uvAggravator2.0

Fur meine Frau.

Hat tip to Spencer!

I'm disappointed to learn that the Army's Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) project is going ahead with the construction and emplacement of 16 "Immobolized Cell Bioreactors" at the future Pueblo Chemical Agent Disposal Facility Alternatives Pilot Project. Bad enough that the Army is being forced to adopt a neutralization technology for the mass disposal of chemical weapons - a technology that has never been used at this scale (thus the name change, I suppose, to a "pilot project") at a cost of roughly twice that of a similar incineration facility. The Army had proposed to save millions of dollars by shipping the hydrolysate waste from the neutralization to an off-site private contractor - as it has successfully done for the Newport and Aberdeen disposal facilities. But no, that would mean fewer jobs for Colorado citizens.

For Irene Kornelly, seeing the units being lowered into place by a massive crane was especially heartening.

Kornelly is the chairwoman of the Colorado Chemical Demilitarization Citizens Advisory Commission. The commission led the fight to get the biotreatment done here when Defense Department officials wanted to ship the hydrolysate to an offsite treatment facility. The Pentagon claimed that off-site treatment would save $150 million in the more than $3 billion program. [actually closer to $4 billion]

Commission members argued that the estimated savings didn't take into consideration contingencies that could be a lot more costly. They pointed out, for example, that shipping the hydrolysate could set the stage for more delays if there was a spill in transit that brought on litigation stopping further shipments.
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"[The Defense Department] told us it only meant 30 jobs but 30 jobs is 30 jobs in this economy," she said.

What a load of shit. In the past decade, the Army moved thousands of tons of hydrolysate from Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to treatment facilities in Delaware, as well as from Newport, Indiana, to treatment facilities in Texas. There were zero spills in both cases. The only delays in the treatment program were the litigation suits brought on by environmental activists, some of whom might be thought of as close friends of Irene Kornelly.

I salute Ms. Kornelly in her open statements that she's quite willing to let the federal government's pay $5 million for each of those new jobs created by forcing the hydrolysate treatment to occur at the Pueblo Chemical Depot. It's quite an economic stimulus for the locals. Who cares if the mustard-filled artillery rounds sit there for another decade? It's just easy money in the bank for them.

Yes, let's all stop and thank former President George Bush for getting us into, and eventually out of, a war with Iraq. Listen at the 1:45 point:

"Well, of course the fundamental reason we went to war was because President Bush, just as President Clinton and all before him were told [that] Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons. And after being hit on September 11, the decision President Bush had to make is, when you were told as president that Saddam Hussein has biological and chemical weapons, is your reaction - we're America, there's nothing we can do about it, or, it's unacceptable, I will do something about it - that was the decision President Bush made. The calamity - the horror - is that we went to war for a reason that turned out to be wrong."

Ari has this patter down cold - it's a well-worn excuse. It's also a shame that people don't remind him that 1) Saddam Hussein didn't attack us on September 11; 2) the CIA's report on Iraq's WMD program assessed that Saddam would not give CB weapons to terrorists; and 3) the real fear expressed by Bush administration officials was that Saddam was seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and that was "unacceptable." No one was really sweating the CB weapons.

Gaddamn snakes - Obama administration is getting us out of Iraq in 2011, and this provides the former administration officials the stage to recraft their sorry-ass excuses for getting us into Iraq in 2003. Do us a favor, just shut the hell up.

Back later. Busy travel day.

One of the things that I distinctly dislike in our national security dialogue on WMD issues is how the medical community tends to lump emerging infectious diseases with biological warfare agents as all part of the "biological threat" continuum. It's as if they think all we have to do is focus on the medical diagnosis and response to both manmade and natural diseases, and that's all you really have to consider to succeed. It doesn't work like that in real life, though.

That's why it's really annoying to see the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense (ATSD[NCB]) take a billion dollars away from the DOD Chemical-Biological Defense Program - and specifically non-medical programs - to fund a medical vaccine facility for pandemic flu. It's not DOD's role to do this, and DHHS is already building two national medical vaccine facilities. What's the deal here? Elaine Grossman explains at the Global Security Newswire that the story is wrapped up in a budget document being drafted for OSD discussions.

"To implement the DOD response to the president's new [vaccine] initiative requires $1.07 billion" between fiscal 2012 and 2016, states the defense memo, obtained by Global Security Newswire.

The money was taken out of a wide variety of programs deemed "essential" for combating weapons of mass destruction, the document states. An additional $442 million was trimmed through efficiency reductions mandated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, for a total of $1.5 billion cut from the counter-WMD account over the five-year period, according to the draft memo.

U.S. nuclear, biological and chemical preparedness efforts "cannot absorb the entire reduction without delaying both current and future force readiness by approximately six to nine years," states the memo.

Defense Department projects under the budget-cutting ax include the development and acquisition of biological and chemical detection systems; gear to decontaminate skin and equipment after exposure; systems to coordinate military operations in a chem-bio environment; and protective clothing for military personnel entering toxic areas, the document indicates.

It's an amazing thing. If the President really believes we need all three national medical vaccine facilities to "counter biological threats" as detailed in his national strategy, you'd think that DOD could find a lousy billion dollars without taking it out of other chem-bio defense programs. I mean, shift a Navy ship one year, and you got a billion dollars. Cut two F35 planes, and you got a billion dollars. But no, it doesn't appear that the OSD leadership places the same value in the president's priority to find new dollars for this facility (even as it pushes for a 1-2 percent increase of funds in the budget). Industry, however, is very interested.

Plans call for Health and Human Services to open "several" vaccine development and manufacturing centers and for the Defense Department to open a single facility, either through new construction or refurbishment of existing buildings, according to Robin Robinson, director of the HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Health and Human Services will spend $478 million on building multiple facilities while the Defense Department will allocate $200 million to construct its lone site, Robinson said in a Wednesday phone interview. Both agencies are likely to release industry solicitations by the end of the year for long-term contracts to build and operate the facilities, he said.

By the end of 2011, 10-year-or-longer contracts should be signed for the HHS and defense facilities, Robinson said. Each center will be owned and operated by its respective contractor -- perhaps a university consortium with a pharmaceutical firm -- and will be located in the United States, he said.

Yes, the pharmaceutical industry is very interested. I respect that DHHS wants to create an ability to address the pandemic flu quickly and more efficiently than it has in the past. I just don't get why DOD is adding to this capability. It's not the right agency to add to DHHS's vaccine facilities, but instead should collaborate on research and development efforts leading to better biological warfare agent vaccines. Let DHHS do the natural disease countermeasures. Hopefully OSD will figure out this rather obvious point.

UPDATE: Let me clarify the last paragraph - while the DOD Defense Health Program is an appropriate agency to address "emerging infectious diseases" and to collaborate with DHHS (as it is with this planned facility), it is misguided to execute this project within the DOD CB defense program's budget.

 

 

I have been actually consumed with other affairs and didn't see The Speech last night. So I'm just going to take Spencer Ackerman's critical assessment of the speech. He notes:

“I’m mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it’s time to turn the page.” Actually, he already has. From 2002 to 2008, the Iraq war was perhaps the most politically contentious issue in American public life. In February 2009, starting with the Camp LeJeune speech — pfft. It’s done. And it’s an unheralded political success. You read the Wolfowitz and Bolton op-eds today? Neither of them can really bite the bullet and say that we should remain in Iraq, waging a war, and so they strain to find an actual critique of Obama’s approach. They’re like the sort of arguments “against” the war that Tom Daschle or Dick Gephardt used to make — signaling they hate the president, fearful of getting on the wrong side of an issue.

If Obama hadn’t embraced Petraeus and Odierno, and let them basically spend 2009 without meaningful troop withdrawals, that might not have happened, and we might have been arguing about Iraq for the past 18 months — which is to say for the past eight uninterrupted years. 

I get the feeling that President Obama wants to draw down Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible without getting smeared with the "dirty Democrats lost the war again" label. It may be a difficult task, but I don't think that the Vietnam splash is going to work this time. That doesn't mean that the Republicans won't try as hard as they could to use 1970s generalizations to tar this president. Let's see if the American public is smarter than that.

I saw a twitter by Dr. Steve Metz in response to some neocon nonsensical statement: "Everyone agrees that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. That doesn't mean that the invasion made strategic sense."

