uvAggravator2.0

Chris Bellavita has an interesting post over at the Homeland Security Watch talking about the Cynefin framework. I've never heard about it, but I want to learn more. It seems like a very good process to understand management decision making and risk management.

And in the "no kidding" news, researchers from the University of Hawaii are declaring, after three years of work with submersibles, that the World War II chemical munitions in 1500 feet of water are no threat to the environment or to people in the area. Nothing like solid science to confirm what we all suspected.

The School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology, which did the study for the Pentagon, reported that although even the best-preserved munitions casings are deteriorating, the observations and data collected "do not indicate any adverse impacts on ecological health" in the study area, known as HI-05, the university said yesterday.
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Sediment, water and biological samples were analyzed at UH and independent laboratories on the mainland for munitions components, including TNT, chemical agents and metals.

The analytical methods used to detect munitions components "were effective," UH said.

"With the exception of one unconfirmed detection of mustard, neither chemical agents nor explosives were detected in any samples," the university said in a release.

The risk to human health from the consumption of fish and shrimp collected near the HI-05 Study Area was within Environmental Protection Agency "acceptable risk levels," according to UH. 

The munitions aren't coming up out of the water. It would be more risk to the people recovering the munitions and to the undersea environment if the munitions were unstable and started leaking because of the movement. The activists aren't happy, but it's unrealistic to do otherwise.

Here's one of the first posts I had about Hawaii's chemical history in February 2006.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Best Leak Ever
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

In reference to WikiLeaks, Jon Stewart remarks, "I'm not reacting to the 'newness' of it, I'm reacting to the fucked-up-ness of it..."

While the “American Family Association” was busy making silly statements about The Home Depot allegedly “exposing young children to lascivious displays of sexual conduct,” accusations that their own photos show to be ridiculous, there were revelations of real lascivious displays of sexual conduct being imposed on vulnerable youth - by the “ex-gay” reparative therapy racket.

“He was encouraging me, ‘It’s okay, Ben, you can take your shirt off’ … Here was a man that was much older than me, and I was around 20,” said Ben Unger. “At that point, I was just staring at a mirror with my shirt off and he was right behind me staring at the mirror with me at my body. Then telling me to look at my body and feel my body. It was weird.”

“While I was standing there without my clothes on, he asked me to touch my genitals,” says Chaim Levin. “Once again, I communicated that I was not comfortable with it. And he was like, you know, ‘Just feel yourself. Just feel it for a second. So, you can grasp your masculinity physically.’”

Ew. These are from the testimony of two former clients of a reparative therapy “life coach,” Alan Downing. Downing, the lead therapist for an “ex-gay” group called JONAH, admits that in spite of his years of being “ex-gay” he still “struggles” with gay feelings. No kidding; maybe that’s because he’s gay. And instead of being who he was created to be and living with wholeness and integrity, he’s creepily acting out his repressed sexuality on the minds and bodies of confused young men unwittingly handed over to him by their families.

One might think that a technique of having clients undress and touch themselves in front of a mirror while the therapist watches is unusual, but it’s actually not in the twisted world of self-hating gay life coaches trying to create others like themselves. As Wayne Besen reports the story, these practices are all based on the “touch therapy” developed by the discredited and expelled Richard Cohen, in which, just to be clear, “he places a male client between his thighs and caresses him.” Cohen, in turn, “learned his creepy methods from the Wesleyan Community Christian Church, a cult that practiced nude therapy, including adult women breast-feeding men in a church sanctuary.”

If I might make a humble suggestion to the “American Family Association”: Young people are being placed in the care of dishonest, damaged, sexually perverted charlatans who abuse them, all because their families have the false idea that they shouldn’t be who they are. Why don’t you busy yourselves doing something about that?

Dr. Hans Blix, former chief of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) between 1999 and 2003, was called to testify at the British Iraq War Inquiry board. He was discussing the findings of the inspection teams in Iraq before the US invasion in 2003 - findings that weren't released until June 2003, months after the invasion began.

Asked about the inspections he oversaw between November 2002 and 18 March 2003 - when his team was forced to pull out of Iraq on the eve of the war - he said he was "looking for smoking guns" but did not find any.

While his team discovered prohibited items such as missiles beyond the permitted range, missile engines and a stash of undeclared documents, he said these were "fragments" and not "very important" in the bigger picture.

"We carried out about six inspections per day over a long period of time.

"All in all, we carried out about 700 inspections at different 500 sites and, in no case, did we find any weapons of mass destruction."

Although Iraq failed to comply with some of its disarmament obligations, he added it "was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they did not have any".

It's a popular meme for the conservatives in our country to claim that Saddam didn't allow the inspectors back into the country prior to the 2003 invasion, but in fact he did. The teams had a little over three months before they withdrew, and they only withdrew because they were warned that Iraq was about to become a war zone. It's also a popular meme for the conservatives to even deny that WMDs were the principle justification for the US invasion. The record shows otherwise.

I'm not particularly thrilled by Blix's behavior in 2002-2003. I think he was extremely passive, that he could have done much more prior to the invasion to alert the media and other countries that Iraq really had no WMD program to either threaten Western interests or to arm terrorists. But, like many scientists, he preferred to wait until all the data were in and a full report could be staffed for the United Nations. Now he spends his time trying to make up for that lapse in judgment.

Interestingly, the New York Times covers the same Blix testimony without using the words "weapons of mass destruction" at all. The editors there must have forgotten the paper's history in that department. Or maybe they're just embarrassed by it all.

Building on yesterday's post about SecDef Bob Gates looking for dollars to save, here's this story about how well DOD manages the money it has.

An audit of a $9.1 billion fund of Iraqi oil proceeds showed that most American military agencies entrusted with spending the money on reconstruction projects failed to adhere to U.S. rules on how such money must be tracked and spent, the inspector general found.

U.S. officials failed to create bank accounts for $8.7 billion in the Development Fund for Iraq, as mandated by the Department of Treasury, creating "breakdowns in controls [that] left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss," according to the report, which is scheduled to be released Tuesday.

The audit is the latest probe to fault the U.S. government for mismanagement of Iraqi funds in the years following the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, which led to an insurgency and a years-long occupation.
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 The United States also has spent more than $50 billion in taxpayer money for reconstruction projects in Iraq.

Yeah. Come after USJFCOM and us contractors to save money. It's the easy thing to do. Ignore the billions of lost funds from the more obvious, but politically embarrassing sources. Forget about the obvious issue of fixing DOD's ridiculously broken financial system. And by all means, don't look at the operations and sustainment costs of major defense acquisition programs. We wouldn't want to try to address any systemic, long-term problems that might actually result in real cost-savings.

George Smith scouts out reality from fiction:

The US government — specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency — paid to find out the level of threat that might be posed by oversees black market botox production being taken over by terrorists. And it was all over the news recently.

It’s worth noting the inspiration for analyzing such a problem — the diversion of botox to bad people — was minted here in the US, courtesy of the biodefense research industry. First.

In fact, mundane reality may reproduce the American model — the incidental poisoning of a few people here or there overseas, lining up for black market de-wrinklings, overdosed by the careless and incompetent greedy wanting a piece of the beauty industry action. 

Check out the post. It's a little long, but interesting.

Dame Helen Mirren: "I kill people, dear." More films like this, please.

If you want a recap of the op-eds discussing the WikiLeaks release of 92,000 documents, see the Small Wars Journal here. But don't expect any new, astonishing relevations, lots of yawns from the usual Afghan watchers. But there's something else here - the fact that the dog didn't bark. These are routine situation reports, but they show a staggering loss of momentum in that nothing in Afghanistan has really changed in the six years of documented reports. As Spencer Ackerman notes, the recent news "conceals what’s really valuable about the leaked logs: they’re a real-time account of how the U.S. let Afghanistan rot."

Adam Weinstein points out that the numbers of action reports pick up in 2008-2009, reflecting more boots on the ground:

Probably the most significant thing about the SIGACTS is that they're counted and graphed by the military as a metric of how we're doing, and the obvious thing about the Afghan War Diary is that there are tons more entries for recent months in 2008 and 2009 than there were in previous months through the war. That's also a function of numbers of US and coalition forces; just as crime goes up when you put more cops on the street, SIGACTS probably should go up when you put more boots on the ground. And bear in mind, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison; more SIGACTS may mean more good things, like arrests and caches found, rather than civilian and coalition casualties. Even so, the most recent numbers are pretty sobering.

