Reference: The Pentagon Labyrinth

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, DoD, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Historic Contributions, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Media, Military, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Monographs, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

The Pentagon Labyrinth

It is my pleasure to announce the publication of The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It. This is a short pamphlet of less than 150 pages and is available at no cost in E-Book PDF format, as well as in hard copy from links on this page as well as here and here.  Included in the menu below are download links for a wide variety of supplemental/supporting information (much previously unavailable on the web) describing how notions of combat effectiveness relate to the basic building blocks of people, ideas, and hardware/technology; the nature of strategy; and the dysfunctional character of the Pentagon’s decision making procedures and the supporting role of its  accounting shambles.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

This pamphlet aims to help both newcomers and seasoned observers learn how to grapple with the problems of national defense.  Intended for readers who are frustrated with the superficial nature of the debate on national security, this handbook takes advantage of the insights of ten unique professionals, each with decades of experience in the armed services, the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress, the intelligence community, military history, journalism and other disciplines.  The short but provocative essays will help you to:

  • identify the decay – moral, mental and physical – in America’s defenses,
  • understand the various “tribes” that run bureaucratic life in the Pentagon,
  • appreciate what too many defense journalists are not doing, but should,
  • conduct first rate national security oversight instead of second rate theater,
  • separate careerists from ethical professionals in senior military and civilian ranks,
  • learn to critique strategies, distinguishing the useful from the agenda-driven,
  • recognize the pervasive influence of money in defense decision-making,
  • unravel the budget games the Pentagon and Congress love to play,
  • understand how to sort good weapons from bad – and avoid high cost failures, and
  • reform the failed defense procurement system without changing a single law.

The handbook ends with lists of contacts, readings and Web sites carefully selected to facilitate further understanding of the above, and more.

Continue reading “Reference: The Pentagon Labyrinth”

Journal: Pentagon Lies, NYT Sells Out, Obama Fiddles

08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Geospatial, Government, History of Opposition, Intelligence (government), Misinformation & Propaganda, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost
 

Chuck Spinney Sends

Rotting Oder of Pentagon Info Op Signals Effort to Shore Up its Great Game in the Hindu Kush

On 13 June, James Risen of the New York Times conveniently (at least for the Pentagon and the war party) reported that the “United States has discovered $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan [also attached below for your convenience].  I say convenient, because time is running out for the Pentagon in Afghanistan, and this report introduces a ‘new’ reason for occupying Afghanistan.  The timing of this report was noticed very quickly by several skeptical commentators ( e.g., here and here). 

But there is more.  The NYT report has the rotting odor of yet another Pentagon misinformation operation to lather up the masses using the willing offices of the tired old Gray Lady of journalism.  The oder is intense, because Risen’s Pentagon-inspired geological report coincides with the growing disenchantment with Afghan adventure.  And more people are coming to appreciate the disconnect between (1) a spate of credible reports (e.g., here)  describing the lack of progress in Afghanistan, particularly the failure of the showcase Marja COIN strategy to deliver its predicted result and (2) the requirement imposed by President Obama to show progress by the end of this summer.  Bear in mind, Obama’s ‘requirement’ was imposed on the Pentagon when he improved the flawed McChrystal/Petraeus surge plan and sold it to the American people last fall.  The military and spokesmen for the Obama administration began immediately  to back away from the deadline shortly after its inception, and it has already been stretched to coincide with the mid-term elections in November — which goes to show that domestic politics do not end at the water’s edge?

Although the several commentators expressed their justifiable skepticism about the timing of the NYT report, to the best of my knowledge, none have addressed the substance of the mineral estimate.  Shortly after it was published, my good friend and colleague Pierre Sprey, who has been called a vampire because he does his best work in the dark after midnight, got to the heart of the latter question and put the entire story together in an elegantly brief email that he distributed in the dark early hours of 14 June. 

