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Total War-Lite

In case you ever wondered what really made the world go round but were afraid to ask.

Victory gardens are thing of the past, as are other efforts the government used to use to help bolster support for war efforts. Back in the day you needed that kind of commitment when waging total war. Today, the economy is up, black-out shades are out of fashion, and we can wage war without dragging people kicking and screaming into the ranks. It is no surprise then that we are asking almost nothing of the general populace. To be honest with you I think that has to change. If we are not fighting total war, then we are phoning it in. Some thoughts . . .

When raising money for the war effort in the 40s, war bond drives featured uniformed entertainers (often already popular entertainers who went into uniform) and recently returned or temporarily seconded veterans of note. I don’t advocate pitching the populace for their spare change, but I don’t see the harm in arranging for the public appearance of willing returning vets to local audiences. Let them speak (that they’ll be frank is a given) about what is really going on – the positive without Pentagon spin, and the negative without MSM hype – to those whose hearts and minds we’ve largely forgotten about winning: those at home.

If we are indeed in a war, we ought to spend like it. This is particularly true of our elected “leadership.” It is easy to bring home the pork when you attach it into an andouille-filled defense spending bill. If you want to quell the screams from the electorate try this tack: Explain to your constituents that they’re not getting their annual serving of bacon because you are buying more armor for HMMWVs or body armor for the local Guard unit. You’re not going to let them starve; you’re just not going to give them heart disease. Better yet: Repeal the 17^th Amendment.

Propaganda is a neutral term that often is given negative connotations. We’re supposed to be able to rely on broadcast and cable news to do the informing but by and large they’ve defaulted to communicating a certain message. It says something that both my local cable provider and every satellite TV company offers up the NASA Channel (all gantries, all the time) but I can’t get the Pentagon Channel (even though AFRTS offers it up to any carrier that wants it). Granted, AFRTS programming isn’t the most compelling TV around, however it does provide the GI-side of things (since they don’t run news reels anymore).

Enough with rotations already. You go home when you win or you are too badly wounded or you are dead. No matter how much Iraqi sand I’ve had in my cracks and creases there are those who will yell, “Easy for you to say, REMF.” Fine, but remember that grandpa left home and hearth – and the War Department sent him off - knowing that fighting till victory was the only option. When you know when you can go home, and when planners/leadership know they can spread the pain around, it reduces the incentive to go all the way.

Long nights, impossible odds . . .

None of this makes any sense to me. I’ve never been a blue collar guy (does bagging groceries as a kid count?), nor am I an expert in management-labor relations, so perhaps my view of the sanity of unions in a government agency is a little skewed. Watching the local horror that is the NWA strike only helps confirm my belief that unions have outlived their usefulness (explain to me how a strategy that drives your membership to the unemployment lines is beneficial to workers).

For the sake of decades-past fears of steamfitters and plumbers (Watch out! That seven day work week is just around the corner!) we hamstring the ability to get the right people where they need to be when they need to be there, and pay the best performers (age and tenure immaterial) what they are worth. So while we’ve managed to keep the electricians happy, the hemorrhaging of future heavy thinkers in the defense and security communities continues unabated. Nice.

As someone who will be making appointments with both a plumber and electrician in the near future let me state for the record that I have nothing but mad love and props to my peeps in the trades . . . but this isn’t the 30s.

A Lesson from the Coasties

The best military bar on Oahu? The Coast Guard club at Barbers Point. I long suspected that they could afford to charge only $2.00 (‘early 90s prices) for import bottled beer because it all “fell off a tanker.” But I digress . . .

Distorted press reporting today points out that the Coasties had issues with the DP World deal. “Intelligence Gaps” say the headlines in most papers, though buried in the text is the fact that eventually enough cork was found to help assuage fears related to plugging said gaps.

The bigger point to take away? Some of your clearest or more original thinking on a topic is going to come from a quarter you least expect. Just as no one thinks of them as a military service (it is but it isn’t) that doesn’t stop them from firing shots in anger here and overseas. One of my best friends is a PJ, but I also keep in mind that it was coasties that pulled pararescue jumpers from the “perfect storm.” Working at a certain level in the IC you tend to discount (unintentionally or not) the work of others who are farther away from the First Consumer. Your ignorance is usually exposed publicly in some inter-agency meeting, or if you are lucky privately as you read one of the best briefings on subject X that you’ve ever seen by someone you’ve never heard of.

