as a military person I am further impressed because “purple” is the color we use to define truly joint integrated operations that are not corrupted by inter-service rivalry.
The author discusses how from 2006-2009 the polls consistently have shown that 33-39% of America is neither Democratic nor Republican, and I observe a Pew poll just in the last two weeks that puts self-defined independents at 39%, the Democrats at 33%, and the Republicans at 26% or so and falling.
Page 9-10 (after a long preface) have a list of citizen grievances, I will quote just the first one:
“We're tired–tired of two parties whose main priority is self-preservation and self-promotion rather than serving the people who voted them into office.”
The author discusses a number of electoral reforms that are needed, including non-partisan elections, universally-available write-in options, the instant run-off (and variations I was unaware of), term limits, getting rid of the money, an end to gerrymandering (tightly drawn distrcits), and an end to party registration as part of the voting process. All good stuff, see my comments for the list of eight reforms in the Electoral Reform Act that a number of us have press pressing on since the year 2000 while Al Gore sold his integrity for what we now know has become a $100 million pay-off. See The Best Democracy Money Can Buy for the back-story, all known to Gore three months in advance of the election.
I am much taken with the author's brief discussion of how Independents are NOT “undecideds” and are not “swing” voters either. The discussion of how the media ignores (disenfranchises) independent voters, and how the Internet is now empowering ordinary people, is worthy.
I like the author's conclusion that mixing religion and politics is a huge mistake.
Finally I have a note on the author's view that abortion and gay rights are two issues that divide us, and although I did not see this in the book, my own conclusion inspired by others is that we are wasting all of our time arguing about the 20% where we cannot agree, instead of focusing on the 80% where we can make gains: education, family, health, etcetera.
There are so many books I wish I could link to, especially with respect to betrayal of the public trust by government and the inappropriate insertion of religious ideology into both domestic and foreign affairs. See the comment for a link to my reviews of 500+ non-fiction books, all organized to empower individual citizens with knowledge not available to them from any political source.
Brilliant Tour, New Knowledge, Best in Class & Practical,June 19, 2009
Colin Gray
For those who have not already digested the author's seminal publication, Modern Strategy, I have a summative review there that could be helpful in conjunction with appreciating this new work.
10 pages of notes–this is a major work that is also easily grasped by undergraduates and graduates. I want to say up front that I have seen no finer overview that blends the original thinking of the author, himself a master strategist, with broad consideration of the work of others, and very disciplined integration of selected quotes and ample citations. The notes are superb.
My summary notes first:
Six lessons of Bush-Cheney era:
01–Bush era did not lack for brains or judgment, simply suspended intelligence in favor of “hopes, dreams, and good intentions.”
02–Crusades inconsistent with reality will fail
03–US forces not trained, equipped, organized for counterinsurgency
04–Transition to peace is harder than winning war
05–International politics is real and will not go away
06–Beware capabilities-driven strategy.
Three levels of strategic thinking:
–general
–general applied to regular or irregular warfare
–tailored to a specific “episode” e.g. Haiti, Somalia, Iraq
US starts with multiple handicaps:
01–cultural disposition to look at pieces, not the whole
02–flawed theory of deterrence
03–excessive faith in technology, insufficient grasp of human factors, incompetence at irregular war
04–one size fits all military does not suit diversity of challenges
05–lack of authority among those we seek to influence
06–barriers between military and political leaders (and lack of inter-agency coherence at any level)
“Deterrence…is not a fixed, settled, and now long-perfected product.” [It is] not understood, illusions abound, and it [a theory of] is desperately needed as a companion to the concepts of prevention and pre-emption. This is the first time I encounter a concise well-organized critique of the entire field of deterrence. He cites Payne in noting how the US tried to “deter” NVN with a Rolling Thunder air campaign, despite having no clue “about the enemy's policymaking process or how he rank-ordered his values.”
Key recommendations:
01–Deterrence must be part of broader strategy of influence in all its forms
02–We must take the ideas and perceptions of others seriously
03–Citing Metz & Mullen, “the age of the stupid enemy is past.”
Quoting Echeverria: “American way of battle has not yet matured into a way of war.” Later in the chapter on Irregular Warfare he observes, citing others as appropriate, that war is the whole enchilada–political, legal, social, economic, military, cultural; while warfare is the conduct of the war, predominantly but not exclusively military.