Attached for your reading pleasure is Pierre’s incisive critique:

Pierre Sprey

U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
Pierre Sprey  14 June 2010

The timing of this release of ancient mining news–especially when floated with Petraeus' name plastered all over it in a tried-and-true government propaganda outlet like the N.Y. Times–smells to me like a last ditch attempt to invent an economic justification for hanging on many more years in the hopeless Afghani morass.

Note that the now sacrosanct 1980s Russian mineral survey was “stumbled on” six years ago in 2004 by an American reconstruction team foraging in the Afghan Geological Survey Library. Then, according to the Times' (read Petraeus and DoD) spin, nothing happened until two years later when the U.S. Geological Survey launched a 2006 aerial mineral survey followed by another in 2007, supposedly yielding all-new evidence of astonishing mineral wealth (iron, gold, copper, lithium, supposedly a trillion dollar's worth)  just waiting to be tapped. Supposedly, this astonishing new evidence was then ignored by all until a Pentagon business development task force “rediscovered” the ignored USGS mineral data in 2009.

This spin is quite untrue: in 2005, the Afghan government, quite aware of their mineral resources, opened bidding on copper mining leases in Logar Province, bidding that was won by the Chinese in 2007. As for the reliability of the USGS data, note that they report 1.8 billion tons of potential lithium deposits (lithium is very trendy with the greens these days) but only a puny 111 million tons in proven or probable deposits.
 
But none of this purportedly astonishing USGS aerial survey data has raised much dust in the international mining world, despite the fact that the entire current New York Times scoop was thoroughly covered by Reuters and Mining Exploration News a year ago in April of 2009.

So what turned the ho-hum Reuters news of April, 2009 into a hot Times scoop in June of 2010? Is there any connection with the desperate need of McChrystal, Petraeus and Gates for a life jacket, now that the Afghan surge they floated is sinking so rapidly?

Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

Here it is….

U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan

By JAMES RISEN  New York Times, 13 June 2010

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

And so on….read the full deception.

See Also:

Chapter 20, “21st Century Counterintelligence: Evaluating the Health of the Nation,” especially Dereliction of Duty (Defense); Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression; Emprire as a Cancer including Betrayal & Deceit; Impeacahable Offenses (Modern); Institutionalized  Ineptitude; and Intelligence (Lack Of), all in the online hyperlinked version of INTELLIGENCE for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (pages 179-205, in Part III.

Journal: Correction To Spinney Piece Makes It Stronger

08 Wild Cards
Chuck Spinney Sends

All … Please be advised, a reader from Toronto correctly informed me that I made a serious error of fact in my last piece in Counterpunch, “Obama as Moral Dupe: Will Erdogan Blink?”

I stated that the threat to sink any Gaza aid ship or escorting warship carrying Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was made by Deputy of Staff Uzi Dayan. In fact, Dayan is not the currrent Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, but a former DCS. He is now a member of Likud Party in the Knesset. He is not a member of the Netanyahu government, however.

Therefore, the threat to sink any ship carrying Erdogan was not technically made by the Netanyahu government. However, given the fact that Dayan is a member in good standing of the Israeli generals club; the fact that being Moshe Dayan's nephew, he is a prominent member of the Israeli military aristocracy; and the facts that the Jerusalem Post and Army Radio are known mouthpieces for the Israeli Government, I suspect this threat was an exercise in “strategic ambiguity” to hype tensions in the hope of deterring the Erdogan government, while leaving the door open for the Netanyahu government to distance itself from the remarks, should that become necessary. It is also possible Dayan had domestic political reasons for making this statement. And, of course, he may have been a loose cannon.

Whatever the case, imagine a prominent US senator saying the US must take a military action that could kill the prime minister of a rival country, and the President taking no action to disavow those remarks. I have searched the internet to find a statement disavowing Dayan's comments by the Netanyahu government and found none to date.

I should have included wording to this effect — and paradoxically, I think a correction these lines would have made my argument stronger, because it is more illustrative of the kind of psychology at work in a march to a folly reminiscent of that in 1914.