The more complicated things get, the more you realize that you’re not all that. Something to keep in mind as we build memberships, expand contacts, and otherwise try to figure out how to best make sense of this crazy world.

UK Style

MI5 has their Able Danger moment:

MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism.

To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more top secret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the “missed intelligence” leading up to the July attacks in London.

Welcome to our nightmare.

Drawing from a deeper pool

If I remember right, somewhere deep in the IC reform legislation was a provision for the creation of an “Intelligence Reserve” . . . Sec 1053 of S.2845 to be exact. I thought of this as I read this latest item from Inside the Army (subscription):

In his latest challenge to Pentagon policy, the chief of the Army Reserve is crafting a plan to regain control over civil affairs and psychological operations specialists who currently reside in U.S. Special Operations Command, and he is proposing a new way to train them.

Lt. Gen. James Helmly was in the spotlight in early 2005, when he called attention to the level of strain facing the Reserve because of deployments in Iraq — one that his volunteer force still faces, he told Inside the Army in a Feb. 17 interview at the Association of the U.S. Army conference here. […]

Civil affairs and psychological operations lend themselves to the Reserve, an inactive-duty force, Helmly said. “It relies on civilian acquired skills — not military unique skills. It’s civilian skills practiced in a military environment, and so it is a capability [that] needs to be stronger for this century in an age of stability and reconstruction operations than perhaps the last century,” he said. […]

In addition, he wants to establish a training program for those soldiers modeled on training-with-industry efforts used by senior leaders in logistics, management and acquisition.

This is probably one of the better ideas I’ve heard of in a long time. How many of us have heard the “we’re not funding conferences” or “you can only take in-house, no-cost training” speech round-about the June timeframe? Reading industry periodicals is nice, but there is no substitute for participating in practical exercises or actually doing the job. This is less a factor for those who come into the intel field with 20 years of soldiering under their belts, but experts in combat arms tactics are a dime a dozen. What is the going rate for a SCADA pro (or someone who actually speaks and understands Arabic issues) and could Uncle Sam even afford to pay him?

Cycling current IC staff into short-term ‘shadow’ positions in high-demand fields is probably the more do-able course of action. The clearance backlog issue alone is enough to scuttle plans for rotating industry pros into temp assignments in the government; though that would be less of an issue for ex-IC types who have left for industry (real industry, not contracting). It would also be less of an issue for efforts like the DP World deal, where access to classified data wouldn’t necessarily impede the ability to determine the threat. Tapping such expertise on a regular basis would probably be difficult unless IC reservists could also “drill” on a regular basis at joint reserve intel centers or were called upon in response to (or parallel with) the construction of applicable NIEs (regular Team Bs).

The demand for such a capability is obvious to everyone who realizes that all the answers are not available from classified sources, so the real question is, “Would anyone respond?” The flood of resumes to IC agencies post 9/11 (the highly motivated dentist was my favorite) is a good indicator. Only a small fraction of those people have ever crossed the threshold of an IC agency, but one not look very far to find people who are still motivated to do something for the cause. Costs? Based on my own unscientific survey most would happily sign up for mileage and per diem.

The biggest challenge? Some SES somewhere is going to wonder out loud, “How do we keep them down on the farm when they realize the kind of money they can make on the outside?” That discussion, thankfully, is beyond the scope of this entry.

Diminishing Returns

I am reminded of some old Army training . . . or was it Computer Science . . . Hmmm. Anyway, the thrust of the lesson was a little math that helped determine how many cooks one needed to make broth (figuratively speaking), but not spoil it. The vigilant Ms. Gorman drives the point home in this scoop:

Two technology programs at the heart of the National Security Agency’s drive to combat 21st-century threats are stumbling badly, hampering the agency’s ability to fight terrorism and other emerging threats, current and former government officials say.

One is Cryptologic Mission Management, a computer software program with an estimated cost of $300 million that was designed to help the NSA track the implementation of new projects but is so flawed that the agency is trying to pull the plug. The other, code-named Groundbreaker, is a multibillion-dollar computer systems upgrade that frequently gets its wires crossed.

Intelligence experts told The Sun that as a result of these failures, agency computers have trouble talking to each other and frequently crash, key bits of data are sometimes lost, and vital intelligence can be overlooked - all as the agency aggressively argues for broader surveillance power under the president’s warrantless wiretapping program.

Moreover, there are no agency-wide controls to make sure effective fixes are put in place, and, with the demise of the mission management program, none will be in place anytime soon.