To me, this just refocuses the attention on the "lost years" between 2004-2007 when the Bush administration basically did nothing to improve the situation in Afghanistan. And maybe there was nothing to improve - but it calls into question the basic assumption that military manpower is the only means to implement the Afghan strategy - such that it is - and whether keeping US ground forces in Afghanistan for four years or ten years or even twenty years is ever going to make a difference. And if it isn't going to make a difference, then there's no reason for the Obama administration to do anything but start the withdrawal of forces after the mid-term elections.

UPDATE: Also see Fred Kaplan's excellent summary of the situation. "If any of this startles you, then welcome to the world of reading newspapers. Today's must be the first one you've read."

UPDATE 2: Rebutting Kaplan, Exum, et al, James Fallows goes past the "everyone knows this" and points out "yeah, but the leaks point out the absurdity of suggesting we're going to 'win' this conflict - so what the hell exactly are we doing?"

Two weeks ago, Defense News ran an article about the German military - the State Secretary had released an eight-page "Guidelines for the Planning of the New Bundeswehr." What caught my attention was that the guidelines said that "traditional and asymmetric threats, including weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, will not emerge in geographically limited areas." That's the Defense News interpretation. I didn't quite understand that. 

Curious, I called on Sven Ortmann at "Defense and Freedom" to help out. He suggested that the translation was a little off. The document was noting trends for the next decade. These would include "a rising risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their carrier systems" - and separately - "a increasing number of players from whom a mixture of traditional and asymmetric risks emanates, who may not manifest themselves geographically in their own country or elsewhere" or in short form, hybrid threats. Also a nod about the threat of nicht-staatliche Akteure, or non-state actors.

This is not to say that the German military is overly concerned about the threat of terrorist WMDs. The guidelines seem to be more of a justification for how the government intends to shrink the military and reduce its commitments rather than expand to meet limitless and nebulous threats, as the US military prefers. 

WMDs - Massen (large) Vernichtungs (annihilation) Waffen (weapon). So that's my language lesson today. 

There's been constant chatter around the Beltway about when the day comes where the Defense Department is going to get wacked. Some day, and this will not be tomorrow or next year or even before 2012, the defense budget will have to fall from its incredible rise. All things must eventually return to the norm. This NYT article notes the sentiments.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has sought to contain the budget-cutting demands by showing Congress and the White House that he can squeeze more efficiency from the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and weapons programs and use the savings to maintain fighting forces.
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Mr. Gates is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the costs of the war. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion — 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration.

Mr. Gates is arguing that if the Pentagon budget is allowed to keep growing by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings in the department’s bureaucracy to reinvest in the military — and that will be sufficient money to meet national security needs. In one of the paradoxes of Washington budget battles, Mr. Gates, even as he tries to forestall deeper cuts, is trying to kill weapons programs he says the military does not need over the objections of members of Congress who want to protect jobs.

I don't quite agree with that assessment. DOD is going through some "efficiency drills" and forcing agencies to examine what they're doing and to give money back to OSD, but it's to reinvest in other weapon systems, other modernization efforts, so that no one has to make the tough decision to allocate funds for either modernization or combat operations in the Middle East. So SecDef Gates goes to the Defense Business Board and says, hey, help me out here with overhead costs. There's got to be some waste in overhead - there always is, right?

So I read in the Defense News that the DBB study group has some recommendations:

• disestablish the OSD Networks and Information Integration Office, because they have no authority to mandate anything to anyone
• Freeze all hiring actions for OSD, Joint Staff, or any combatant commands, because they're all fat enough from previous hiring actions over the past decade
• Eliminate the US Joint Forces Command, because they've got the most contractors of all of the combatant commands. Yeah. Really sound logic there.
• Curtail all "indirect spending" like duty station moves, business travel costs, and conferences, because those are all silly, unproductive things, too

Now I'm all for "efficiency" but this is just silly. In an attempt to find easy, fast ways to reduce defense spending, they'd rather carelessly cut into the muscle instead of looking for the real cost drivers - health care costs, recruitment and training costs, the ever-climbing costs of developing new equipment, and, oh, yeah, committing to unending combat operations in Afghanistan. Cutting back on hiring actions and travel and conference costs are only going to hurt the organization in the long run by reducing govvies and military staff to unimaginative drones handcuffed to their desks.

The USJFCOM hit is particularly annoying. The study group sees 14 subcommands and organizations in USJFCOM and finds out that there are more contractors than there are govvies, and so there must be something wrong. I wonder if they've considered that there is a cap on government strength and joint military billets, and given a stressful wartime environment, everyone (even USJFCOM) is being asked to do more with less. So of course it hire contractors - that allows a flexible approach to getting work done, then you can dismiss the contractors.

Here's the thing - if you want to get rid of USJFCOM, fine, but someone else is going to have to pick up the work. USJFCOM does a great deal of work for OSD and the Joint Staff, but since you've recommended to stop hiring for those agencies, the other combatant commands don't want the work, and the services sure as hell don't need the extra work, exactly who picks up the work? I know it may look like a lot of ash and trash, but someone thought this work had to be done. The DBB or OSD better have a transition plan, and if they transfer the work, they better supply bodies to the new organization - and then you haven't really saved any money, have you?

I'm not disparaging the DBB - they appear to have looked at a lot of business issues for OSD and they even have suggested priorities for the senior defense leadership. The problem is, as it always is, implementation - actually forcing bureaucrats to do their jobs, to become more far-looking, more efficient, more serious about addressing strategy and budget issues. And because our political process forces a turnover of all its political appointees every four to eight years, it does make it hard to envision success here. But honestly, DBB members, a little more creativity? A little more "truth to power" would be nice.

UPDATE: I missed another recommendation - the DBB suggests firing 15% of the civilian work force, pushing the numbers back to 2003 levels. This would mean about 111,500 people out of work. Yeah, good luck with that one.