UPDATE: I like the Bobblespeak Translations' version better than the original.

Those poor Iraqi kids. Who’s going to keep them supplied with new soccer balls after we leave? Will the poor things have to go back to eating Iraqi food after all the Hershey bars run out? (Cue Sally Struthers). And what will happen to all those adorable puppies American G.I.s adopted as pets that get left behind? (Cue Sarah McLachlan.) The entire planet knows Obama’s “fulfilled promise” to end the U.S. combat mission was an exercise in sleight-of-tongue Neo-speak, and all signs indicate that the December 2011 status of forces agreement (SOFA) deadline by which all U.S. troops are supposed to leave Iraq has already gone the way of the pay phone. The desensitizing phase of the propaganda offensive designed to turn the citizenry apathetic to the warmongery’s next escapade has been in effect for some time. It was clear back in February 2009, long after the SOFA exit deadline had been established, that Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno announced, via David Petraeus hagiographer Tom Ricks, his desire to see 30,000 to 35,000 troops remain in Iraq until 2014 or 2015. More recently, Odie has suggested that theU.N. establish a new Iraq occupation mandate once the SOFA expires, one that will be supported by the same personnel that supported the old U.N. occupation mandate, i.e., U.S. troops. Odie didn’t mention the part about the U.S. having to provide the troops. It must have slipped his mind. Lapdog-of-war Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has been yodeling onto the echo chamber of late about why we need to prolong our stay in Iraq and why we can. In a recent New York Times “news analysis” piece, Crocker told emerging star of the Long War steno pool Tim Arango that even as the SOFA deadline was negotiated, plans were in place to renegotiate it. “For a very long period of time we’re going to be on the ground, even if it’s solely in support of its U.S. weapons systems,” Crocker told Arango. That way talks Crocker apparently all the time – a reflecting of it is how convoluted the pretzel logic he for his Pentarch* pals makes about why more war need we. The weapons systems Crocker refers to aren’t required to keep militants, insurgents, and the local al-Qaeda trademark violators under control. According to a Pentagon press release reproduced by Liz Sly in the Los Angeles Times, “commanders” say “they are reasonably confident in the Iraqi security forces’ ability to keep order while facing insurgents or other internal threats.” But when it comes to Iraq’s capacity to protect itself against attacks from other nations, Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, commander of the U.S. military training program in Iraq, says it is “inconceivable” that the Iraqi army will be able to stand alone by the end of 2011. The “defend Iraq from its neighbors” argument is as specious as the rest of the “buy our war” hucksterism we’ve heard since Shock and Awe blew back in our national face. It’s inconceivable that any country, after having watched the best-trained, best-equipped, best-paid, best-fed, best-publicized, best-entertained armed force in the history of humanity get its turrets blown off for seven years, would be in any rush to embark on a comparable escapade. If a war wonk like the hideous Max Boot tells you things will work out differently when a Muslim country invades Iraq, he’s trying to get his mitts on something you keep in your pants. No matter which of its neighbors might invade it, Iraq possesses at least one major religious and/or ethnic faction that will hate the new occupiers as much as they hated us, and thanks to “King David” Petraeus, every faction is armed to the canines because he bribed them all not to shoot each other by giving them all guns. So if any of Iraq’s Sunni neighbors decide to invade them, they’ll be up to their ammo belts in Mahdi Army and Badr Brigade. If the Persian Shi’ite Iranians invade, they’ll be swarmed by more Sons of Iraq, Sahwas, Concerned Local Citizens, Very Worried Iraqis, Awakening Movers, and other Sunni militiamen than you can sheikh a stick at. If the Turks decide to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq, then… Oh, wait; they’ve already done that. In fact the Kurds in Iraq (specifically the Kurdish Workers Party) and the Turks have been in an open war with each other since 1984. We’ve barely noticed that conflict, despite having been involved in at least three (depending how you count them) Iraq wars in that time frame, one on Iraq’s side (the Iran-Iraq War) and the others – Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Desert Sword, Desert Saber, Granby, Daquet, Locust, Friction, Southern Watch, Northern Watch, Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom, Infinite Justice, New Dawn, Telec, Falconer, and the rest – against Iraq. Even if one of Iraq’s neighbors were crazy enough to want to prove it’s as crazy as we are, it couldn’t. The nations in that region simply don’t possess the kind of operational reach or strategic depth it takes to move into and occupy a country as large as Iraq for any length of time. Our Mesopotamian Mistake has nearly broken us in half economically. Imagine what a similar shenanigan would to a pismire like Syria. That’s where arguments that the absence of U.S. military power in West Asia will lead to a widespread regional war break down. The powers in that region, to use the term “powers” generously, can’t support a war that big, no matter how many killer gizmos we sell them. Sure, there might be a temporary uptick in border skirmishing if we vacate the subcontinent, but that sort of fighting has been going on in the Muslim world since Lawrence of Arabia created the camel cavalry back in World War I. Liz Sly tells us, “The gravest concern may be Iraq’s inability to defend its airspace.” Fortunately for Iraq, we’ve agreed to sell them 18 shiny new F-16 fighter jets for that purpose. Alas, the poor dumb Iraqi pilots won’t be able to fly the pretty things by themselves for a time so long we’re not sure just how long a time it will be. “I would say we’re five years into a 10-15 year program,” says Brig. Gen. Scott Hanson, who heads the U.S. mission in charge of training the Iraqi air force. “We’re on a glide path, but we’re not in the final stages of approach,” Brigadier Scotty adds. What a steaming pile of wild-blue balderdash. Conventional combat air power, specifically aerial bombing, seldom rises in significance above the tactical level of war. It is merely, to borrow from Clausewitz, a continuation of terrorism by vertical means. Once we move into the nuclear arena, post-Clausewitzian paradigms and other art-of-war mumbo jumbo kicks in and air power becomes a predominant strategic factor. But arcane nuclear warfare theories lose relevance when you consider that only one country in the region we’re talking about is capable of delivering a nuclear air strike, and I’d just love to see Charles Krauthammer go on Fox News and explain that we need a permanent military presence in the Middle East to protect all the Muslim countries from Israel. *Pentarchs are the oligarchs of the Pentarchy, that cabal of sandbox generals,bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs,Pavlov’s dogs of war, and other patriotic psychopaths whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

There was a recent flap over an Army lieutenant colonel who was on a deployment to Afghanistan when he was fired and sent home for an article he submitted - without command authorization. Oops. In the article, he blasted the Powerpoint Rangers whom he saw working so hard in Kabul. Tom Ricks allowed the gentleman to reflect and amend his earlier observations, and I caught this point about Powerpoint:

One of the main themes of the article involved the use of PowerPoint. I don't hate PowerPoint. In fact, I use it often. I do object to its use as a crutch or a replacement for serious thinking. Also, the overuse of PowerPoint can give the illusion of progress, when it is really only motion in the form of busy work. It can confuse the volume of information with the quality of information.

A second theme was the way in which organizations function and why they don't e.g. stovepipes, ad hoc or absent processes, run-away egos or adding bodies as a solution to every problem.

Just to make the point, don't hate the tool, hate the messengers. If you're an officer trying to look busy and want to impress the boss with misleading statistics, sure, Powerpoint's your tool. But that should reflect more on the poor training and intentions of the officer, not the abilities of the tool.

Michael O'Hanlon is confused, and that's not a new thing. He's confused a great deal of the time, and yet the Washington Post reporters still flock to ask his opinion on national security issues. No matter how many times he's wrong, misguided, or confused, he will get quoted. It's an amazing thing. In this case, he's concerned that President Obama should not be telling the American people that combat operations in Iraq are over. 

"Maybe he's entitled to the partial victory lap, but this is not the right moment for it," said analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who has been critical of both Democratic and Republican approaches to the war. "If I were him, I'd wait until we have an Iraqi government, and do it with the Iraqis together."

O'Hanlon said he was "confused about the planned Oval Office speech." It could raise unrealistic expectations among the public about the chances for calm in Iraq, he said. And the timing of the pullout of combat troops may be seen as having more to do with the president's political needs than with real signs of progress on the ground.
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"The president and this administration are making good on our commitment to end the war in Iraq responsibly and to help build a stable, self-reliant and sovereign Iraq," Blinken said. Biden, who made his his sixth trip to Iraq to participate in the "change of mission" ceremony, planned to give Iraqi leaders a preview of the president's speech, he said.