There is no doubt that the work going on there is complex, but there is also no denying that such complexity, and the massive number of cooks, is producing some truly inedible dishes. Things were a show 15 years ago and by all public accounts they’ve gotten worse. Given the value of SIGINT it is clear that something must be done.

Downsizing isn’t necessarily the answer because that just means more contracts and more recycled (blue-to-green badge) contractors. Being ground-broken once is plenty.

Then again, maybe breaking things up is the answer. Wholly-owned subsidiaries divided along functional and regional lines would allow for more focus on core missions and make overhead a lot more manageable.

Any other bright ideas?

Taking Politics out of Intelligence

(Update below)

It comes as no surprise to some that elements within our intelligence services play politics. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that has come to a head in the aftermath of the war in Iraq. Now that we have acknowledged the 800 lb gorilla, what in the world should we do about it? Should we do anything?

Just because one works in the intelligence community does not mean that one surrenders any rights (though some – like free speech – come with caveats). People are going to have political opinions and vote the way they want; but the ballot box, not the country desk, is where political intrigues should stay.

Placing restrictions on the political activities of intelligence officers is neither a radical or draconian idea. In the financial and legal worlds “Chinese Walls” are erected to help prevent conflicts of interest. Members of the military are restricted from running in partisan elections. This latter restriction grows out concerns over a coup d’etat, but while most in the military may lean right, one need only look at the recent slate of veterans who have decided to run for state and national office as Democrats to realize that the military is not homogeneous politically. So concerned are we over a military overthrow that we’ve completely disregarded the political machinations of those who have a hand in sending soldiers to war.

What follows are some suggestions on ways we might reduce the amount of potential political influence in our intelligence services. The goal here is not the abrogation of any rights, but prudent steps to reduce the opportunities to overtly or covertly politicize intelligence.

Term Limits: Restrict the tenure of intelligence community staff above the grade of GS-14 to five years (you can come back after a five year hiatus if you want). This would apply to collectors in staff and management positions, analysts, as well as managers and executives. Officers come into their own at grade 12 or 13 and don’t start to have serious influence on missions until they get promoted beyond that. Five years is enough time to put hard earned expertise to use in a leadership position, but not enough time to fully instill the feeling that permeates so many “lifers”: that they ARE the mission, they know best, and they’ll be damned if any politician is going to tell them how to save the world.

Restrictions on Political Affiliation & Support: For the duration of one’s service in the community, you are prohibited from belonging to any political party or action committee, or donating time, money, or other resources to same. You are welcome to have your political opinions you are just required to voice that opinion at the ballot box, not in your written products.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: No political discussions, stickers, posters, buttons or other items in the office. No one is saying you can’t root for one side or the other you just have to do it on your own time.

Curtail Congressional Liaison: Keep the various agency Congressional liaison offices open, but as facilitators of meetings, not gatekeepers of information. Leave officers and members to meet alone and as they like to discuss what they will without the presence of a mother hen. Members deserve frank and direct - not “approved” – information.

The Four-Man Rule: Any meeting with a member of the House or Senate must be done with a fellow officer and in tandem with a member of the other party on the same committee. If you are raising a real national security concern, it is something that deserves attention from both sides of the aisle. It is harder to plot an intelligence-driven political coup if the opposition is sitting right in front of you. If you are blowing a whistle, having support from both camps can only help. If your views are valid you should have no problem finding an internal ally.

These are a starting point and certainly not all-inclusive. Additional carrots and sticks are also necessary, such as real protection for legitimate whistle-blowers and serious punishments for those who meet with members in parking garages and send signals to each other via the placement of potted plants.

Running football betting pools or selling Girl Scout cookies are all prohibited activities in federal offices, but that doesn’t stop them from taking place. It is not that the rules are meant to be ignored – they address real concerns - but they are best enforced when things get out of hand. Any rules meant to address political influence in the intelligence community will be treated in a similar fashion, because one way or another people will make their political disposition known. What we need is a hammer that can be dropped on those that cross the line between having political feelings and taking political action.

Update: Colleagues at Kent’s Imperative weigh in.  Clearly a complicated issue that no laundry list will solve completely. Keeping things above-board meeting/action-wise only takes care of the obvious and stupid. It is a nice exercise though, eh?