It’s a sign of the New American times that even when we know we don’t have cogent grounds to continue our woebegone wars, we can’t invent compelling reasons to end them. In September 2009, President Obama caved to Pentagon demands to send more troops to the Bananastans* even though nobody in the Department of Defense could tell him what they’d do with the extra troops. This was before Obama fired Gen. David McKiernan as Bananastan commander to make way for Gen. Stan McChrystal, who was fired to make way for Gen. David Petraeus, whom Obama should have fired the second he took office, along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, and the rest of the Bush administration Pentarchy**. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana is the latest voice in Congress to express doubt about what is now inescapably Obama’s war. Once a supporter of our imperial pratfall in the Bananastans, Lugar now says, “The lack of clarity in Afghanistan does not end with the president’s timetable,” and he thinks that our involvement there is “proceeding without a clear definition of success.” Politeness Man couldn’t have put it more civilly. We don’t have coherent war aims. The “realistic and achievable” objectives that Obama’s national security “Chess Masters” established in their March 2009 Bananastans policy paper revolved around a “core goal” to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” CIA director Leon Panetta recently reaffirmed that the number of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is “50 to 100. Maybe less.” Maybe none. Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says there are “somewhat more than 300” al-Qaeda characters hiding in Pakistan, which means there are somewhat fewer than 400 there for a total of less than 500 of them in the Bananastans. Since experts like Leiter say the vast majority of al-Qaedeers are in the Bananastans that puts their strength worldwide at comfortably under 1,000. A 2005 report by the Century Foundation said that al-Qaeda never had more than “several hundred” formal members. (The Century Foundation was talking about the real al-Qaeda, not the copyright violators in Iraq. The “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” hooligans are like a college that calls itself “The Harvard of Northwest Indiana.”) Whatever al-Qaeda’s exact number is, it’s a safe bet that it has fewer card-carrying members than the Ku Klux Klan or NAMBLA. Leiter says we’ve made “incredible successes” against al-Qaeda, and that the group “is weaker today than it has been at any time since 2001.” But, but, but, but, but, Leiter quickly adds, “Weaker does not mean harmless!” Senior Pentagon bull-feather merchant Mullen does Leiter one better: he’s worried about the “depth of synergies” between al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups, including (ominous chord) the Taliban! Where do we find such admirals? The next thing you know, Mullen will be asking for a defense budget hike to help close the “depth-of-synergies gap.” And as I’ve often noted, even if there’s only one al-Qaeda member, the only safe haven he needs to plan and direct terrorist operations against Americans is a pocket big enough to hold his smart phone. For the U.S. military to deny al-Qaeda sanctuary, it would have to occupy every nook and cranny of the earth from the bottom of the Marianas Trench to the peak of Mount Everest, something that couldn’t occur even in neocon prodigy Freddie Kagan’s wettest dream ever. The only genuine security threats the Bananastans present to the U.S. are the nukes in Pakistan and the heroin in Afghanistan, but none of our national security tank-thinkers give a pig’s wings about either of those things. If we ever decide to so something about those threats, though, the Air Force and Navy could bomb both of them back to the molecular level in less time than it takes the Baltimore Orioles to lose a baseball game. Other “realistic and achievable” goals set out by the white paper included establishing legitimate governments and effective security forces in both Bananastans. We’ll cure cancer before either of those things will happen. Our decision to stand by election-robber President Hamid Karzai ensures that Afghanistan will never have a legitimate government. Afghan security forces are corrupt, incompetent, and infiltrated by insurgents, and estimates that they may be able to operate without training wheels by2014 were arrived at with the aid of hallucinogens. As for Pakistan, it’s even more of a security state than America. Pakistan’s army chief,Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, just strong-manned his prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, into extending his term for another three years. This makes Kayani even more powerful in his country than Petraeus is in ours. By August 2009, shortly after McChrystal took command in the Bananastans, the war intelligentsia had stopped wasting oxygen on arguments that our circus in Central Asia had anything to do with our national security. Counterinsurgency shaman David Kilcullen, an adviser to both Petraeus and McChrystal, baldly admitted that counterterrorism was “not at the top of my list” of reasons we “need to persist” in the Bananastans. Among his top justifications, according to journalist Anne Gearan, were that the United States and NATO have promised protection to the Afghan people, that the future of the NATO military alliance could hinge on perseverance in Afghanistan, and that if Afghanistan crumbles, nuclear-armed Pakistan would probably follow. Harrumph! Kilcullen needs the sharp edge of a stainless-steel hanky administered to the upside of his noggin. One of McChrystal’s last acts as top banana in Bananastan was to delay his much heralded Kandahar offensive because the locals told him they didn’t want his protection. As for Pakistan crumbling, we can rest assured that Gen. Kayani won’t allow that to happen, even if he has to stay in power six, 10, 15 years – whatever it takes! That leaves us continuing to gush national blood and treasure over the Khyber cliffs to preserve a military alliance that hasn’t had a gnat’s whisker’s worth of relevance in two decades. This is the same NATO that presently provides troops to ISAF, the acronym for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan that, according to U.S. troops, actually stands for “I Suck At Fighting.” None of that keeps NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen from being “optimistic” about the Afghanistan project, though, and he says NATO will “not leave Afghanistan prematurely.” So I guess we have to stay too. If they stay and we leave, they might call our troops a bunch of sissies, and we can’t have that now, can we? Last week the House of Representatives told the Senate they’d vote yes to $60 billion for more war in the Bananastans if the Senate voted yes to $20 billion for school districts and grants to low-income college students and security along our border with Mexico. The Senate sneered and told the House no to investing $20 billion into items of genuine national security and yes to throwing $60 billion at a war that is wholly contrary to our best interests. What a shameful indicator of America’s priorities. Even worse, though, is the spine of the antiwar argument that insists we should withdraw from the Bananastans conflict because we can no longer support it economically. We became a global hegemon by dominating the rest of the world militarily. For us to continue to fight wars based on whether or not we can afford them is madness. It is difficult to imagine a need for us to fight any sustained armed conflict, much less one against an enemy that doesn’t have a navy or an air force or even a real army to speak of. If we ever encounter a war we truly need to fight, we can afford to fight it whatever the cost, but an old green penny is too much to pay for a war that isn’t necessary. And it is clearer than ever that the most wrong thing Barack Obama has ever done, and likely will ever do, is to call our Chinese fire drill in the Bananastans a “war of necessity.” We must stop putting up with the militaristic nonsense our elected officials continue to perpetrate. Here’s hoping the WikiLeaks bombshell helps blast us out of the ovine torpor we’ve been seduced into by the war mongrels who President Dwight Eisenhowerwarned us would take over our country if we didn’t keep them on a short leash. * The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central Asia. ** The Pentarchy is the Pentagon oligarchy that promotes the Long War agenda.


Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

No one will ever be able to topple Karl "Turdblossom" Rove from his championship position of the asshat to beat all asshats. His constant attempts to rewrite the CheneyBush administration's history as a benign, gentle period of progress is a continuous blight on American culture. About a week ago, he placed an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal decrying the Democratic politicians' attacks on the CheneyBush record, in particular accusations that the CheneyBush administration lied about the WMD justification behind the Iraq invasion. If only he had led a counterattack against that wicked, wicked lie...

At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration's heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America's enemies.

We know President Bush did not intentionally mislead the nation. Saddam Hussein was deposed and eventually hung for his crimes. Iraq is a democracy and an ally instead of an enemy of America. Al Qaeda suffered tremendous blows in the "land between the two rivers." But Democrats lost more than the election in 2004. In telling lie after lie, week after week, many lost their honor and blackened their reputations.

Unfortunately, our memories go deep, and the written record is pretty clear. On March 17, 2003, in a televised speech to the nation, President GW Bush stated:

Intelligence gathered by this and other goverments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological, or one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other. ... Saddam and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.

Always fun to note how the past administration used the term "WMD" instead of just "chemical weapons" when referring to Halabjah and the Iraq-Iran war. It's hard today to find senior defense officials who consider chemical weapons in the same phrase as "WMD." But of course, I don't expect any mainstream media talking head to call Turdblossom on his lies in this article. That would be contrary to their policy of "fair and balanced" reporting.

I haven't had time to review or reflect much on the WikiLeak's disclosure of 92,000 classified documents to the NY Times, the London Guardian newspaper, and the German magazine Der Spiegel. After taking a cursatory cursory look at some of the news articles, I can't say that I'm surprised at all. At best, it only reflects the lack of good reporting that we've seen to date on the war in Afghanistan - adequate reporting perhaps on the surface of things, but no in-depth analyses resulting in a good understanding of the conflict. The NYT says:

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus,tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year’s deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.

The dialogue runs directly counter to the military's positive spin on the conflict, as leaders such as Petraeus stubbornly insist that "victory" in Afghanistan is still possible. Just give it another four years or so. As I said, I don't think the reports will tell you anything particularly new (Charli Carpenter agrees). But what I find more interesting is trying to determine who might have sent these documents to WikiLeaks - 92,000 classified documents, mostly tactical level reports, over a six-year period. Is this person a military officer who has seen one too many operations go south? A low-level DOD civilian, secretly frustrated at the mismatch between reality and the manufactured news on the television? A poorly-screened defense contractor, taking advantage of stressed out defense personnel to slip messages out to other confederates?

Who is this modern-day Daniel Ellsberg?

UPDATE: Noah Shachtman points to a WikiLeaks document that notes a chemical weapons scare in Afghanistan around mid-February 2009. I didn't know about that one, but I  will stress the point "scare," that it wasn't a chemical weapon. Nor should you assume that the Taliban or al Qaeda has a WMD program when the best it can do is use small amounts of industrial chemicals to attack the unprotected public.

The posts and discussions on defense strategy are always excellent over at the blog "Kings of War." While I have the rather low bar of providing commentary and general observation on US defense issues, their community is much more consistent at discussing a higher level of academic views on various strategic defense topics. In particular, I just wanted to point out these two recent posts.

David Betz talks about the lack of strategic planning by the United Kingdom as it enters its sixth year of combat operations in Afghanistan:

In 2009, six years after going to war there was still no strategy and really no one in charge. Insane? No, it’s childish; it is as though a child having pestered and begged for a complex and expensive toy realizing after having removed it from the eye-catching packaging that it was beyond its meagre ability shoved the unassembled bits into the back of the closet to be forgotten. It is to be hoped that henceforth our wars will be directed by grown-ups.

Yeah, we're hoping for the same over here. Doesn't look so good, though. David Ucko talks about the rise and fall of military doctrine concerning counterinsurgency operations:

A powerful reason why counterinsurgency today is so unpopular is because its principles are looked upon as strategy in their own right. As should be clear, the principles and theory of counterinsurgency are only relevant as a means toward a strategic end, which itself may be more or less realistic: to help a country recover from protracted conflict; to bolster the legitimacy and reach of a government, etc. Even then, the theory is not a silver bullet but mere guidance – a collection of lessons learned – that may help in the design and implementation of an effective campaign plan, a plan that must, as counterinsurgency theory clearly stipulates, be adapted for specific environments.