The chapter on surprise is original, lacking only one fundamental: intelligence must cast a wide net and policy must keep an open mind.
The chapter on revolutionary change is original but overlooks O'Hanlon's Technological Change and the Future of Warfare and does not address the broad literature on the need to reinvent intelligence and shift from secret unilateral to open multinational.
I learn that context is both that which surrounds, and that which weaves together; throughout the book the author emphasizes the importance of Gestalt, of “the whole,” with particular attention to the political consequences of military actions.
Citing Field Marshall Keitel: errors in tactics and operations can be corrected in the current war, errors in strategy can only be corrected in the next.
Quoting Gray:
p. 108: “Strategic surprise on the greatest of scales occurs as a result of changes in the contexts for national security.” He goes on to note that political surprise is what catches the US most unawares, in part because the US separates policy and politics from all else.
p. 119 “War is about peace…above all else, war is about the kind of peace that should follow.”
Essence of strategy:
01–About the use of force for political effect
02–About relationship between means and ends
03–Politics must rule BUT politicians must hear, understand, and respect the military
American “way of war (more properly, way of battle):
01–Apolitical (I would add, amoral)
02–Astrategic
03–Ahistorical
04–Problem-sovling, optimistic
05–Culturally-challenged
06–Technology-dependent
07–Focused on Firepower
08–Large-scale
09–Aggressive-Offensive
10–Profoundly-Regular
11–Impatient
12–Logistically-Excellent
13–Highly-Sensitive to Casualties
Irregular Warfare demands:
01–Protect-the-People
02–Intelligence-is-king
03–Ideology-matters
04–Enemy-not-the-main-target
05–Unity-of-effort (I add, Whole of Government, M4IS2)
06–Culture-is-crucial
07–No-sanctuaries
08–Time-is-a-weapon
09–Undercut-enemy-POLITICALLY
The author is deeply respectful of our soldiers, lamenting that they are victims of a strategic deficit among both our politicians and senior military leaders, hence sent in harm's way ill-advisedly to few good ends.
The author provides new thinking on pre-emptive and preventive war, stating on page 242 that both are “only feasible if intelligence is immaculate.” This chapter may be the most important chapter as well as the most difficult for conventional decision-makers, both political and military, to grasp, given their “closed circle” circumstances.
The concluding chapter on The Merit in Ethical Realism is absorbing and feels a huge gap in current US strategic thinking. Three quotes capture my admiration for this author and this chapter:
“…it is nearly always inexpedient to ignore or affront the ethical sensibilities of stakeholder communities, including one's own.”
“As a practicing strategist, I am convinced that strategy's ethical dimension is not subjectively irrelevant; rather it is integral to supposedly objective analysis, calculation, decision, and behavior.”
“The moral is strategic, and the strategic is moral.”
The author concludes that we cannot think in terms of one “Master Menace,” and must instead be prepared for a diversity of challenges and dilemmas. In my comment below I provide URLs for summary articles about the Army's Strategic Conferences in 1998 and 2008, both ignored by all “deciders.”
Jeffrey Nachmanoff Hits It Out of the Park, June 20, 2009
Don Cheadle
As a former spy and leading critic of the $65 billion a year spent by the secret world, I normally limit my DVD intake to hotels and airplanes, but this one attracted my attention and deservedly so.
This is one of a tiny handful of decent depictions of the spy world, and I want to note that Jeffrey Nachmanoff, a name most will not notice, was also the screen writer for The Day After Tomorrow (Widescreen Edition).
The over-all plot is credible, well-acted, well-filmed, and I was pulled in to give this my undivided attention. The subtleties of inter-agency competition and non-sharing were well integrated.
Bottom line: a top-notch offering all the way around, but I want to single out Nachmanoff for getting it right. He's a talent to watch.
If you are interested in intelligence, I have written several books, all free online as well as for sale here at Amazon, and a great deal of information helpful to any citizen can be found at oss.net.
Moving Collage Beyond Karrate Kid and Second Hand Lions, June 20, 2009
Clint Eastwood
I got this movie on a whim, in part because I am tired of seeing Americans turning into either fat blobs or pussies afraid of their own shadow (or worse, self-righteous morons who really think government is the answer to everything.
It's hard to sum up this movie so I will say just three things:
1. He weaves every possible American hard-ass self-made man image in as gracefully as it could be done.
2. He does for the hill people of Viet-Nam what Bride and Prejudice did for India but without the music, love, and dance.