Superficial

Roll the clock back to the late fall of 2001 and remember all the kooky, crazy schemes that everyone knew al-Qaida was getting ready to unleash; bulk purchases of personal electronics, shady characters trying to learn crop dusting, swarthy men talking about weddings while standing outside of skyscrapers . . . we’ve got to do something man, or we’re all doomed!!!

That’s the danger of dealing with people who know a lot about a little bit. They’re not bad people and they’re certainly very smart in their wheel-house, but g-d they’re annoying when they start thinking with half their brains and all their hearts.

Such it is with the DP World story. Real experts on slivers of the deal discount valid and mitigating factors outside their areas of expertise, while “experts” tell us that they just know that this all stinks to high heaven because Dubai is full of swarthy men and the country has a spotty record. Newsflash: Everyone helping us has a spotty record.

To an extent this is all unavoidable because we’re talking about DC, and if an insufficient amount of scandal-fodder isn’t available, actual governing might have to take place. So much easier to burn daylight in front of a camera railing about one half-baked theory or another while pretending to know what the heck you are talking about.

What is needed here is recognition of the realities of; the globalized world (including tax and financial issues that foreign firms don’t have), the complicated matrix that is homeland security, and the amazingly brief and superficial amount of attention paid to all aspects of same. 30-day CFIUS review? Knickerbocker, please.

People in the business often stand in awe of external thinkers of big thoughts because let’s face it: That’s their job. They’re not filling out travel vouchers or going to sensitivity training, doing their work AND the work of their less-capable colleagues, spending half the work day in traffic trying to get to/back from an inter-agency meeting, or interrupting their trains of thought with whatever new bean-counting exercise the appointee-of-the-month has decided to foist upon the masses.

How many Barnett-caliber thoughts could an internal analyst with a few months peace and quite churn out? That’s hard to say because as things are configured now it’ll never happen. No one thinks to cut out or at least reduce the administrivia that consumes so much valuable daylight. Jean Larteguy should have written about the IC, not the army.

So here we stand: Listening to the ill-informed trying to educate the clueless about the complex. Intelligence failure or “intelligence” failure? I wonder . . .

Shocker!

No kidding?

The nail that sticks up . . .

. . . gets the hammer:

In the late 90s Julie Sirrs, late of DIA, traveled to Afghanistan to put eyes on the goings on. She found out first hand what the Taliban and al-Qaida were all about and even managed a meet with the Lion of the Panjshir. For sounding off against the commonly accepted wisdom, as well as ill-informed policy, she got ‘the business’ and was forced out of the business.

In the words of Sen. Pat Roberts . . . “(Kie) Fallis tracked Al Qaida for a year, linked them to Iranian intelligence and terrorist cells. In January of 2000, he predicted two or three major attacks against the United States. [. . .] He attempted in vain — in vain, to convince his superiors to issue a threat warning in August of 2000. His warnings were considered — I think they were called anomalies, not connections. And we now know different.” For his troubles Fallis also went through the door.

Able Danger . . . nuff said.

Today we learn that former Deputy Undersecretary for Defense John Shaw reported that Russia helped move Iraq’s WMDs to Syria and Lebannon. For doing the right thing he and his allied pals also got ‘the business.’ You can’t exactly give DUSDs the bums rush, but you can try to PNG their allied friends.

The common theme that runs through these examples? The response from those with the responsibility to explore these “anomalies” is to announce with great fanfare their dismay that someone is acting outside their lane or beyond the scope of their authority. In light of a long string of both policy and intelligence failures would not the proper response be to dedicate resources to confirm or debunk the oddity? Let’s face it: How many people do you need to have on hand to steer missions that are on auto-pilot?

This kind of behavior is shameful in that those who perpetuate it are forgetting that the goal is the acquisition and dissemination of “the” answer, not “your” answer. It would be nice if they were to keep in mind that the next batch of innocents that are targeted for death (and their future widows and orphans) don’t care whose logo is in the warning.

The real shame in this kind of behavior is that it cultivates a culture of mental bovines. Why bother reading, researching, stretching or imagining when in the end you are just going to have you’re a$$ handed to you? You see the effect already, with the demand for producing “evidence” in assessments or the production of lists of quadruple-sourced “facts”. The cobbling together of only certain types of trusted data for regurgitation in a narrative format is the work of trained monkeys, not skilled analysts. It is a sure-fire way to ensure that – in the words of a wise and wizened colleague who would point dismissively at the screen of his classified workstation – “you can’t trust that stuff.”

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