Afghanistan muddies the water here, because the link between the stated strategic goal (to ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda’) and the operational tenets of counterinsurgency is difficult to discern, not just because of the practical difficulties of ‘state-building’ in Afghanistan, but also because al-Qaeda is not limited to Afghanistan, or even to Pakistan, but would subsist even if the region turns into Central Asia’s answer to Switzerland (there are some parallels).

I think the same issues plague our discussions on combating/countering WMD strategy. We have "principles" that are considered strategy in their own right, often disassociated with the main purpose of the military combat operations or irregular warfare underwway. So the best we get right now are people who spend their time worrying about the Taliban getting nukes from Pakistan and giving them to al Qaeda, who intend to turn our major metropolitan cities into radioactive wastelands. Meanwhile, serious capability gaps continue in our military capabilities to address the use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons on the battlefield.

Anyway, don't miss out on these excellent topics. A day without "Kings of War" is like a day without sunshine.

Charli Carpenter identifies some "good news stories" relating to the use of military weapons in urban settings. First of all, as noted by the Danger Room, the US military is pulling its "less-than-lethal" Active Denial System out of Afghanistan after just deploying it there a short while ago. This is due more to policy and perception issues than technical issues. I, for one, am very supportive of the decision to return to the previous "population-centric COIN approach" of authorizing our troops to shoot up busses and cars with old-fashioned lead ammunition as the preferred way to stop potentially hostile vehicles (/snark off).

In other news, the Israeli military is revising its operations playbook to restrict the use of white phosphorus munitions in urban areas, following its brutally one-sided armed conflict with Gaza more than a year and a half ago. From the official report, I note this paragraph on page 24:

The use of smoke-screening munitions containing phosphorus during the Gaza Operation was also addressed in a special command investigation dedicated to the issue. This investigation determined that the policy of using such munitions was consistent with Israel’s obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict. Nonetheless, following that investigation, the Chief of the General Staff ordered the implementation of the lessons learned from the investigation, particularly with regard to the use of such munitions near populated areas and sensitive installations. As a consequence, the IDF is in the process of establishing permanent restrictions on the use of munitions containing white phosphorus in urban areas.

This might be a good thing for the US Army and Marine Corps to consider as well. I don't say this believing that armed forces ought to "prioritize humanitarian concerns over tactical considerations," as Dr. Carpenter suggests this trend indicates. I think these actions are being taken strictly out of concern that the US and Israeli militaries really don't want the bad press, not that they are overly concerned about civilian casualities while engaging enemy forces. But I'm a cynic. I agree with the sentiment, but don't believe it to be any admission that there's anything wrong with the use of the Active Denial System or white phosphorus munitions. War will always be hell.

Chilean government officials had to deal with a suspicious package marked "ANTHRAX" just a week ago... it was sent to their foreign ministry office in Santiago.

After testing the parcel, the Institute of Public Health ruled out the presence of any infectious agents associated with bioterrorism, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The government temporarily closed the ministry building to visitors Tuesday when the package was discovered.

Every nation has their nuts, I guess. Still no sign of the G-T comedy team's mass casualty bioterrorist incident.

Got this in the email today.

Hello.

I am in need of your assistance, Am Sgt John Brown. The Sergeant of the Army of the United States, I have about 15.7 million US dollars that i want to move out of Iraq. I need a good  partner,someone i can trust to actualize this venture. The money is from oil proceeds and legal.

However, I want to move it by diplomatic means to your house directly or a safe and secured location of  your choice using diplomatic security services and my personality as the Sgt. Can I trust you? Once  the funds get to you, you take your 20% out and keep 80% for me. Your part of this deal is to find a  safe place where the funds can be sent to and my part is sending it to you.

If you are interested reply and I will furnish you with more details. Kindly treat this email  confidential as i won't want anything that will jeopardise my image as the Sgt.
Urgently awaiting your response.

Yours sincerely
Sgt John Brown.
U.S Army.

Strangely enough, the reply goes to a yahoo email address and not to the John-Bl@usarmy.com address. Should I help out Sgt Brown? It certainly sounds legit.

Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

Remember the good old days when all Americans had the freedom to worship as they wished, where they wished? Why do Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin hate American values?

UPDATE: Other similar stories across America pour in.

The “American Family Association” occasionally provides us with the names of businesses we should patronize because of their inclusive employment policies or other contributions to the cause of equality and a better world. Today’s winner is The Home Depot. Among the AFA’s many complaints, “(m)ost grievous is The Home Depot’s deliberately exposing small children to lascivious displays of sexual conduct by homosexuals and cross-dressers” at a Pride festival - and they have the pictures to prove it:

The horror! Then, Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes had the nerve to respond to AFA’s demands with this: “The bottom line is, [ending our participation in Pride events] just runs counter to our inclusive culture…and that’s where we stand.”

The increasingly droll Box Turtle Bulletin provides a timeline on the basis of past boycott attempts:

1. AFA will auto-email Home Depot pre-fab letters from their member list declaring that they will not shop at Home Depot.

2. Home Depot’s stock will go up. (I still haven’t figured out why this happens)

3. At some point Home Depot will agree to some tiny concession of no material concern.

4. AFA will declare victory and call off the boycott.

Rinse, repeat.

Igor Volsky at the Wonk Room has a good post discussing the Defense Department's ongoing survey of military personnel as to their opinions on the open integration of homosexuals and lesbians into the armed forces. Interestingly, a similar survey was conducted prior to the integration of blacks into white military units in the 1940s. Segregated black units had served with distinction in the two world wars, and President Truman was determined to integrate them into the mainstream.

I traveled to the National Archives and recovered some of the surveys the military conducted about the troops’ attitudes towards black people between 1942 and 1946. At the time, the military — along with the overwhelming majority of the country — opposed integrating black servicemembers into the forces and preferred a ’separate but equal’ approach that would have required the military to construct separate recreation spaces and facilities. One month before Truman’s order, a Gallup poll showed that 63% of American adults endorsed the separation of Blacks and Whites in the military; only 26% supported integration.

These surveys show that the same attitude pervaded the military: 3/4 Air Force men favored separate training schools, combat, and ground crews and 85% of white soldiers thought it was a good idea to have separate service clubs in army camps.

While smaller, these racial polls share some common questions with the DADT survey. In fact, in some instances one can even replace “negro” for “gay” and end up with today’s questionnaire. Both polls ask servicemembers if they objected to working alongside minorities, how they felt serving with minorities, how effective minorities are in combat and if their feelings have changed about the minority after serving with them. (Interestingly, 77% of respondents said they had more favorable opinion).

I kind of wonder if there were political conservatives back then who were decrying the use of the armed forces as "social experimentation" as some do today. I don't know who in the DOD is running this survey, but I think it's been poorly handled as a strategic communication issue. It appears that a majority of troops, in particular the enlisted, aren't going to have many issues at all. It's also clear that there will be a significant portion of the military (albeit a minority) who do have issues, whose conservative values will conflict with their professional views. What history ought to inform us is that it's certainly possible to overcome these narrow, personal views and that there will be no decline in effectiveness, as long as we have strong leaders and professional execution of responsibilities. So let's get on with it.

You might remember David Kay, the chief UN inspector who took a tour of Iraq in 2004 and reported that he had nada. Nothing. No WMDs, just papers and frustrated scientists. Well, he's in the Wall Street Journal talking about how weapons inspectors are not going to disarm Iran. To which I really have to say, duh?

Inspection and verification are often viewed as ways to prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons. This is well beyond the capabilities of any conceivable inspection regime, especially given Iran’s status as an almost-nuclear-capable state. The fact that inspectors must let Tehran carry out its civilian-nuclear effort while policing the military program makes the task largely unachievable.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would need access to all of the infrastructure that could possibly aid in fashioning a nuclear weapon and potential delivery systems. They also would need a full and complete declaration of all Tehran’s nuclear components, all of its uranium enrichment, all of its plutonium-related activities, and all missile testing, production and deployment sites.

This is just not plausible when inspectors confront a hostile regime. Tehran has kept hidden its nuclear activities and support networks, domestic and foreign. It has refused repeated IAEA requests for interviews with the scientists and engineers responsible for large areas of its secret atomic work, and it has refused to disclose the details of its involvement with North Korea and with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network.

The result is that Iran now has a broad capability in all aspects of the complex nuclear-weapons process—from converting natural uranium into enriched uranium using gas centrifuges, to designing and testing the components of a nuclear weapon, to working on the construction of a missile-deliverable warhead, to building and testing missiles capable of delivering that nuclear warhead over significant distances.

Maybe I'm messed up, but isn't this kind of asinine? I mean, let's get past the unfounded assumption that because Iran won't let the IAEA inspectors in the country, obviously their scientists and engineers must have a fully functional nuclear weapons infrastructure up and running. The thing that I tend to fixate on is the fact that arms control inspectors aren't supposed to disarm countries. If countries don't want to be disarmed outside of being the loser in a significant war, then they don't get disarmed. All the inspectors can do is to verify whether or not the program is running - if they have access, as Kay notes. That's all they're supposed to do.

The blunt truth is that weapons inspections simply cannot prevent a government in charge of a large country from developing nuclear weapons, when that government has decided to breach its obligations not to. The international community must use inspectors when possible to aid their efforts, but it needs to face up to the fact that these people are not the answer to the problem at hand. If they fail to see the limits of the IAEA or any other inspection team, only further disaster awaits.

It's this melodramatic shit that I dislike. "Only further disaster awaits..." This only feeds neocon fantasies of bombing Iran. Well, the IAEA can't look at Israel's nuclear weapons program. Even if Israel isn't a signatory of the NPT, I'm not sure "disaster awaits." And then there's India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries at the brink of war most of the time. No IAEA inspectors there, either. Not sure how we're doing in North Korea either, but I'm not expecting "disaster." 

A learned military historian wrote, "People don't fight because they have arms. People have arms because they want to fight." He was bemoaning the philosophy of arms control proponents who think that they can change the world's behavior as long as they're alert and on the beat. But the fact is, arms control inspectors can only tell us what they see, based on the willingness of the countries who support arms control regimes. I never expected arms control to significantly impact countries who are adverse or hostile to inspection regimes. So while I'm all for defining laws of war and supporting arms control as one aspect of diplomacy, I don't favor this "black and white" distinction. 

We can deal with a nuclear-armed Iran with a combination of diplomacy and military readiness, just as we do any other nuclear-armed country (see "China, future conflict with"). I'm not sure the neocons will be able to stop foaming at the mouth, but as long as we can keep them as a minority in Congress and out of the White House, we might just survive despite them.

Trouble in Savannah, Georgia, as an envelope filled with "white powder" brings things to a standstill in Chatham County's State Court.

Firefighters were called at about noon to the courthouse on Montgomery St. after an employee in the office of the State Court Clerk opened an envelope that contained an off-white substance.

Hazardous materials crews were called after the substance was examined.

Courthouse officials also turned off the air conditioning system to that office to help prevent any of the substance from becoming airborne, according to a news release.

Field tests showed the substance could be soap shavings.  

On the plus side, if they deconned anyone, they'd probably clean up pretty good. Okay, the show's over. Time to go back to fearing about the future mass casualty bioterrorism incident that the Graham-Talent comedy team has predicted. 

I just can't understand why the DOD in particular has allowed such a massive growth of contractors in its acquistion programs. It seems like such an simple, transparent process.

Walter Pincus summarizes the meeting of the three big DOE national lab directors (Sandia, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore) before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Their discussion is part of the dance required by Congress prior to the approval of the new START agreement. Most of their talk was about the need to modernize the US nuclear arms stockpile (surprise). It's good info for those of us who don't routinely deal with this subject.

Sandia has the lead in the life-extension program of the older versions of the B-61-7s, which has been underway since 2009. As currently planned, the design and cost analysis for the extension is to take place next year. Development and engineering will run through 2017, and production, of probably 100 or less, will occur from 2018 to 2023. That offers an example of just how long the life-extension process takes.

Hommert told the senators that critical non-nuclear components "are exhibiting age-related performance degradation." He cited specifically that the earlier B-61 radar, which begins the fusing process of the weapon as it descends toward the target, includes vacuum tubes that now will be replaced by computer chips. Plans also call for replacing the battery component and the neutron generator in each bomb, the latter device being the one that initiates the fission process leading to the nuclear explosion.

The nuclear package of the B-61 was developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and its director, Michael R. Anastasio, told the committees that his staff was turning to the nuclear bomb, having finished work on the extension program for W-76, the warhead carried by the submarine-launched Trident intercontinental ballistic missile. Los Alamos will refurbish a new detonator cable assembly for the B-61 as well as foams and polymers that have shown decay and are needed to protect the nuclear package.

Their written testimonies are here. I don't have much to add, other than I agree that the national labs have a particularly unique mission set and we do need to maintain that infrastructure for as long as we have nuclear weapons as a strategic option. And since that's going to be for a while, it's important that there's a good plan on the table to do that.

People often comment that the British government has one big advantage over the US government in running its operations. They have many more professional government officials rather than political appointees, which offers them a much more stable and consistent public service bureaucracy as administrations change. Certainly it seems to enable their public officials to be much more honest about, oh, say whether Saddam Hussein was a real threat to the West. Here's Eliza Manningham-Buller, a.k.a. "M" of MI5:

The former MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller today delivered a withering assessment of the case for war against Iraq, saying it had significantly increased the terrorist threat to Britian.

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Manningham-Buller said the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion in 2003 was low.

But the toppling of Saddam allowed Osama bin Laden to gain a stronghold in Iraq and radicalised young Muslims in Britain, she said.

In evidence that undermined the case for war presented by the former prime minister Tony Blair, she was asked whether it was feared Saddam could have linked terrorists to weapons of mass destruction, facilitating their use against the west.

"It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or the medium term to me or my colleagues," she replied. 

And it shouldn't have been of concern to the United States leadership. I know, you think I'm a broken record on this topic. But until the CheneyBush administration officials admit that invading Iraq was a complete boondoggle and the Republican party admits that it was not an adventure for democracy and glory, then I'm going to keep on saying it. The US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with WMDs, although that was the main drum being banged by CheneyBush officials (and yes, some misguided Democrats) between June 2002 and March 2003. 

The BBC has a longer article on this same story. Hat tip to elizzar and Ray!

Gulliver at Ink Spots hits the real point behind the "outrage" over the number of contractors working for federal agencies who are involved in classified work. He explains:

The problem is the government's hiring system. There's a reason that 90% of the smart people under 40 that I know in government are contractors: because the government makes it impossible for you to come aboard as a civil servant, even in transition from a contractor position performing the exact same duties.

Now there are presumably reasons for this relating to the extensive benefits/sustainment trail for a government employee (which obviously need not be invested in a contractor), personnel flexibility (read: ease of firing), and the opportunity to contract outside for a specialized skill when the need calls for it. But it also means that you have an old, comfortable government workforce (in many places made up primarily of retired O-5s and O-6s with no specific preparation to perform their function) supplemented by young, purpose-trained contractors (often with recent graduate degrees in their field of work). A RAND study from 2001 (pdf) found that about 75% of the defense civilian workforce was over 40, and around a third were over 50. I'm not gonna spend half the morning looking for recent data, but let's just say the trend is not improving. (I'm almost certain I saw some figures recently saying that around two-thirds were over 50.)

Yeah, it's really that simple. There's a lot of talk about how CIA govvies, for instance, quit their jobs so that they can turn around and become contractors to the CIA with higher salaries. Wow, it really takes some deep thought to figure out what to do here. Either raise the salaries within that $48 billion intel community budget or just stop handing out contracts. Either way, if you've got empty seats, then it's the hiring process that's at fault. DOD's even worse. I've seen minimum 6-8 months between people applying for jobs and their getting word that they didn't meet the minimum qualifications of some poorly-worded job opening. I don't like the HR offices of private firms much better, but they are at least quicker and more flexible in reviewing one's quals.

Lots of us contractors would like to be govvies, dirty little secret, would be nice to be in charge of projects and being able to make decisions, instead of just being subordinate to the tyranny of little minds that currently direct our work. But it's just too damned hard to get through the paperwork. The WaPo jobs section routinely suggests hiring specialists to get you through the federal jobs process, which I think is insane. It seems that the only successful way to get a govvie job is to find a client who likes you, who actually has funding and authority to hire that year, and who writes a job application that's focused on your resume's highlights. And even then, things will go wrong. So we end up with the situation as described by Gulliver.

On the recent flap about too many security clearances and "secret squirrel" agencies, Bob Haddick offers some good advice. If the public truly thinks that this is an issue that needs to be corrected (you know, as Jim and Joan Smith pause during commercial breaks of "American Idol" to think about the perils of big gov'ment), then they need to understand that there are risks involved. Maybe not big risks, but you can't expect 100% coverage and then be surprised by the federal reaction.

The average response to the Washington Post’s expose on the intelligence community’s (IC) vast spending on counter-terrorism seems to be a shrug – if the Washington Beltway responded to 9/11 with a gluttonous frenzy of contractor-hiring and office construction, why should anyone be surprised? I join those who have found the series a little over-hyped and underwhelming.

Some have become cynical about Washington’s ways. But we should consider whether there might be deeper causes that mere bureaucratic competition and empire-building behind the vast expansion in the IC. Rather than being only a self-interested grab by agencies and contractors for money and power, the great expansion of the IC also reflects the preferences of the broader American society. We could save money by making significant cuts in the IC’s counter-terrorism activities. But that would mean taking risks with casualties, civil liberties, or responsibilities that many Americans would find uncomfortable. So, perhaps not yet having thought through the financial tradeoffs, the public, at least for now, is happy to “spend whatever it takes.” In other words, if we are outraged by the size, expense, and waste of “Top Secret America,” we all share the blame.

For example, the minimum acceptable standard for counter-terror success is presumably zero attacks within the United States homeland. An Islamist maniac shooting up a reception center at Fort Hood with two pistols or a crude attempted car bomb in Times Square are deemed to be unacceptable failures, requiring investigations and bureaucratic shakeups. An alternative and thriftier approach for the federal intelligence community would have it focus on only truly mass casualty scenarios such as nuclear, chemical, biological, maritime, and commercial aviation threats. Preventing relatively low casualty threats such as car bombs, suicide bombers, and gunmen would fall on states, cities, and the citizens themselves.

Bob notes that this discussion with "the American people" hasn't taken place yet. I'm very much in favor of putting some of the burden on the states and cities and to force the feds to focus on the real high-priority issues. I don't think there will be much more play on CBRN terrorism than there is now, but certainly the feds need to be developing policy and coordinating strategic assets for homeland security and national security, especially in coordination with international and interagency efforts.

James Gammon was the rough-talking coach of the Cleveland Indians in the phenomenal movie "Major League." He died at the age of 70 as a result of cancer. He was a great actor.

In noting the LA Times' coverage of the potential movement of BioShield funds to other government initiatives, I failed to notice this longer news article by Ken Dilanian on the same subject. In doing so, I now have to take Mr. Dilanian to task for using the ridiculous statements of former Bush administration officials in the context of scary bioterrorism scenarios.

On its face, it's just another Washington dispute about money. But a move by House Democrats to strip $2 billion from reserve funds for bioterrorism and pandemic flu — without objection from President Obama — has infuriated some of the country's foremost bioterrorism experts.

It's a symbol, they say, of how the Obama White House is failing to properly address the threat posed by a potential biological attack, which they say could kill 400,000 Americans and do $2 trillion in economic damage.

First of all, Bob Kadlec, former senators Graham and Talent, and Rolf Mowatt-Larssen are not bioterrorism experts. In fact, I would hazard to say that all of the sources in the news article are not bioterrorism experts. The fact that they make stupid statements about bioterrorism while in positions of authority does not make them experts, especially when the positions of authority are more general (homeland security, health affairs, general terrorism, etc etc). Second, the scenario that is stated - a bioterrorism incident that results in 400,000 dead and $2 trillion in economic damage -  comes from one study commissioned by a particular intelligence agency, it has never been validated, hasn't been accepted by the homeland security or defense communities, but pops up a lot in speeches by certain former Bushite officials. It's a fantasy piece, a fiction, but the media's willing to repeat it as gospel now.

"It is incomprehensible to think that an administration and a Congress that is fighting terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — some of whom are trying to obtain and use biological weapons against the U.S. — would eliminate monies dedicated to make us better prepared," [retired Col Bob] Kadlec said.

That's an interesting statement, but one that is without merit and without substance. The DNI report to Congress on this issue says that there are groups that have "expressed interest" but only AQ is still "intent on [CBRN] acquisition." However, big difference between intent and capability. Everyone can say, sure, terrorist groups might get this capability, because the biotechnology equipment and information is "out there" in the global economy. No transnational violent extremists have in fact obtained any weapons-grade CBRN materiel since Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, though. But Kadlec, as a former Bushite official and now a contractor with a clearance, can make a good deal of business happen if he says it is so.

In the Bush administration, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff proposed allowing first responders and Homeland Security employees to keep medical kits in their homes with antibiotics and other agents, but the Food and Drug Administration would not go along, Chertoff said recently. The FDA raised concerns about the overuse of antibiotics, though a 2006 study in St. Louis found that only 4 out of 4,000 people improperly took the pills.

So how many "improper uses" of antibiotics and other medical countermeasures does it take before it becomes a scandal? And there were others who believe that the federal government should let the general public have these medical kits at home, preparing for "when" the CBRN terrorism happens. Worst idea ever.

Though the 2001 anthrax attacks have been attributed to a U.S. scientist who later killed himself, Al Qaeda ran a biological weapons program that was discovered only when U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan. The group continues to pursue one, wrote Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA agent who is a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, in a study this year.

I covered Mowatt-Larssen's report when it came out in January, and I wasn't impressed. He only covered al Qaeda's track record between 1998-2003, which was largely a failure to do anything related to WMD acquisition and use. He relied on questionable  sources and really didn't answer the mail as to future capabilities of a terrorist group that currently is hiding in caves in Pakistan, trying to avoid armed UAVs and the Pakistani military.

Better reporting, please. You could start by getting better sources of information.

I like Tom Toles work, but he doesn't always hit the target. Again, there's nothing mysterious about the growth in the number of clearances, the expansion of national security-related agencies, and the growth of contracting firms in parallel with the agencies. Most of them are open source and you can find them on Teh Google. Just because Joe Public doesn't know about them doesn't mean that the government is "out of control." 

Those of us in the business are frankly laughing at all of the fuss. This morning, I'm reading a contract0r's proposal to do an operational analysis of a particular CBRN issue for a government office, something you might have thought the govvies would do. It's not at all uncommon to go to a government meeting and find that more than half the attendees are contractors, because their clients were too busy answering emails and going to other meetings. The opening video of the WaPo special talks ominously about the "fourth branch of government" being the contractors with clearances, but the fourth branch has always been the government bureaucracy. It's not a new invention, it's just the expected evolution of the species.

I don't often read Anne Applebaum, but she provides the voice of reason here.

For this hidden world, with its 1,271 security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal: It has been set up in response to public demand. It's true that the French want to retire early, and that the British think health care should be free, but when things -- any old things -- go wrong, Americans also write to their congressional representatives and their commander in chief, demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy, Congress and the president respond, pass a law, build a building.
-------
Look around the world, and we don't look as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security guards would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government provides a tax break if you buy a house or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created -- democratically, constitutionally, openly -- to deliver it.

This isn't news. It may be an observation and opportunity to question whether we've gone overboard in the national security business, and I don't think anyone would disagree that it's overblown. But the solution isn't to order an investigation or to create a database that monitors where all the agencies and clearances are. Just tell Congress and the NSC to do its job and clean house. Reduce their budgets, stop demanding "annual reports" on everything, and the agencies will figure out how to downsize quickly enough.