3. The ending is spectacular–Eastwood's voice in the background, slow singing against a visual as the Gran Torino drives toward the future with its special passenger who inherited from the master. For this alone I would rent or buy the DVD.
That is the context within which the USS Liberty was attacked with impunity, and the deliberate attack covered up by the US Government, i.e. the White House and Cy Vance the Secretary of Defense. The US Navy protested but was silenced.
Perhaps the most important contribution this book makes is to record the current (2007) views of participants on both sides to the effect that this was a deliberate premeditated attack ordered by a person high enough in Israel to order the combined “joint” attack by both air force attack jets and naval torpedo boats.
The book confirms what has been claimed before, that the vessel was known to be US, and that the American flag was clearly seen by the attackers. DCI Richard Helms, interviewed in 2008, specifically confirmed the atrocity.
QUOTE from page 47: “The fighters destroyed the Liberty's machine guns, knocked out the antennas, and targeted the bridge to kill the officers and spark chaos among the crew.”
Israel also spies with impunity on the US, both with formal and technical spy networks such as depicted in Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul, where every American Jew is considered a “sayonim,” a person who will support Israel spy operations that are treason against the US, and with non-official spying such as Congresswoman Jane “this conversation never happened” Harman supports.
The book is both a labor of love and extremely well-executed investigative journalism.
Israel murdered 34 US naval personnel and wounded 171. This was an international war crime.
This is a RIGHTEOUS BOOK (I actually write this just before putting the book down). Here are some of my notes:
+ Immediate impact of the cover-up was the failure to learn anything, such that the USS Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans (at the request for the Soviets, completing their needs for use of the crypto cards they acquired earlier).
+ Middle of the book is sad sickening detail not here-to-fore presented in such an organized and detailed manner, along with 22 compelling shameful photographs of battle damage. Points to remember:
–Smell of rotting bodies
–Oil-soaked environment
–Partial bodies were a recovery & identification challenge
+ Communications breakdowns combined with a quick Israeli apology kept reinforcements from reaching the Liberty for 17 hours.
+ The Skipper ramped readiness up, wanted to move, but would have lost line of sight needed for NSA intercepts. Similarly, Navy advisor to Adm McCain (the father) wanted to pull the Liberty back at same time that a submarine was pulled back, but Admiral McCain did not want to tangle with NSA and claimed he did not have the authority when he actually did. (Later he redeems himself somewhat by insisting on Purple Hearts and combat pay.]
+ The context (Viet-Nam in particular) made the Liberty a “problem” for LBJ. Quote from page 93: “The Liberty–now riddled with cannon blasts, its decks soaked in blood, and its starboard side ripped open by a torpedo–evolved in a matter of hours from a top-secret intelligence asset to a domestic political liability.”
+ We learn that LBJ's upbringing taught him to favor Jews, and that “Johnson has too heavy a roster of Jewish and pro-Israeli advisors” (page 139.
+ We learn that Pentagon loyalists toed the party line on covering the whole thing up.
+ We learn that the US inquiry did not answer the question “How and why did this happen,” that Admiral McCain forbade travel to Israel, and that the Israeli's were not forthcoming with logs from any of the attacking units.
+ We learn the Israeli's ordered napalm to be used against the USS Liberty as it would be “more efficient,” and we learn that the US politicians in the White House considered sinking the USS Liberty at sea to get rid of the evidence–one can only recoil in horror knowing that they considered the crew “expendable” and did not care if it was sunk with or without crew.
+ We learn that the US was willing to accept $3.3 million for the families, and the Israeli'[s refused, offering $1.25 million. Ultimately the Israeli bill came to $17 million of which $9 million was interest, and they finally settled for $6 million in three payments of $2 million each. What the author does NOT tell us is that the US taxpayer pays 20% of the entire Israeli government budget every year at the same time that the USA turns a blind eye to Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and Israeli theft of water from the Arab aquifers (see Chuck Spinney's brief on this at oss.net).
The book ends on a graceful note. I am impressed by the author's balance throughout. He finally visits Israel and meets one of the pilots, now Brigadier General Yiftah Spector. Accompanied by his father, who served on the USS Liberty, the author witnesses the Israeli officer saying “I'm sorry,” and his father saying “Thank you.”
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.”
+ 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”.
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.
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.
Citizen Intelligence, Core Good Idea Well Presented, June 9, 2009