Ending combat in Iraq may help offset some concerns about Afghanistan, officials said. Even after deploying an additional 30,000 troops there - taking the total to nearly 100,000 - the reduction in Iraq means that about 30,000 fewer troops are serving "in harm's way" abroad, one administration official said. And the reduction frees up financial resources, including domestic funding for roads, bridges and schools - a point Obama will underscore. 

What O'Hanlon seems not to understand is that, yes, reducing troop numbers in Iraq and changing their combat mission there is inherently aligned with the president's political agenda. War is an extension of politics. Thus has it ever been. Adding troops to Afghanistan and pushing a more aggressive combat mission there is a political act. Now, as far as the timing of this announcement, come on. Announcing the end of combat operations in May 2003 was "not the right moment for it." Announcing the end of combat operations in 2010 after multiple national elections are held and a substantial investment in training and equipping Iraqi security forces? Much better.

O'Hanlon can't seem to make any positive comments about a Democratic administration, no matter how good the decision is. And yet he was always so effusively positive about the past administration, no matter how poorly its decisions were made. He's very confused. The troops returning home aren't confused about their enthusiasm to get the hell out of Iraq.

The UK Guardian reports that the Bush administration expressed "grave doubts" to Tony Blair about the suitability of Gordon Brown as the Prime Minister of England. 

According to the Sunday Telegraph, Brown is said to have "harangued" Rice, then secretary of state, over US policy on aid and development in Africa. Rice reportedly alerted the White House which passed on its concerns to Blair.

No date is give for the meeting with Rice, who became secretary of state at the start of Bush's second term in January 2005. Blair announced in the early autumn of 2006 that he would stand down before the time of the Labour conference in 2007, suggesting that Rice's comments were passed on in 2005 or 2006.
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 Brown eventually became prime minister at the end of June 2007. A month later he visited Bush at Camp David, causing mild offence by briefing that he would not handle relations with the White House in the same way as his predecessor.

In contrast to the jeans sported by Blair for a Camp David meeting with Bush, Brown made a point of wearing a suit and tie for his joint press conference. Bush addressed Brown as Gordon who then replied "Mr President". Brown described their discussions as "full and frank". 

Yes, good thing no world leader ever expressed "grave doubts" about the US government's leadership between 2001-2009... Hat tip to Ray!

It's a sad thing when Admiral Eric Olson, the commander of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), admits that his dance card is so full that he can't commit forces to what President Obama calls the gravest national security risk - nuclear terrorism. It's not as grim as the article first sounds. It's more of a case where a general/flag officer decides that he has to obtain increased technology to augment the lack of personnel available.

Fewer elite commandos are available for the hunt and their expertise has been degraded by “the decreased level of training,” Admiral Eric Olson said. They now have only a “limited” capability for this mission, he said.

Meanwhile, the threat of extremists acquiring and using chemical, biological or nuclear arms “is greater now than at any other time in history,” Olson told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a written response to a question posed by lawmakers after a hearing March 16 on his command’s budget.
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 In his unreleased guidance, Gates cited the need to “fully fund” technologies for disposing of explosive ordnance, destroying “ultra-high performance” concrete that might shelter WMD production or storage sites and disabling “control systems” for “state-run weapons production facilities.”

The proposed budget for the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that develops these capabilities increases to $113 million in 2015 from $61.3 million in fiscal 2010.

The agency’s fiscal 2011 plan calls for continuing to develop and field “new technologies to improve” the commandos’ “ability to detect, disable, interdict, neutralize and destroy chemical, biological and nuclear production, storage and weaponization facilities.”

SOCOM hasn't really been paying attention to WMD terrorism for the past decade. They used to be much more focused on counterproliferation issues - but that was when we had Saddam as a threat. Since no WMDs were found in Iraq in 2003, business has been kind of slow in the counterproliferation area (for SOCOM at least). Now that business is drying up in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't have WMD sites, SOCOM and DTRA need to invent a new threat. It would be nice to actually find terrorists who are developing CBRN production, storage, and weaponization facilities. Until then, we can all pretend that we need these new technologies that don't work to defeat a threat that doesn't exist.

And I'm shocked, shocked to find out that it's a middle-aged, disgruntled white man from a red state who sent President Obama a "white powder" letter.

A man from the Denver area pleaded guilty Thursday to sending letters containing white powder to President Barack Obama, members of Congress from Colorado and Alabama, and Argentine consulates.

Jay DeVaughn, 41, of Aurora faced 13 federal counts of mailing threatening communications.
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 He mailed a letter to Obama that was intercepted Sept. 10, 2009, according to court documents. The letter called health care reform championed by Obama and passed by Congress a "joke" and contained a plastic bag of white powder and a reference to anthrax.

The white powder in all the letters was harmless, but emergency personnel were called when the various offices received the mail, authorities said. 

Still no massive bioterrorist attack as predicted by the Graham-Talent comedy team.

 Last week we saw the Taliban's continued attacks against young girls' education in Afghanistan with poison gas. It's a particularly vile thing to do, but it's educational to note the amateur hour approach that they used.

 A total of 46 students and nine teachers were treated in hospital after what Mohammad Asif Nang, an official at the education ministry, described as "an apparent poisoning" attack by "the enemies of women's education".

According to staff, parents and onlookers, girls began fainting in the school's main classroom block at about 10.30 this morning, during the first of three daily shifts designed to triple the number of girls at the school.

Some victims had to be carried out while others stumbled to the school gates, where about 18 slumped to the ground unconscious, said Abdul Haq, a 15-year-old boy who witnessed the incident.
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 Western medical experts have taken blood samples from alleged victims while investigating previous incidents but have been unable to find clear evidence of poisoning. They have also questioned how such an apparently powerful gas could be spread with such apparent ease round large school buildings.

This hasn't been the first gas attack on a school, and it's unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it's a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.

UPDATE: George Smith suggests that the Taliban used fumigants. Good suggestion as any.

In a stunning announcement yesterday, Admiral Mike Mullen told the Detroit Economic Club that the national debt had replaced nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat to national security.

The single biggest threat to national security is the national debt, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday, underscoring the importance of good fiscal stewardship and a need to stimulate economic growth.

American taxpayers are going to pay an estimated $600 billion in interest on the national debt in 2012, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen told local leaders and university students here.

Mullen explained to the group that the Joint Staff and OSD had undertaken an analysis of the enemy and discovered that the 9% average annual growth in the defense budget between 2000 and 2009 had made the Defense Department the largest source of discretionary spending contributing to the national debt. As such, he intends to focus his full energy and plans on defeating the Defense Department.**

"Our plan is two-fold," he explained. "We intend to ask Congress to increase spending on major defense acquisition programs so that we can defeat the national debt within the DOD budget. We will develop a counterinsurgency operation by employing military veterans who have been released from active duty. Their skills and life experiences will be key to infiltrating and taking out the major state actors who are increasing defense funding and thus the national debt and its threat to America. We expect this to be a long-term contingency operation, possibly running up to 2016 before we see positive results."

Mullen alluded to the "Oil Spot" theory in the execution of this plan. "We intend to attack OSD acquisition first, and take out the key people who are ignoring the spiraling costs and extended schedules of the major defense acquisition programs. We can ignore OSD policy, they're just the propaganda arm of the defense budget. As we hold our position, we'll expand by attacking into the Congressional staffers' strongholds in the Armed Services Committees. That battle will rival Fallujah 2004, I think. It will be bloody. We don't expect to win over the defense industry partners, they're long-term fanatics and well-funded, but we think we can negotiate with them from a position of strength at that time."

More on this new military initiative against the national debt as it continues.

** Following paragraphs are actually creative fiction (Hey, the punch lines just write themselves. Truly)

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

The io9 site has a pretty good list of 25 sci-fi movies that should be on everyone's "must watch" list and a short discussion on why they made the list. I only have a few changes in mind. Not crazy about insisting people watch the ones before 1965 - let's keep it within the same generation. And some of them are a little too new. But it's a pretty good list.

Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)

The Day The Earth Stood Still 1951, dir. Robert Wise)

Forbidden Planet (1956, dir. Fred M. Wilcox)

Planet Of The Apes (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Logan’s Run (1976, dir. Michael Anderson) [my add]

Close Encounters (1977, dir. Stephen Spielberg) [my add]

Star Wars – A New Hope (1977, dir. George Lucas) [my add]

Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott)

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Irvin Kerschner)

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, dir. George Miller)

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982, dir. Nicholas Meyer)

Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott)

E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)

Tron (1982, dir. Steven Lisberger)

Terminator (1984, dir. James Cameron) [my add]

Back To The Future (1985, dir. Robert Zemeckis)

Brazil (1985, dir. Terry Gilliam)

RoboCop (1987, dir. Paul Verhoeven)

Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo) [my add]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, dir. James Cameron)

Ghost In The Shell (1995, dir. Mamoru Oshii)

Twelve Monkeys (1996, dir. Terry Gilliam) [my add]

Gattaca (1997, Andrew Niccol) [my add]

The Fifth Element (1997, Luc Besson) [my add]

The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis)

Equilibrium (2002, dir. Kurt Wimmer) [my add]

Primer (2004, dir. Brad Bird)

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004, dir. Michel Gondry)

Serenity (2005, dir. Josh Whedon) [my add]

Children Of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)

Moon (2009, dir. Duncan Jones)

District 9 (2009, dir. Neill Blomkamp)

Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan)

UPDATE: Don't ever cut and past from a Word 2007 document into a web browser. What a mess. Good suggestions from the comments, "Equilibrium" was a great film, as was "Fifth Element." In an effort to keep this to 25 titles, I'll have to let "Starship Troopers" and "E.T." get honorable mentions. Other films will no doubt join this list.

UPDATE 2: Due to continued beatings on "Galaxy Quest," (Never give up! Never surrender!) I give in and put it on the "honorable mention" list. "Akira" goes in, we do need some foreign films in this list. Gods, I forgot "Serenity"! Out goes "Back to the Future."

Read Fred Kaplan's article on how the US government still isn't developing a regional approach to solving the Afghanistan challenge and how Pakistan isn't really helping.

The Washington Post reveals that the CIA is recommending Yemen as the next objective on the War on Terror. Fortunately, they don't have any WMD programs there - just bad mixes of liquid explosive molded into underwear for suicide bombers. But once again, it's as if we're seeing the former Bush administration in charge of the response. The only tool in the kit seems to be military power. Notably, the CIA wants to move more assets into country.

Proponents of expanding the CIA's role argue that years of flying armed drones over Pakistan have given the agency expertise in identifying targets and delivering pinpoint strikes. The agency's attacks also leave fewer telltale signs.

"You're not going to find bomb parts with USA markings on them," the senior U.S. official said. Even so, the official said, the administration is considering sending CIA drones to the Arabian Peninsula "not because they require the deniability but because they desire the capability."

A senior Yemeni official indicated that the government would not welcome CIA drones. "I don't think we will ever consider it," the official said. "The situation in Yemen is different than in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is still under control."

Introducing a covert CIA capability might also improve the U.S. ability to carry out attacks - perhaps from a U.S. base in Djibouti - if the Yemeni government were to curtail its cooperation. 

So seriously, we're going to bring the techniques from Afghanistan that haven't worked for the past five years, and see if they might work in another Muslim country where the popular opinion of American leadership is already pretty low? Yeah, that's just genius. I'm reminded of  Capt "Redlegs" Terrill in "The Outlaw Josey Wales":

Captain Terrill: "We got ’em now. We’ll get these two first, then we’ll get the others."
Fletcher (startled): "What others? Wales and the kid are the last ones."
Captain Terrill (dismissively): "Nahh. Texas is full of rebels. Lot’s of work to do down in Texas."
Fletcher (sternly): "We get Josey Wales and it ends."
Captain Terrill (grimly and with finality): "Doin’ right ain't got no end."

Really, time for a new approach to combat terrorism that works. Less short-term kinetic focus, more long-term "smart power" please.

Over at the Danger Room, Noah Shactman critically reviews the LA Sheriff's Department plans to use a version of the US military's Active Denial System in its prison system as a form of non-lethal crowd control. The title of his post is "Pain Ray, Rejected by the Military, Ready to Blast L.A. Prisoners." Yeah, that's not leading the readers on at all. I have to take exception with his one statement in particular.

The jail’s energy weapon is a small-scale version of the Active Denial System, the experimental crowd control device that the U.S. military brought to Afghanistan — and then quickly shipped back home, after questions mounted about the wisdom of blasting locals with a beam that momentarily puts them in agony. The pain weapon seemed at odds with the military’s efforts to appear more humane and measured in the eyes of the Afghan populace.

First of all, the military hasn't rejected the ADS, only its operational use in Afghanistan, and that was probably because they haven't ironed out the concept of operations enough to satisfy the nervous policy-makers in Washington DC. Second, using terms like "blasting locals with a beam that momentarily puts them in agony" really isn't a fair statement of the system's actual operation. It's not a firehose with only one setting - maximum force. And the key here really is "momentary." There is no persistent damage, and if the crowd disperses or drops to the ground, the operator can in fact turn the system off. It is, in the end, better than using burning CS powder, capsaicin pepper spray, or Claymore-like TASER systems on a crowd that includes combatants mixed with noncombatants.

Last, let's differentiate between statements about how "population-centric" counterinsurgency policy intends to provide a "more human and measured" focus on the Afghan population and the current record of how US military troops tend to view self-protection options at checkpoints and actual COIN operations. They tend to lead with the lethal force option and gripe when commanders impose overly-restrictive rules of engagement on their activities, because they don't like being shot at. So let's not mislead anyone about appearances and actual practice.

Non-lethal or less-than-lethal weapons have applications in both law enforcement and military operations. In both cases, successful use of such weapons requires detailed training, careful oversight, and focused application in the right circumstances. When that doesn't happen, then we see the news stories about the misuse of non-lethal technology. But there's nothing wrong about trying to use options other than guns, batons, and tear gas to minimize casualties while enforcing order - in the prisons by guards or in urban settings by the military.

It's a good thing that Marine Corps General James Conway is ready to retire from his post as commandant of the Marine Corps. He's obviously uncomfortable with this administration's efforts, as evidenced by many recent, public comments. I admire most Marine Corps general officers, but Conway is really trying to be the exception to the rule. Here he is making the case that our military operations in Afghanistan should remain open-ended and without concern about little things like progress and wasted billions of dollars.

Gen Conway, who just returned from Afghanistan, said he is concerned the date may signal to the Taliban that the US was preparing to wind down the war.

"In some ways we think right now it's probably giving our enemy sustenance. We think that he may be saying to himself, in fact we've intercepted communications that say, 'Hey, we only have to hold out for so long,'" Gen Conway told a Pentagon news conference.

"I honestly think it will be a few years before conditions on the ground are such that turnover will be possible for us," he said of Marines in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

Really, general? You really want to undercut the SecDef and President's public comments on this issue on your way out the door? Bad enough that we have to listen to this crap about "emboldening the enemy by announcing an end-date" again. Funny, we're leaving Iraq after two stated deadlines (one from Bush, one from Obama) and it hasn't fallen apart (yet). Conway really expands the civil-military relationship gap by his refusal to acknowledge the supremacy of political decisions over military affairs. He's certainly not alone in this myopic view that, if the military were only allowed to perform without restrictions, they could wrap things up nicely. But nine years later, with about every existing metric still pointing toward failure, it's hard to believe that things will get better in the next few years if "American will doesn't falter."

And then there's Conway's decision to advocate for the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a system that can definitely be cast as the poster-child for the drastic need for DOD acquisition reform. And we're already aware of Conway's dislike of Teh Gays (to which Peter Feaver says "eh"). If General Conway is so hard-set against the administration's national security policies, then it's way past time that he step down from his four years as commandant of the Marine Corps and take up the private life. Then he can go on Faux News and preach all he wants to that adoring crowd.

A while ago, during a conference at the Army's war college, Prof Andrew Bacevich made a comment that the United States had a greater national security interest in the drug wars south of the border than in Afghanistan. He probably got a lot of criticism for that statement, but was he wrong? I don't think so. This AP article talks about the bullets that are flying over the river into El Paso.

