Berto Jongman: Swedish Report on Fusion Centres — Lessons Learned with Comment from Robert Steele
PDF 39 Pages: 2013-05-23 Fusion Centres – Lessons Learned_ENG
ROBERT STEELE: Lars Nicander should never have allowed this schoolhouse paper out the door. While it touches on two useful concepts — trust-building takes time, and the “inromation bubble” can be seductively powerful in fostering complacency — as a general statement this report is buried so far up the Cold War anus as to be largely worthless. The author has produced a politically-correct, technically-ignorant, source-oblivious manifesto focused exclusively on a threat that does not exist (terrorism is a tactic, not a threat), and on the largely worthless Cold War bureaucracies desperately trying to maintain their funding while betraying the public trust ever more each day. It appears to have escaped the author that all of the US fusion centers have been total failures, from the Joint Fusion Centers spawned by the Department of Homeland Security, to the National Counter-Terrorism Center. In Europe the divide between the EU and NATO is cataclysmic, and the chemistry terrible, in part because NATO is under the thumb of the Americans and does too many really stupid things, from GLADIO B into the Caucasus to regime change in Libya, a major destabilizing action that has helped the American create a swath fo instability running from the Caucasus down to Mali and Niger.
The truth-teller on this report can be found in its listing of references. We have students at Mercyhurst College, trained by Bob Heibel and Kevin Wheaton, who produce better papers in their sophmore year. Sweden still has come superb contributors to the global dialog on the need to move toward Open Source Everything (OSE) and M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making) — Col Jan-Inge Svensson at the Folke Bernadette Academy stands out, but if this report is typical of Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies of the Swedish National Defence Council, that Center can be closed now, and the funds allocated to something much more worthwhile.
The first principle of asymmetric threat studies is to know yourself. The second principle is to listen to all stakeholders, not just those with “clearances.” The third principle is to think holistically and honestly. None of that is in this report. It joins CIA’s Global Trends 2030 and INSA’s Expectations of Intelligence in the intelligence hall of mediocrity.
See Also:









