Public Intelligence Blog

I thought the short piece below might help people better analyze and report on the defense spending budget that will be released on Monday, February 13.  As you know, DOD has already released some numbers; however, they are quite incomplete.  They do not even cover all Pentagon spending, let alone all defense-related spending.  Using the Pentagon’s press release on Monday will likely mean missing the more complete picture.  I try to explain below, and I address where you can find a more complete display of the numbers–all of them.

Decoding the Pentagon’s Budget Numbers

Winslow T. Wheeler

This Monday, February 13, the Pentagon will release the details of its fiscal year 2013 budget.  The press, congressional staff and think tank-types go through an annual routine, scrambling to get out their take on the numbers and some selected issues.  Some of these efforts are quite predictable; this year we will surely hear about

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DefDog

Rent-A-General Business Booming

Chris Frates

National Journal, 7 February 2012

Two of the highest-ranking Pentagon officials to leave government in the past year have landed on a lucrative rainmaking board for the federal contracting arm of business-consulting giant Accenture.

Former Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James “Hoss” Cartwright have signed on to provide advice on “the federal market, industry trends, and business strategies” for Accenture’s federal business arm, based in the Washington suburb of Reston, Va.

It’s the latest evidence that the “rent-a-general” business is booming for Pentagon retirees in the post-9/11 decade. Sitting on internal advisory boards for government contractors has become a popular destination for high-level Pentagon retirees, and while it’s perfectly legal it remains controversial.

Phi Beta Iota:  In a properly managed military, not only would be cut the flag officer and senior executive service by half, but by the time they retired, they should not be qualified to serve in the private sector — they should have been focused every waking moment on training, equipping, and organizing national capabilities, and as a general rule should be considered by contractors to be Darth Vaders on fraud, waste, and abuse.  Not today.

See Also:

Winslow Wheeler: US Generals/Admirals Corrupt & Bloated — Panetta Reverses the Token Cuts by Gates

Ralph Peters

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Baluchistan Hearing, February 8, 2012
Testimony of Ralph Peters, military analyst and author

“PAKISTAN AS A FAILING EMPIRE”

2012-02-09 Ralph Peters House Testimony, Baluchistan and Pakistan (8 pages, doc)

Introductory remarks: This testimony arises from three premises.

First, we cannot analyze global events through reassuring ideological lenses, be they left or right, or we will continue to be mistaken, surprised and bewildered by foreign developments. The rest of the world will neither conform to our prejudices nor behave for our convenience.

Second, focusing obsessively on short-term problems blinds us to the root causes and frequent intractability of today’s conflicts.  Because we do not know history, we wave history away.  Yet, the only way to understand the new world disorder is to place current developments in the context of generations and even centuries.  Otherwise, we will continue to blunder through situations in which we deploy to Afghanistan to end Taliban rule, only to find ourselves, a decade later, impatient to negotiate the Taliban’s return to power.

Third, we must not be afraid to “color outside of the lines.”  When it comes to foreign affairs, Washington’s political spectrum is monochromatic: timid, conformist and wrong with breathtaking consistency.  We have a Department of State that refuses to think beyond borders codified at Versailles nine decades ago; a Department of Defense that, faced with messianic and ethnic insurgencies, concocted its doctrine from irrelevant case studies of yesteryear’s Marxist guerrillas; and a think-tank community almost Stalinist in its rigid allegiance to twentieth-century models of how the world should work.

If we do not think innovatively, we will continue to fail ignobly.

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Truth, lies and Afghanistan

How military leaders have let us down

LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

Armed Forces Journal,

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

. . . . . . . .

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

Read full article.

See Also:

Marcus Aurelius: Col Paul Yingling, Departing

Marcus Aurelius

House Armed  Services Committee (HASC)

Impact Assessment

Executive Summary

Impact Assessment

See Also:

Powering Down: A decline in U.S. military might could upend the world order

Phi Beta Iota:  NOBODY is doing fact-based evaluations.  Senator Sam Nunn’s words remain unheeded–there is no credible holistic threat assessment; there is no credible holistic strategy; there is no credible holistic force structure; and there are no credible holistic acquisition plans for actually getting to what should be a 450-ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, A-10′s long overdue for transfer to Army Aviation, and a Marine Corps that stops trying to be expeditionary everything and focuses instead on helping the US Navy create a 450-ship Navy as we have been advocating for over a decade.

See Also:

Search: maritime piracy charts + RECAP

Richard Wright

Integrity? We don’t need no stinkin’integrity!

Precision Munitions Lessen Need for Close Air Support Plane: Schwartz Answers the A-10 Question

PENTAGON: One of the longest-running debates between the Air Force and the Army centers on close air support. Historically, the Air Force hates supplying CAS and doesn’t like buying or maintaining the planes that do it. But the white scarf boys wouldn’t let the Army do the job either, since it involved fixed-wing aircraft and shooting and that’s what the Air Force does.