At least eight bullets have been fired into El Paso in the last few weeks from the rising violence in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, one of the world's most dangerous places. And all American police can do is shrug because they cannot legally intervene in a war in another country. The best they can do is warn people to stay inside.

"There's really not a lot you can do right now," El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said. "Those gun battles are breaking out everywhere, and some are breaking out right along the border."

Police say the rounds were not intentionally fired into the U.S. But wildly aimed gunfire has become common in Juarez, a sprawling city of shanty neighborhoods that once boomed with manufacturing plants. It's ground zero in Mexico's relentless drug war.

There is an amusing side to this story (in a twisted kind of way). Of all people, Governor Rick "Let Us Secede From the Union" Perry is losing his cool and is calling for the federales to come save him from the border war. He thinks that there are bombs going off in El Paso (actually not happening). Again, back to the AP article:

And Monday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued a statement demanding more security.

"It's time for Washington to stop the rhetoric and immediately deploy a significant force of personnel and resources to the border to protect our homeland," Perry said.

Katherine Cesinger, a Perry spokeswoman, said the governor believes that more security - in the form of federal agents and even troops - could all but shut down the border to smuggling and help put Mexico's warring cartels out of business.

No, it's not that simple, Gov. Perry. You don't get to bad-mouth the federal government only when it's politically convenient. You don't get to refuse federal stimulus funds and make wild statements about "state rights" and then turtle up when the shots start firing. As governor, you have the ability to move National Guard troops down to the border - go do it. Send some Tea Party militias and Minutemen people, too. Make sure they're well-armed - well, I guess you don't need to do that, they already are. So where are your balls, big man? Are you running a self-sufficient Republic or is Texas actually part of the Union?

Just another example of Republican governors who can't stop running to the federal treasury while badmouthing the current administration's attempts to govern. Same shit, different day.

Homeland Security Watch has a good interview with the man who developed this documentary film. Key to his criticism is this observation:

Why did Gevalt make this movie?  What does he hope it accomplishes?

“My hope is that someone in Washington knows what the point of all this is.  What are we doing here, at the strategic level?  What are we looking for?  What are we supposed to do?  What are we not supposed to do?  It would strike me that the biggest single problem that faces this agency [TSA] is whether or not they are operating as a deterrent or … to interdict.  Are they there to stop [a terrorist] or are they just there to shoe them away and have them go bomb the subway or something?”

The people at TSA I know are as serious about making sure flying is safe as are the whistleblowers and other critics in the movie.

Gevalt acknowledges that, but…

“How much are you willing to spend, how much should the government spend, how much does it make sense to spend in terms of time, employees, money, everything that costs you to build this kind of scarecrow?

There's a recent anecdote in the Philly Inquirer about a woman who was harrassed by a TSA screener. The officer rifled through her wallet, pulled out several checks that she intended to deposit in a bank, and accused her of embezzlement. He then called the police and her husband to tell him that she was probably thinking of emptying out the bank account and leaving him. Hopefully this jackass has been fired and TSA has apologized to this woman, but I don't think TSA thinks that its employees did anything wrong.

It's the fundamental lack of policy analysis, of examining what your agency's goals are and measuring your progress against those goals, and the willingness to admit the need for change that has made DHS and DOD so inefficient and so wasteful in the exercise of national security. They don't want to do the analysis - it's hard to do it right, it's embarrassing to people with vested interests, and Congress would rather continue the facade of acting tough rather than making the necessary incremental corrections.

I'm hard-pressed to say that we are any safer flying today than we were before 9/11. It seems like the same dullards are screening luggage at the security points - they just switched uniforms. It's been two years since I flew last, and with all luck, it may be another year. It's just not worth the hassle.

The FAS Secrecy News notes a few new doctrinal documents coming from the Army that relate to WMD issues. The first is a regulation on the Army's implementation of and compliance with arms control policy (fascinating stuff...). I kid, it is important to understand how the military supports nonproliferation agreements such as the Chemical Weapons Convention and other arms control treaties. The second is a manual on "Site Exploitation Operations," which is more interesting to me from a policy implementation point of view.

Let me briefly explain. Back in the heady days of 2001-2002, the Department of Defense wanted to have intelligence agencies work closely with the military on exploiting sites that might have WMD materials or technology located there. At the least, they might grab some interesting documents or videotapes that would demonstrate the horrible threat of WMD terrorism (and later, Saddam's WMD program). What a surprise, things didn't quite work out that way. The emphasis was on creating these special exploitation units that were top-heavy with WMD specialists instead of intel experts and translators.

This manual appears to have been recrafted to support tactical development of intelligence requirements in support of counterinsurgency operations. Specifically, SE operations are:

• To answer information requirements (usually the commander’s critical information requirements).
• To facilitate subsequent operations (already planned or not yet anticipated).
• To facilitate criminal prosecution by host-nation or international authorities (related to war crimes).

WMD CBRNE facilities are still considered an exploitable site, but so are locations where war crimes are suspected to occur, terrorist training camps, POW locations, R&D facilities, government buildings, government officials' residences, etc etc. It must be a reaction to years of being an occupying power in Iraq and having to be investigators as well as security forces. But there's still the remnants of Chemical Corps concerns in the manual.

Combat in and around sites with hazardous chemicals or materials may expose friendly forces to the unintended release of toxic materials from the site. The danger to friendly forces is dramatically increased if the enemy threatens to release toxic biological or chemical agents or explode a radiological dispersal device. During planning, commanders and staffs consider tactics, techniques, and procedures for offensive combat operations in a CBRNE environment if toxic industrial chemicals or materials are suspected.  

Now we've never seen toxic outbreaks at an sensitive site exploitation mission, but the Chemical Corps has to try to remain relevant somehow. They can dream. Wow, I wish they would stop using the antiterrorist term "CBRNE." It's really not a relevant term in the counter-WMD community.

