Chuck Spinney: Steven Walt’s Proof of Col John Boyd’s Strategic Theorem — Don’t Think, Just Keep The Money Moving….

Boyd’s Theorem  (pounded with unrelenting ferocity into the heads of friends for over 30 years):   “People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy  They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is:  Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”   — Col. John R. Boyd (U.S. Air Force, ret.)*  Fighter …

Chuck Spinney: How Contemporary War “Reporting” Messes Up Your OODA Loops

The attached article is a very important and informative essay.  Patrick Cockurn describes how the media echo chamber warps the Orientation* of the public, as well as that of a government, to unfolding events in the so-called global war on terror that triggered by 9-11 and the continuously metastasizing instabilities the GWOT is unleashing.  I regard …

Review: Pakistan on the Brink–The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan

Ahmed Rashid REF A — 12 Years of Lessons Learned in Time for 2014, October 13, 2013 This is an extraordinary book that required a great deal of time, not in the reading, but in the reflection. This will be a longer review than usual, even for me, because this book contains all of the …

Chuck Spinney: Andrew Bacevich on David Brooks of the NYT “Always Wrong”

This superb piece by Andrew Bacevich (Colonel US Army Ret.) is one the best portraits of what is wrong with self-important warmongering commentariat in the mainstream media: Track records count for nothing in the cozy salons of Versailles on the Potomac. SUNDAY, SEP 15, 2013 3:30 PM UTC David Brooks is constantly wrong Takes a …

Chuck Spinney: When a KGB President Lectures the USA — And Holds the Moral High Ground…Say What?

Who Benefits From America’s State of Perpetual War? Putin Lectures Obama by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, COUNTERPUNCH, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013 That our Noble Peace Prize winning President and the Congress needed a rational lecture [also attached below] on the need for a little common sense in foreign policy, from a graduate of the KGB, says a …

Chuck Spinney: Kosovo as Precedent for Syria — Obama Administration Disconnected from Reality and Well Over the Line

The Kosovo Precedent Syria in the Crosshair by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 27 August 2013 http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/27/syria-in-the-crosshair/ I found it truly scary to read that some high officials in the Obama Administration are so disconnected from reality that they consider the 1999 war in Kosovo to be a precedent for justifying limited cruise missile strikes in …