So when the Air Force announced it was scrapping a large chunk of the current A-10 Warthog fleet and the pilots who go with it — five squadrons worth — the Pentagon’s back channels quickly filled with disgusted comments about how “there goes the Air Force again.” Every time they need to cut money from the budget the first thing they do is cut the A-10s, which have provided superb close air support ever since they started flying in the mid-70s, critics said. Two things make the A-10 especially fine at CAS: its amazing 30mmm cannon which can destroy a tank with ease; and the titanium bucket within which the pilot sits. The armored aircraft provides pilots with great protection, allowing them to be almost cavalier as they operate in dangerously kinetic environments.

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Berto Jongman

The Iran War: Who will decide?

By Amir Oren

Ha’aretz, 5 February 2012

The War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran War. That’s the sequence Defense Minister Ehud Barak laid out at the Herzliya Conference on Thursday in a speech on Israel’s fateful decision.

All for the better, it has been suggested, that behind the wheel as successor to David Ben-Gurion in 1948, Levi Eshkol in 1967 and Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan in 1973 is military leader Barak and his assistant on prime ministerial matters, Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak has been quoted as saying, ignoring the law and the cabinet, that “at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us – the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

The immunity zone that Iran is constantly moving closer towards is meant to limit the possibility of a strike against its fortified and dispersed nuclear infrastructure. The Israeli argument is a global innovation in the theoretical justification for preemptive wars. The intended victim usually strikes preemptively when hostile preparations to act are discovered.

The precedents of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 teach us that the desire for wider security margins made Israel attack while a nuclear capability was still being acquired. Barak’s comments suggest an argument for acting even earlier, at the phase of developing a capability to acquire a capability.

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Syria a Satellite of Iran? Nah….

NIGHTWATCH: Syria, Iran, and the Regional Context

NIGHTWATCH: US Invades Iraq, Creates first Arab Shi’ite State

NIGHTWATCH: Push-Back on US Across AF PK IR SY

Mini-Me: Smoking Gun Documents on Iran From Israel Mossad?

Josh Kilbourn: Dollar Disappearing, US Sidelined on Syria / Iran

Journal: Turkey’s Emerging Grand Strategy

Journal: Turkey Emergent

Journal: The Rise and Rise Further of Turkey (Along with the Collapse of Israel and the NeoCons)

Journal: Stupid Is As Stupid Does–Israel…Again

Journal: Nuclear War Against Iran…Again

Journal: Here’s a Great Idea–Lets Piss Off Turkey

Iran–and the USA–Blew Arab Spring, Both Irreleva

Iran–and the USA–Blew Arab Spring, Both Irrelevant

Chuck Spinney: Israel, Not Iran, is Central Threat in Middle East

Chuck Spinney: Middle East New Geopolitical Map

Chuck Spinney: Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis Reinstated

Chuck Spinney: Should We Fear Nuclear Iran or Nuclear Israel?

23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..

Phi Beta Iota:  Does not include relevant book reviews.

Somalia: For the record. India, China and Japan have begun coordinated naval patrols off the Horn of Africa with the assistance of counter-piracy mechanism Shared Awareness and Deconfliction (SHADE), Indian navy sources said. This is the first time that these three have coordinated in this fashion, though all have been engaged in anti-piracy operations for several years.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  The old US model, of a very expensive and now unsustainable “forward presence” including over 1000 “locations” outside the USA, all prime targets for asymmetric attack, can be contrasted with the new Chinese model, of coordination, using shared information as the “loose glue” for building trust.  The US has refused to entertain these notions since they began in force from 1988.  The U.S. military is not thinking seriously about the future — for example, Hawaii as an autonomous state (if not a free Republic) that evicts all US forces as part of an internationalization and conversion to a Pacific “neutral” zone such as China has been thinking about for at least fifty years.  Boneheads will label this idea insane.  The more intelligent will plan for it.  Put bluntly, the US Navy does not have a clue how to be influential in a sustainable (cost effective) manner in the Pacific or anywhere else, absent big bases, hundreds of billions, and tolerance for zero strategic smarts.

See Also:

NIGHTWATCH: China Leads Multinational Intelligence and Operations Initiative within Mekong River Basin

US Intelligence & Policy on China & Pakistan Lack Consistency & Common Sense (i.e. Integrity)

NIGHTWATCH Extract: China-Iran Rail + China ReCap

NIGHTWATCH Extracts: China-Fiji, China Carriers, Venezuela-Colombia Re-Set

John Robb

Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die

Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.

However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).

What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.

Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don’t require many people to deploy/operate, don’t put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.

The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can’t.
What does this mean?

It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.

Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).

Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

If they don’t do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).

With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less thanWhat can we look forward to?

The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?

Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx.

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Oh joy.

See Also:

Is There a Defense Against Drones?

Chuck Spinney: Real Cost vs Real Value of Drones? + RECAP

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP

John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

Marcus Aurelius: US Navy Hypes Water Drone Threat

Mini-Me: Assassination – Made in America – At What Cost? Impeachable Treason.