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The good news is that Defense Secretary Bob Gates is going to save money by shutting down Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in Virginia. The bad news, as the New York Times reports, is that the White House says the money Gates saves will free money that can be “better spent on war fighting.” Egad. That’s like selling off your garage full of vintage sports cars so you can blow the money on booze and hookers. Actually, it’s more like selling the cars plus taking out a loan to finance your booze and hooker habit, because Gates’s thrift measures will result in a net defense spending increase; the 2011 budget will top $700 billion, and that just counts the defense dollars spent by the Pentagon. Throw in the Homeland Security budget and the defense-related items from all the other cabinet departments’ budgets, plus the interest owed on money borrowed to fight our wars and the interest on the accrued interest, and pretty soon, to channel the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, you’re talking real money. That’s not to say that making JFCOM fade away isn’t an overdue measure. A descendant of the once-proud Atlantic Command that fought the Battle of the Atlantic against Hitler’s U-Boat force in World War II, JFCOM (pronounced “jiffcom”) was a boil in dismal need of lancing. JFCOM is America’s premier military-industrial welfare program. JFCOM directly employs 2,800 civilians and active-duty military members, and is supported by over 3,000 contractors. It openly advertises itself as the gateway where prospective defense contractors can climb aboard the cash caisson. The keel of this gravy boat is JFCOM’s “battle laboratory” directorate, a massive conflict-of-interest Ponzi scheme in which retired military defense contractors work hand-in-pocket with soon-to-retire active-duty types who hope to go to work for defense contractors to “test” favored doctrines and weapons systems. The war games get rigged to produce the desired results, appropriation bills are passed, contracts are signed, and the wild blue budget continues to soar. The most notorious of these pre-fabricated battle “experiments” was Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). MC02 purported to simulate a war with one of the powers in the Persian Gulf. Initially, the play-enemy commander, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper, used low-tech, asymmetrical tactics to pull off a David-spanks-Goliath victory by tucking the U.S. Navy in with the fishes. The game gurus didn’t like having their network-centric warfare dogma and shock-and-awe gizmology defeated by a dollop of cunning and a pinch of common sense. So they screeched “What a world!” and halted the game, and cast a spell that re-floated the fleet, and changed the rules so they couldn’t lose. The next year, America unleashed its network-centric shock and awe on Iraq and we’ve been getting our baby-makers stomped by guile and sagacity ever since. According to Gates’s “savings” plan, JFCOM’s responsibilities will be “reassigned.” That shouldn’t be too difficult. We can easily find other places to fritter the money we presently blow on JFCOM. Its annual operating budget of $704 million won’t even finance half a week’s worth of our fire drill in Afghanistan, which in fiscal year 2010 will cost about $105 billion, roughly $287 million per day. In FY 2011, Afghanistan will weigh in at $117 billion. And, of course, JFCOM’s budget barely amounts to one tenth of 1 percent of the aforementioned 2011 defense budget. JFCOM’s civilian and military government employees can’t lose their jobs; they won’t miss a paycheck as they transfer to another unit or agency. And there’s enough gold mother’s milk sloshing around the Commonwealth of Virginia to keep JFCOM’s 3,000 contractors from starving. In 2009, Virginia firms won more than 60,000 government contracts worth over $51 billion, an amount roughly 72 times greater than JFCOM’s entire operating budget and enough to finance almost six months of the Afghanistan war. If you wonder how Gates considers axing JFCOM to be a serious step at reining in the defense budget, keep in mind that he’s been arguing for months that, as the New York Times puts it, “if Congress and the public allow the Pentagon budget to grow by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings within the department’s bureaucracy to reinvest in the military.” That’s the sort of line you’d use to sell encyclopedias door to door in a trailer park. JFCOM’s counterfeit battle lab function can be absorbed by institutions like the U.S. Naval War College, which already runs a jiggered exercise each summer called theGlobal War Game. Here’s the sort of thing that went on at the Global Game during the Cold War: The chief umpire, a member of the faculty, would ask the admiral in charge of the game, who was also the president of the college and hence the umpire’s boss, how many aircraft carriers he thought the U.S. would lose in a war with the Soviets. The admiral would say “two or three.” So the result became three lost carriers if the dice rolled odd and two if the dice rolled even. Hence, the Global War Game “proved” that the U.S. would only lose two or three of its 12 or so aircraft carriers in World War III. We no longer need a battle lab of any kind to figure out how to trap ourselves into inextricable wars of invisible merit. The Long War may have become a permanentcomponent of the American psyche. The warmongery has so desensitized the populace to the realities of war that no one is paying particular attention to urgent notices that Obama’s withdrawal timelines for Iraq and Afghanistan have gone the way of dial-up Internet connections. Club Combat spokesmodels aren’t even bothering to offer coherent arguments why we need to stay in those two sinkholes. In a twitty analysis for the New York Times, Tim Arango says we may not pull out of Iraq “because many American and Iraqi officials deem the American presence to be in each nation’s interest.” The officials he cites are former ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, Gen. Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno, and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, all of whom have a personal stake in continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Arango also references Joe Biden, which journalistically is akin to quoting a stoned parrot and identifying him as a “senior official.” Plus, the cost of the Iraq war has plummeted to a bargain-basement price of $183 million per day, making it cheaper than the Afghanistan conflict. So, by Gates’s fuzzy accounting methods, we can’t afford not to stay in Iraq, huh? Neocon jackanapes Josef Joffe boldly insists that we need to “stay forever” in Afghanistan, even though he baldly confesses the conflict is “indecisive” and “a difficult war of choice” in which our interests are “remote” and “abstract.” But “once we go in,” Joffe insists, “we have to be willing to stay sine die” (i.e., until brown cows give chocolate milk). Sure, it sounds loopy, but throwing good tax dollars after bad on ill-advised high jinks abroad is a core tenet of neoconservative grand strategy. “King David” Petraeus, who has dictated U.S. foreign policy since young Mr. Bush put him in charge of it, told NBC fop David Gregory on Sunday that he won’t seek a “graceful exit” from Afghanistan, which means he won’t seek an exit of any kind from Afghanistan, so staying there forever is a fait accompli (i.e., bend over and try to relax). It’s thanks to the persuasions of Pentarchs* like Joffe and Petraeus that we Americans, who spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, are, of our own volition, engaged with foes who have no defense budget at all in a contest to see who can urinate on a car battery the longest. And we insist on going first! *Pentarchs are the oligarchs of the Pentarchy, that cabal of sandbox generals,bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs,Pavlov’s dogs of war, and other patriotic psychopaths whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed of permanent American security state a reality. Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

How many fingers is commander in chief Obama holding up? He has flushed every one of his promises to wind down our wars all the way to the mess tent, yet he insists that we nod in eager agreement when he tells us he’s keeping them. Like many citizens, I voted for Obama twice. When he won the party nomination from Hillary Clinton, I thought, “Ding! Dong!” When he won the election, I sacrificed a cigar to my Maker in thanks for Him not allowing one of the planet’s most dangerous lunatics to become its most powerful head of state. Then Obama announced he’d keep Uncle Bob Gates and “King David” Petraeus and Michael “Moon” Mullen and the rest of the Pentagon’s Long Warriors on the job and I thought, “Uh oh!” Then he appointed Hillary to become secretary of state and my thoughts began to contain adult language. I made the sound of one hand slapping a forehead when Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno announced in February 2009 (via Petraeus hagiographer and former journalist Tom Ricks) that he wanted to see a U.S. force of “around 30,000 or so” skulking about smartly in Iraq until 2014 or 2015, well beyond the status of forces agreement (SOFA) deadline for all U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Odie’s projected occupation schedule also busted all withdrawal promises either Candidate or President Obama had made, but the White House chose to let Odie’s insubordination go without reprimand. Few people took note of Odie’s open defiance of an international agreement and an order from the top of his chain of command, but that’s almost understandable. You need to construct a timeline to figure out what promise Obama made when, when he changed it, what he changed it to, and which promise he was breaking when he claimed to have kept it. Obama tells us these days that the redeployment of the last “combat brigade” from Iraq fulfills the promise he made while stalking his present office. But what was that promise, exactly? The echo chamber is saying that Candidate Obama promised something to the effect that he’d bring “combat” troops home from Iraq within 16 months. But what he actually said on Oct. 27, 2007, at one of those godawful town hall freak shows was “I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.” (The YouTube video of that speech has been all but purged from the entire Internet for “terms of use violation.” One can’t help but ponder what sort of Orwellian high jinks brought that about.) Somewhere along the firing line, “our troops” became our “combat” troops, then our combat brigades became “training and assistance” brigades and their combat mission went into “re-mission” and morphed into “stability operations.” The next thing you know, our troops will transmogrify into goodwill divas on an extended farewell tour. Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, who made his bones with the neocons when he and Judith Miller helped Dick Cheney pander the Niger-gate hoax, tells us in an Aug. 19 article that “By October 2011, the State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police, a task that will largely be carried out by contractors. With no U.S. soldiers to defuse sectarian tensions in northern Iraq, it will be up to U.S. diplomats in two new $100 million outposts to head off potential confrontations between the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.” The “diplomats of fortune” will no doubt come from whatever Blackwater Inc. happens to be calling itself at the time, and they will almost certainly provide other “stability services,” like “preserving” the aforementioned $100 million outposts and “enabling” Iraqi soldiers on “social services and fact gathering” missions and “ensuring the enhanced cooperation of guests of the government.” But it’s not like the sad sacks from State and their mercenary bodyguards are expected to replace active-duty military troops altogether come January 2012. The U.S. Air Force has long-standing plans to stick around and help Iraqi pilots fly the F-16s we agreed to sell them. I can’t wait to hear Pentarchy* spin physicians explain that it’s okay for the Air Force to be in Iraq after the deadline because Air Force discipline is so lax it isn’t really a military service. That would at least be in line with what the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps have been saying for decades. But expect representatives from the other branches to keep their wild blue Bubbas company in Iraq after the SOFA nods out. Petraeus’s lapdog-of-war Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, tells us via access-poisoned Gordon that now matter how good the State Department turns out to be at running its first war (freaking heh!), it’s important for the U.S. military to maintain a “presence” in Iraq because, um, um, um… because it will encourage Iraq’s generals to stay out of politics. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Crocker is so full of gas he could airlift the Statue of Liberty back to France. Does he honestly expect anyone to believe that there’s a general on the planet who isn’t a politician? Crocker says that if the Iraqis ask us to stay past the December 2011 SOFA deadline, “It is going to be in our strategic interest to be responsive.” The Iraqis are already asking us to stay, one of the most notable among them being Lt. Gen. Babaker Zebari, who became chief of staff of the Iraqi army by virtue of his political skills. Zebari says his forces won’t be ready to defend his country until 2020 at the earliest, even though determining what nation on earth would be bull goose loony enough to invade Iraq after watching the world’s “best-trained, best-equipped” military get its brass handed to it there is beyond the pale of cogent imagining. Crocker had plainly been nipping at the talking-points bottle when Gordon interviewed him. “We need to have strategic patience here,” he said. Strategic patience. That’s quite clever. That’s a crisp one. What won’t those neocon think-tankers dream up next? Operational aplomb? Tactical sangfroid? As I’ve watched the never ending war story unfold over the past 20 months, and cringed every time Obama played slut puppy for the Pentarchs, I’ve sought solace in the reflection that at least Pops McCrackers and Tea-Bag Barbie aren’t in the White House. Alack the day, though. I’ve arrived at the conclusion that we might be better off if Obama had lost the election. Sure, we’d still be stuck in Iraq forever if McCain had won; but we might not be in the same boat in Afghanistan. And yeah, Bob Gates would still be on the job as well as Mullen and Petraeus and Odierno. But Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be secretary of state. And yep, Sarah Palin would be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, but Joe Biden wouldn’t. *Pentarchs are the oligarchs of the Pentarchy, that cabal of sandbox generals,bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs,Pavlov’s dogs of war, and other patriotic psychopaths whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

Least we forget, this is the month when US forces cease their combat role in Iraq and their numbers drop to 50,000. Operation Iraqi Freedom ends in less than two weeks.

"This is a historic mission!" he bellowed, struggling to be heard over the zoom of fighter jets and unmanned drones deployed to watch over the brigade's convoy to Kuwait. "A truly historic end to seven years of war."

The 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, which left Iraq this week, was the final U.S. combat brigade to be pulled out of the country, fulfilling the Obama administration's pledge to end the U.S. combat mission by the end of August. About 50,000 U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, mainly as a training force.

"Operation Iraqi Freedom ends on your watch!" exclaimed Col. John Norris, the head of the brigade.

"Hooah!" the soldiers roared, using an Army battle cry.

But really, does anything change for the 50,000 troops still in theater? The Iraqi government is still fighting internal conflicts over who's in charge. Militias still run the local security. Bombs still go off in Baghdad. At least there will be fewer American targets.

Also see this series of articles in Stars and Stripes. Would you believe there are still ten members of Saddam Hussein's regime on the famous deck of cards who are at large seven years later? Forgot about those guys, didn't you?

Interesting notice on the CIA's home page. Director Leon Panetta is announcing the formation of a Counterproliferation Center within the Agency.

Director Leon E. Panetta has announced the creation of CIA’s Counterproliferation Center (CPC).  This new unit will combine operational and analytic specialists dedicated to combating the spread of dangerous weapons and technology, allowing for even greater collaboration and information sharing on a top intelligence priority.

Building on the success of proven models, such as CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the new organization will incorporate the current Counterproliferation Division of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) and elements of the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation & Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which is part of the Directorate of Intelligence (DI).

Director Panetta said that more DI analysts and NCS officers will work side-by-side in the center, providing “precise, comprehensive” analytical support to operations.  “As our nation continues to confront the threat of weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological,” Director Panetta noted, “we must constantly strive for new ways to work across directorates, combining a diversity of expertise with a range of powerful capabilities to keep our nation safe.  Our greatest achievements as an agency are the product of close collaboration among operations officers, analysts, targeters, technical specialists, and support officers.”

The Counterproliferation Center will be led by an undercover NCS officer, with deputies for operations and analysis.  Director Panetta explained that CPC would take shape over the next several weeks.  “More important than the movement of people or desks, though, are the results we seek:  the strongest, most effective counterproliferation operations and analysis in our Agency’s history,” Director Panetta said.

Yes, indeed. One could hope that such an organization might want to improve its analytical capabilities as to avoid past embarrassing incidents such as this. More to the point, is this just an internal efficiency drill for the CIA's existing capability, and how is it not duplicating the National Counterproliferation Center mission and roles?

A city council meeting in Spokane, Washington, was interrupted by an alarmed employee who found "white powder" in the building's office supply room. Bioprep Watch notes this story: 

Police and firefighters were called to Spokane City Hall after an employee found a white powdery substance in a package of office supplies in the city’s planning department. City employees in the area, including the mayor and city administrator, were told to stay away until the all clear was given.

Others were told to keep working, but the public were asked to leave and kept out of the building, ostensibly to control traffic flow, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Firefighters entered the building in hazmat suits and tested the material, which turned out to be 93 percent cornstarch, Battalion Chief Bob Green of the Spokane Fire Department told the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Cornstarch is often used to prevent envelopes from sticking together. he said.

City spokeswoman Marlene Feist sent out a news release five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin. It stated that the meeting would go on despite the closure. The meeting ended around the same time firefighters gave the all clear, about an hour later.

Could it be that "white powder" scares are becoming so routine that people can, in fact, just ignore them and keep on working? One could only hope this example might be followed by other jurisdictions across the nation. The humorous side of the story is that some of the public are incensed that the city council ejected visitors (in the interests of their safety) and kept on having their meeting. Seems that it's "illegal" to hold closed city council meetings.

Fascinating site that I've just stumbled across. Check out this historical discussion of Australia's World War II chemical warfare depots. The caption for this photo reads:

Royal Australian Air Force Chemical Warfare Armourer ‘sniper’ crew. With 0.303 rifles in hand they are undertaking the disposal operation of 250 lb phosgene bombs at No. 19 Replenishing Centre, Talmoi, Queensland. Phosgene is venting from a bomb middle right and a gas cloud forms. A mustard gas storage shed (also for 250 lb mustard filled bombs) is seen behind the armourers. The phosgene bombs were stored in specially built concrete igloos. One can just be seen to the left of the tree (in the distance). Two armourers (Kevin Garr and Noel Stoneman) were overcome by phosgene, the deadliest of all chemical warfare agents during this operation.

There appears to be a (rather long) book associated with this web site and its topic. Some selections of the book are available to read. May have to see how I can order this one.

Check it out.

Germany: Sweet, just got an Austria, holla!! (13 March 19:38)
Italy likes this

UK: whatever

France: meh...

Hat tip to the War Historian.

The Washington Post remarks upon the increase in women leaders addressing the United States' nuclear weapons program. The Russians are bemused, to say the least. Not used to the idea of collaboration over confrontation.

"We're really at a very critical juncture in the field at large. We've had many more women than we've ever seen," said Jolynn Shoemaker, executive director of the group. "It's particularly visible in this administration."

Current and former officials say the increase is not just due to the Obama administration. Gradually, the women who began taking national security jobs in the military, the diplomatic service, think tanks and other institutions in the 1970s and 1980s are rising to the top.

They include people such as Michele Flournoy, the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy and one of the highest-ranking women in Pentagon history; Letitia A. Long, who recently was named to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; and Laura Holgate, a top nuclear official with the National Security Council.

"We're not overnight successes," said Susan Burk, a 34-year government employee and the top U.S. official at the recent review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Perhaps "we have to work more years to get to these positions."

Importantly, the article notes that nuclear experts are crediting the women at the State Department and Defense Department are not "peace-loving" amateurs but rather are just as tough and work well in teams. Good for us.

Last Thursday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius brought an all-star cast of government leaders in medical research issues together to announce how the department intended to invest $2 billion to improve how the government and private industry developed medical countermeasures for pandemic flu outbreaks. But first, she had to sensationalize the issue so that the reporters would know that this was really serious stuff.

Our greatest responsibility in government is keeping the American people safe, and to uphold that responsibility, we’ve always had a powerful military that can guard against conventional threats. But increasingly, the range of dangers we face is widening to include biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological hazards. Today, we really don’t know where our next public health crisis can come from. It could be a dirty bomb set off in a subway car. It could be a naturally-occurring “super bug” that is resistant to all treatments. It could be a biological weapon we’ve never seen before assembled from the building blocks of life by a terrorist in a lab.

It could be an asteroid the size of Texas or a 350-foot monster come out of the depths of the ocean. Honestly, do we need all this melodrama to justify spending $2 billion on improving how the US government obtains medical countermeasures for public health emergencies? Obviously, we do. We must have no expertise or policy analysts who can calmly and accurately review the past century of how the federal government responds to natural disease outbreaks or the relatively few bioterrorist incidents. But I digress. The point of this conference was to announce how the government would pay pharmaceutical firms to work in a government-owned facility to improve the speed (but maintain the efficacy and safety) of vaccines for pandemic flu outbreaks.

Among other things, the effort would provide $822 million for upgrades to speed up production of pandemic flu vaccine. Another large block, $678 million, would be used to set up at least one private facility that would work under government contract with small companies to manufacture new products, develop new manufacturing processes and help produce vaccines during periods of peak demand.

There are a number of interesting points here, first of all that the government is not proposing to produce the vaccines itself. Under what it calls a "public-private partnership," the government will provide a facility and funding to a private firm (or firms) so that they can produce the vaccines. The government will just "manage" the process and "encourage" the private firm, thus getting around the traditional reluctance of Big Pharma to invest in low profit, high risk research and development of new vaccines. Along with this partnership, the government wants to speed up the FDA's review and processing of new, experimental drugs.

Dr. Tony Fauci (NIAID) was asked what the difference was between this project and how BARDA provides funds to pharmaceutical firms for medical countermeasures under Project BioShield. He trotted out a story that BARDA focuses on helping companies get a specific product through the regulatory system, whereas this new process focuses on investing in the company's viability. Viva la difference. What no one wanted to say was "Project BioShield was a bust, but Congress won't let us disestablish it, despite its repeated failure to develop new medical countermeasures for CBRN terrorism."

In general, I'm not against this proposal. It makes sense for the US government to invest in a vaccine facility and to improve FDA regulatory processes as long as the general public expects the government to protect it from natural-occuring endemic diseases. Big Pharma doesn't want to play, and working with foreign producers is difficult and time-consuming. But we really don't need to hype the message with the "gloom and doom" terrorist aspect. Saving some of the thousands of Americans who die every year from the flu ought to be enough reason. And it should be noted that none of this effort will directly result in any new medical countermeasures for CBRN terrorism.

UPDATE: I did want to add something about the failure of the "invisible hand of the market" and the failure of Big Government to address the policy aspects of public health and its decision to just throw money at the problem, but this post was getting long enough.

James Carafano, high priest of the Cult of EMP Crazy, wants to piggy-back on the latest apocalyptic scare of solar storms to work in his favorite topic, the national missile defense program. It's not a surprise that he links the two subjects to the movie-plot scenario of a high-altitude EMP burst. In both cases, he claims that the American electronic infrastructure would collapse, not merely threatening our way of life but quite possibly dooming our northern neighbor, Canada.

There's nothing we can do to prevent a solar tsunami, but thwarting a nuclear missile attack is well within our capabilities. "Countering the EMP Threat: The Role of Missile Defense," a recent report from the Independent Working Group, offers some practical and readily achievable recommendations and even outlines how we could implement a defense against a short-range seaborne missile attack now.

We could take the danger of ballistic missile EMP attacks off the table by building more robust long-range missile defenses That would require beefing up our domestic ground-based interceptors and dusting off an existing (but currently shelved) plan to put ground-based interceptors in Europe.

Both the U.S.- and European-based interceptors are proven, cost-effective systems that could defend us right now. Yet the Obama administration has opted for a "phased and adaptive approach" -- a strategy that may start to give us useful capabilities around 2020 or so ... if everything goes right.

For the long term, the administration ought to be pushing space-based missile defense, which can provide comprehensive, robust and very cost-effective security against ballistic missile attack.

Yes, we need to resurrect the original "Star Wars" concept - a space-based system that places offensive weapons in the "final frontier." Now ignorant, overly sensationalistic statements from James Carafano are not unusal. It's almost not worth noting his flights of fancy, except that it is necessary to educate those people who might believe his "end of times" speech. It's interesting, to say the least, that he so quickly bad-mouths the Obama administration's European missile defense strategy when it provides immediate coverage with Navy Aegis cruisers and SM-3 missiles (the latter date of 2018 alludes to the land-based system). When does he think a space-based system is going to be deployed? Before 2050? I don't think so.

Carafano deliberately leaves the little details, like the overall cost and effective coverage of a national missile defense system, out of his articles. He knows, as do those serious analysts, that any program that professes to cover the 50 states with missile defense protection would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to establish, construct, and operate. If his concern is truly to protect the electronic infrastructure, then hardening selected critical points of the infrastructure and stockpiling critical equipment such as transformers would be enough.

Carafano would have you believe that, since there are solar storms that cause electronic disruption, we need a missile defense system to prevent "rogue nations" and terrorist groups to do similar damage with megaton nuclear devices detonated hundreds of miles above Kansas. Unfortunately for him, while solar storms do exist, his imagined threat of an EMP nuclear strike does not.

I find it odd that a retired Army colonel doesn't understand (or refuses to accept) the political nuances between having combat brigades in Iraq, conducting offensive operations without the Iraqi government's overview or participation, and having combat soldiers doing what we used to call "operations other than war." Today it's called "stability, security, transition and reconstruction" operations.

Yes, there are still combat troops in Iraq, despite the announcement of the last "combat brigade" leaving that country. What remains is something the US Army calls "Advice and Assistance Brigades" that have a training mission. Oh, that and an undisclosed number of special operations soldiers doing counterterrorism and training missions.

Sure, it's bullshit. With 50,000+ American troops and billions of dollars still being spent every month for operations in Iraq, it's disengenuous to say that "there are no combat troops in Iraq." But it's politics. Really, did you expect otherwise? As long as the Obama administration continues to decrease the military footprint in Iraq downward through 2011, it will be a good thing. Better when we're out completely.

But that's not going to happen soon, because there's still money to be made in Iraq.

But the tiny military presence under the Obama administration’s plan — limited to several dozen to several hundred officers in an embassy office who would help the Iraqis purchase and field new American military equipment — and the civilians’ growing portfolio have led some veteran Iraq hands to suggest that thousands of additional troops will be needed after 2011.
-------
The array of tasks for which American troops are likely to be needed, military experts and some Iraqi officials say, include training Iraqi forces to operate and logistically support new M-1 tanks, artillery and F-16s they intend to acquire from the Americans; protecting Iraq’s airspace until the country can rebuild its air force; and perhaps assisting Iraq’s special operations units in carrying out counterterrorism operations.

I will continue to maintain that modeling and arming the Iraqi military as an American force is a big mistake. I don't think it's good to have Iraq dependent on US sources, and there are no easier ways to give Iran access to our military technology. But hey, it's all part of developing business opportunities for our depressed economy, I guess.

In the constant fear that an American subway could be the next "Aum Shinrikyo" CBRN terrorist event, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is going to gas its Boston subway in an effort to analytically study how gases flow in the oldest subway in the United States. It is widely expected that the air flow in any subway system would quickly disperse gases and particles throughout the system, but it is perhaps unclear how bad the contamination would be. So in come the scientists and the engineers and their fancy, shiny instruments.

Scientists will release the odorless gas and particles in more than 20 stations and subway cars over the next week, “covering the entirety of the underground portion’’ of the train system, the department said.

While gauging the effect of a potential attack is the main priority, the study will also help researchers learn more about the “airflow characteristics’’ of smoke and accidental spills of chemicals and fuels, the department said. In addition, the study will assist in the design of new chemical and biological agent detection systems, according to the statement.

Scientists conducted phase one of the Boston study in December. Teresa Lustig, program manager for the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, said yesterday that the similar study was conducted in the Washington subway in 2007 and 2008.

She said that when scientists release gas and particles on subway cars this week, they will be escorted by Transit Police, who will be able to explain to riders that the experiment is sanctioned by the government and safe.

Surrrre it's safe. Just trust the gov'ment. Nothing wrong with inhaling this nontoxic gas, which they did not mention in the article. Nuttin' to worry about friend, just keep on commuting.  Hat tip to Pat!

BTW, as clarification, I think these tests are great. Good to have hard data against which one can improve models and simulations, improve operating procedures, and develop options. Deploying video cameras with the detectors significantly aids in identifying false positives from real incidents. But it's an expensive option for an unlikely event.

UPDATE: BGG comes to the rescue, finding this article that identifies the gases used in a similar Dec 09 test in the Boston subway as sulfur hexafluoride and perfluorocarbon gas, and sodium fluorescein particles. Thanks, BGG!