Super Dave Petraeus, newly installed as top banana in the Bananastans*, is practicing the exploding-cigar kind of diplomacy Dick Cheney and his cabin boys perfected during the Li’l Bush regime. Following policies outlined by the neoconservative cabal in their September 2000 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Dick and the Destroyers’ negotiations with Iran amounted to a bad practical joke. Making an unacceptable demand as a precondition to talks – namely that Iran give up its UN-guaranteed right to refine uranium for peaceful purposes – ensured that talks would never take place. When the Iranians refused to knuckle under to an outrageous demand, Team Cheney could say they tried diplomacy and it didn’t work, and continue to press for war. Nothing has changed under the Obama administration; we’re still demanding that Iran give up its right to refine reactor-grade uranium, and it still refuses to cave in to what amounts to bullying on our part. And perennial AIPAC Shemps** John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are still running around telling the world how we’ll go to war with Iran if we have to and that the U.S. Congress “has Israel’s back” in return for Israel maintaining the oldest established permanent floating campaign-finance racket in American history. So our animosity toward Iran is theoretically based on the threat Iran poses to Israel, even though, despite what the Ministry of Truth Network would have you believe, Iran can’t do anything to Israel militarily. It’s little wonder then that one of King David’s first acts as praetorian governor of Central Asia ensured that peace talks don’t take place among the concerned local parties. As “senior officials” have told the New York Times, the Teflon General has introduced the idea of “blacklisting” the Pakistani warlord group known as the Haqqani network by having it declared to be another Club Terror affiliate. That would disrupt the peace coalition Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is trying to form. In one version of that coalition, Haqqani network leader Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani would become Afghanistan’s prime minister. Given his connections, Haqqani could coax the Afghan Taliban into a power sharing agreement with Karzai’s government, and because of Haqqani’s close ties to Pakistan’s government, he could broker terms with Afghanistan’s neighboring archrival as well. And good golly, we wouldn’t want that. If all those Bananastanis decide not to fight each other, then the only excuse we’ll have for staying there is that we don’t want to leave, and we don’t want to admit to something like that out loud. We like to at least cover our aggression with a fig leaf. Mom and the kids are watching, for heaven’s sake. By now, everyone with a brain larger than a tea bag knows our so-called war on terrorism isn’t about terror. The only effect our war is having on terrorism is to enhance it by creating more terrorists. But even bona fide brainiacs are hard pressed to say what our war on terrorism is about. Everything we’re doing now is as it has been since young Mr. Bush took office: in strict accordance with Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the neoconservative manifesto that said since we no longer had a peer military competitor we had better invade and occupy the entire world before somebody came along who could stop us (like the Vulcans, maybe). Occupying Iraq was step one. It had little to do with Saddam Hussein; he was just a convenient excuse. The neocons weren’t concerned about weapons of mass destruction, and they didn’t give a gnat’s meow about terrorism. Iraq had enormous geostrategic importance, though. Located in the middle of the Gulf region and featuring easily navigable terrain, it offered a perfect bully base of operations from which U.S. land and air power could molest the rest of the Muslim world until kingdom come or the planet ran out of oil, whichever came first. Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno floated his recent suggestion that the UN establish a long-term peacekeeping mission in Iraq with the prime neocon directive in mind. The present disarray of Iraq’s government provides a choice opportunity to slip into place a new UN occupation mandate that extends beyond the December 2011 deadline of the present status of forces agreement. And, naturally, the troops who fill the new UN mandate would be the same as the troops who filled the old UN mandate, i.e., U.S. troops. (Pretty clever, huh? Maybe we should start calling Odierno the Sly Ox.) Now that Teflon General Petraeus is directly in charge of ensuring peace doesn’t break out in the Bananastans, Obama’s promise to limit our military involvement there is as bogus as a George Washington penny. The reasons the pentagogues*** keep feeding us for staying the course in the Bananastans are equally specious, but their true ambitions become clear when we again consider geostrategic bases of operations. Iraq provides expanding lines of operations, interior lines of communications, and all the other operational artistry that goes with a central base of operations. The Bananastans provide us with exterior position. Exterior bases of operation provide converging lines of operations, and when we combine the land bases in Bananastan and Iraq with our maritime posture in the Indian Ocean, we have more than sufficient geostrategic leverage on Iran to squeeze it like the boil on a wicked witch’s forehead. Now little old me figured this out, and all I have are myself and an iMac and two dogs for research assistants. The neocons have global networks of tank thinkeries staffed with multi-degreed career warmongers, so they’ve surely stumbled upon similar revelations, and this is without question the general scheme of operations they’re presently pursuing. What I can’t figure out is how Pavlov’s dogs of war have managed to convince so many people that the Iranians are worth expending American national effort against. Their defense budget is less than 1 percent of ours. Their conventional air, sea, and land forces are strictly defensive in nature, unable to project power significantly beyond Iran’s borders and shores. Their ballistic missiles are unlikely to work properly in real conditions. Even if one of their missiles did work, it wouldn’t be worth shooting at anybody because the Iranians don’t have a payload worth wasting an expensive missile on. They don’t have nuclear weapons, and despite the dedicated efforts of Israeli-sympathizers in the CIA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and elsewhere to convince you otherwise, the Iranians don’t have a nuclear weapons program either. One might attempt to build a blanket rationale for the American military to run rampant in Central and Southwest Asia by playing the oil card, but that’s bogus too. Neither Iran nor any other oil country wants to shut down the flow of oil from the Gulf. The people who have oil need to sell it as badly as the people who need oil want to buy it. So what explains America’s seemingly unalterable aggression? History shows that some people will fight over whatever there is to fight over, and that if there’s nothing to fight over they’ll fight over nothing. People with this type of personality disorder typically get themselves put in charge of things like school boards and civic leagues, where they can be annoying to their hearts’ content but are relatively harmless. What I haven’t puzzled out is how enlightened people allow the same sorts of lunatics to control the policies of mighty nations and wreak havoc on entire civilizations. Can someone please reassure me that leadership entails more than having a malignant ambition to destroy the universe and sufficient charisma to get away with it? * The “Bananastans” are Pakistan and Afghanistan, our banana republics in Central Asia. ** A “Shemp” is a second-string stooge. *** A “pentagogue” is a member of the “Pentarchy,” the militaristic oligarchy that aligns U.S. foreign and domestic policy with the priorities of the Pentagon. Also known as “Pavlov’s Dogs of War,” “war mongrels,” “the warmongery,” “Big War,” and “War, Inc.” Catch the rest @ Antiwar.com.

I am shocked, shocked to find out that there are hundreds of thousands of security professionals with top secret clearances across the nation. And many of them are (gasp) in Washington DC and at military posts. The Washington Postis creating a dramatic dialog that, in the end, is an empty house. At least, the series hasn't told us anything that we didn't know already. Dana Priest and William Arkin try to make it sound scary, but I'm not biting. But then again, I am one of those security professionals.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

So how do professionals like Arkin and Priest not get this? Following 9/11, there have been huge increases in national security payrolls, and the Bush administration deliberately kept the size of the government down. The result was to increase the contractor rolls. The size of the intelligence community annual budget doubled from $24 billion to $48 billion. The NSA picked up major new responsibilities to wiretap Americans. The CIA needed help flying UAVs in the Middle East. The State Department found out that it was dangerous in Iraq and bought security. We all watched the size of the defense budget more than double to about $700 billion annually. Yeah, there was a lot of equipment being bought, but people had to manage it.

For years, we heard about how the federal government couldn't clear contractors quickly enough to meet all the requirements. For years, we watched as jobs in the Washington DC area were filled as the rest of the country suffered from the economic depression. In addition, the Washington Poststory isn't just focused on the intel community - it covers counter-terrorism, counter-WMD, counter-IED, Department of Justice, Department of Energy, DHS, Treasury, lots of additional characters. We watched the government create an Office for the Director of Intelligence and marveled at all of the agencies involved. This was the Republican hypocrisy of  "big government is bad, unless we're in charge" in action. This isn't news.

Of all the commentary I've seen (not a lot), Pat Lang has the right attitude:

Why has this catastrophic growth occurred?  There are probably several reasons, most of them embedded in our shared culture.  We like big.  There is an assumption in American culture that "bigger and more" must be better.  We tend to assume that we can solve problems by throwing money and manpower at them.  Why?  We are addicted to the leveling idea.  My insistence that smaller is better is typically seen as "elitist" because it implies that all people are not created equal and that some people do much better work than others, often being capable of the intuitive leaps called "intuition" by the "elitists" and "guessing" by the levelers.  The levelers are in charge.  Like "Poppy" Bush they are usually not good at "the vision thing."  Their reaction to the need to do serious thinking about phenomena that do not have linear outcomes from present events is often to divide the "action" up into smaller and smaller pieces that do not expect much insight from individuals.  Then these mental tessarae are submitted to the attention of layer upon layer of committees and inter-agency "coordination."  What results is often not useful, but the process is manpower and contract rich.

This isn't news. It's just the inertia of panic in America that started on September 12 and hasn't stopped rolling. The Republican politicians feed the fear, it allows them to keep control through their visage of the "daddy" party. The Democratic politicians are too afraid to manage the security mess, because it will make them look weak and they might lose votes. But this is not an unmanageable issue. There's a group who's supposed to maintain control of the agenda and to manage this huge beast. It's called the National Security Council and its staff,  and it hasn't done a good job for quite a long time (no matter what party was in charge). That's the real story.

The Defense Department announced the locations of ten National Guard Homeland Response Forces (HRFs), one in each FEMA region across the continental United States. These HRFs were developed as part of the discussions leading up to the release of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. The good news is that DOD finally has developed a response force that didn't have "CBRNE" or consequence management in its title. The bad news is that DOD still hasn't figured out what a ridiculous waste of money this is.

The Department of Defense (DoD), in collaboration with the states, has selected Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Utah, and California to host the remaining eight homeland response forces (HRFs), which will be established in fiscal 2012.  On June 3, 2010, DoD announced Ohio and Washington as the hosts for the first two HRFs, which will be established in fiscal 2011.

The creation of the HRFs is a part of DoD’s larger reorganization of its domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high yield explosive (CBRNE) consequence management enterprise, initiated during the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review.  This reorganization will ensure DoD has a robust ability to respond rapidly to domestic CBRNE incidents while recognizing the primary role that the governors play in controlling the response to incidents that occur in their states.

The homeland response forces (HRF) will be distributed across the nation, with one HRF hosted in each of the ten Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regions.  Each HRF will provide a regional response capability of approximately 570 personnel composed of CBRNE specialists, command and control and security forces.  HRFs will self-deploy by ground within six to 12 hours of an event, bringing life-saving medical, search and extraction, decontamination, security, and command and control capabilities -- this represents a dramatic improvement in response time and life-saving capability to the previous construct. 

Actually, it doesn't represent much of an improvement in "response time and life-saving capability" to the previous construct, which was the CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF). The Bush administration wanted three CCMRFs, each sized about 4500 military troops, as the ultimate bad-ass response force to support federal, state, and local responses to CBRN terrorist incidents. You know, because it's only a question of when, not if, and all that bullshit. Problem was, the Bush administration wanted all the components of the CCMRFs to come from active and reserve units, and well, it was hard to get 13-14,000 troops free when you're fighting two active wars.

But this new HRF creation is just an "efficiency" drill. The rationale goes, if there are ten HRFs at 570 people each spread out over the United States, they will respond quicker than three large CCMRFs, because they will have shorter distances to answer anywhere, in any state, for that mass causalty WMD attack that we know is coming (but strangely has been absent for the past decade). It's an asinine argument. The 57 state WMD Civil Support Teams have been largely inactive since their inception, supporting the local emergency responders but not for the purpose of addressing CBRN terrorism. These HRFs will not be any more successful than the CSTs. Oh, and by the way, now there are new acronyms for the CBRN defense community to learn.

• One Defense CBRNE Response Force (DCRF), formerly CCMRF 1;
• Two Consequence Management Command & Control Elements (C2CREs);
• 57 Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams (WMD-CSTs); &
• 17 CBRNE Enhanced Response Force Package (CERFPs).

This is bloated and inefficient overkill, otherwise known as "just another day in DOD." The sad part of this exercise is that the Obama administration basically has just followed and continued the paranoia of the Bush administration, viewing CBRN terrorism as a certainty (or at least, something of which the federal government cannot overinvest). The federal government acts as if the states and local emergency responders are as unprepared and untrained as they were in 1996, when Congress mandated that DOD use its "expertise" to help the cities. Time to reassess and develop a better plan.

 The DOD article at the top link has a fact sheet if you want more info.

The Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News shines a light on the recent decision by President Obama to move two billion dollars from DHHS's Project Bioshield to other legislative initiatives. 

Project Bioshield, a program that was created by the Bush Administration in 2004 to foster development of new drugs to respond to a potential bioterrorism attack, now faces significant budget cuts from Congress with the acquiescence of the Obama Administration.

Supporters of the program argue that the reductions to Project Bioshield are shortsighted and dangerously unwise.  Critics say the Project is a boondoggle that has produced little of value.

As you may remember, former Senator Bob Graham (the charming half of the Graham-Talent comedy team) didn't care for this move. He thinks it unnecessarily threatens biotech industry profits our protection from terrorists who might employ biological agents against US targets. In fact, the LA Times notes this statement from the two: "If the BioShield program is defunded now, before your new strategy is even given a chance to work, we will have to find a grade lower than an 'F' for our next report card." Yes, these are asshats at work.

The FAS blog includes a Congressional Research Service report on Project BioShield dated July 7, 2010. I recommend reading the report - it's got some good facts in it, to include other congressional actions to move money to other projects. The fact is, the Bush administration put way too much money into the project ($5.6 billion) for a five-year period, thinking that Big Pharma would just jump through every hoop to get that money under contract. They didn't.

The idea of stockpiling biological vaccines at a national location isn't a bad one. The mistake was when the Bush administration thought the FDA would just step aside in the interest of national security and that no one would have any issue with using untested, experimental drugs if a bioterrorist incident were to occur. That was wrong. So given the opportunity to level out BioShield so that it actually spends the money that it's authorized by Congress, yeah, taking the $2 billion makes a lot of sense. Even if Bob Graham convinced Congress not to move the money as the president requests, the BioShield project couldn't spend it.

Now I still think the issue of bioterrorism is greatly overblown, that while it's possible, it's certainly not something to fear as much as the damage from a nuclear terrorist incident. Some people are confused on that issue. And we really don't need to worry about either event as much as we need to worry about people with explosives, automatic rifles and handguns.

Went to see the new "Predators" movie this weekend. That was a mistake. Adrien Brody isn't ready to replace Bruce Willis or Ah-nold as a main actor in an action shooter. All I can say about Topher Grace and Laurence Fishburne is that you should slap your agents for talking you into this film. You're both better than this. Predictable movie plot, stereotypical acting, disposable cast, fancy CGI but you know it's CGI. The nod to the first Predator film was nice, but unnecessary. The ending was left open for a sequel (shudder). If you're interested in the "Predator" line of films, wait for the rental. 

On the other hand, "From Paris with Love" was a good action film, fast-paced, reasonable plot, good acting. At first, I thought John Travolta was overacting (yeah, I know, hard to believe), but that's to create the necessary tension with his new buddy Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. The plot isn't very clear, but that's deliberate. It mixes the CIA, drug smugglers, diplomats, and criminal gangs in Paris, but the plot in this case didn't have to be deep. In part, that's because there was a great director (Pierre Morel) who also did the movie "Taken," a movie I also quite enjoyed. Fast paced, good acting, good action film.

Perhaps needless to say, neither passes the Bechdel Rule. 

Rough tough Marines in Afghanistan adopt kittens. It's a refreshing change from the "adopted Afghan dogs" story.

Hat tip to basilbeast.

If you're looking to help an Afghan cat or dog, look no further.

Spencer Ackerman takes the bold, if unjustified, jab against the Department of Energy as a report from the Federation of American Scientists and Union of Concerned Scientists suggest that the US government is unjustified in requesting $175 billion over two decades to maintain a robust defense infrastructure that manages our nuclear weapons. OMG!!! What's going on! Let's fly to the Danger Room.

According to a leaked Energy Department plan submitted to Congress in May that the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists obtained and published, the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration proposes to slash the 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal down to “approximately 3,000 to 3,500″ warheads. So far, so clear. Nukes going down. President Obama’s plan for a nuke-free world going up.

But then the hedges come in. The Federation points out that the nuclear-arms reduction treaty with Russia making its way through the Senate, known as New START, would create a substantially smaller arsenal, allowing the U.S. to maintain up to 1550 deployed warheads. When not speaking for attribution, administration officials express hope that before the Obama leaves office, they’ll be able to conclude another treaty with Russia that cuts the arsenal even further.

Maybe the Energy Department is just trying to be prudent about having the facilities, technology and personnel in place to maintain a bigger arsenal should national strategy change. (And the Department has long pushed to refresh the stockpile with new, more “reliable” parts and warheads.) But its plan appears out of sync with the strategy as it stands.

Here's the thing, Spence. It doesn't matter what level of reduced nuclear arms that the next round of arms control talks result in, there's still work to be done. Those nuclear warheads don't just get dropped into a disintegration chamber (poof! all gone). There's a backlog of nuclear warheads to be dismantled right now, and you don't really want to just rip apart a nuclear weapon without careful planning and disposition of the special nuclear material. The disassembly line isn't manned by robots. If we go from 5000+ nukes today down to a target of 1500 in five years, that's a hell of a lot of work, maybe two decades worth.

Then there's the basic fundamental point that we probably won't be done with nuclear weapons in twenty years, or in fifty years for that matter. Our nuclear scientists are old and the facilities are old. They need replaced in the near term and sustained at a level that ensures that the US military will have nuclear weapons expertise as long as adversarial nations have nuclear weapons. Even the president acknowledges this fact. So when you talk to senior government officials (like Dr. John Harvey, now the principal deputy to the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense) they say, yes, in fact it does cost about $7-8 billion a year to maintain and upgrade our nuclear R&D infrastructure, because it's been starved over the last decade.

Walter Pincus has a more detailed and balanced article in today's Washington Post that outlines some of the issues. Hell, Spencer, you talk like $7-8 billion a year is something our government can't afford to operate NNSA. You really want to go through the long list of defense acquisition programs, agricultural subsidies, health care costs, or other blatantly exorbitant government programs that cost equal to or more than this effort? This is just the cost of business, and it's a good move.