Also, apropos the question of Erdogan blinking, the Turks do not seem deterred and on the contrary appear to be ratcheting up the pressure, if the following quotes attributed to Turkish President Gul in this Ha'aretz report are accurate.

“On Friday Turkish President Abdullah Gul told the French daily Le Monde that Israel must make amends to be forgiven for a commando assault on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, including apologizing for the attack and paying compensation.

Gul added that if Israel made no move to heal the rift, then Turkey could even decide to break diplomatic relations.

In an interview published on Friday, Gul said the Israeli attack at the end of May, which killed nine activists, was a “crime” which might have been carried out by the likes of al-Qaida rather than a sovereign state.

“It seems impossible to me to forgive or forget, unless there are some initiatives which could change the situation,” Gul was quoted as saying by Le Monde.

Asked what these might be, he said: “Firstly, to ask pardon and to establish some sort of compensation.” He added that he also wanted to see an independent inquiry into the botched raid and a discussion on lifting Israel's blockade of Gaza.”

In my opinion, statements like Dayan's and Gul's illustrate how this crisis could evolve in to a more serious crisis than the Cuban Missile Crisis. I say more serious, because in the Cuban crisis, both sides had militaries armed with nuclear weapons that we now know were controlled by rational civilian leaders, whereas in this crisis is inherently more unstable, because only one side has nuclear weapons, and that side's politics are dominated by the military, its political and military leaders have a belligerent history preemptive wars, and it has a national outlook that is governed by an increasingly disconnected sense of self-righteous victimhood that has, in Henry Siegman's words, lost its moral imagination. An the other side is equally stubborn and it senses it has the moral high ground. And the US is in this up to its neck, because it has tight connections to both sides of the quarrel.

Sorry for any confusion caused by my mistake.
Chuck Spinney

Journal: Dropping COIN–McChrystal Returns to His Roots

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Ethics, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, 27 May 2010

FULL STORY ONLINE

For the past several years Americans have been inundated by reams of journalistic puff pieces extolling the virtues of the new US Counterinsurgency (COIN) Strategy documented by General Petraeus in his much ballyhooed COIN manual — which for the most part was a merely regurgitation of the failed thinking of French Marshal Lyautey's ink spot strategy (that counterinsurgent forces should aim to secure an ever expanding geographic zone of security with each new area secured providing a basis for further spreading, and so on.)
It is becoming clear, however, the showpiece of this new strategy, the Marjah operation, has failed to deliver on the promised security improvements to the people, and in the words of the theater commander, General Stanley McChrystal, has become a “bleeding ulcer.” 
Coupled with the deadlines imposed by President President Obama, when he approved McChrystal's ill-thought out plan last Fall, notwithstanding the cogent misgivings expressed by Ambassador Eikenberry, it is now clear that McChrystal is under mounting pressure to deliver some progress by the end of the year. 

Indeed, hair may be on fire at McChrystal's Bagram headquarters.  Rumors are circulating in military circles of backbiting and finger pointing, as well as complaints that MacChrystal is being set up as a fall guy, while his boss, General Petraeus, skates to a Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Continue reading “Journal: Dropping COIN–McChrystal Returns to His Roots”

Journal: Bound to Fail–The Inevitable Collapse of McChrystal’s Afghan War Plan

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security

The Inevitable Collapse of McChrystal's Afghan War Plan

Bound to Fail

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Nisos Kos, Greece

In the 11 May issue of CounterPunch, apparently based on White House and Pentagon sources, Gareth Porter, one of the most able journalists covering the Afghan debacle, reported that General McChrystal’s war plan is in the early stages of unravelling. To appreciate why this was entirely predictable, consider please, the following:

On January 2, during an interview with Drew Brown of Stars and Stripes, McChrystal described his plan to create an ‘arc of security’ in the most densely populated regions of Southern Afghanistan. The green shaded area in the following map of Afghanistan overlays McChystal’s arc on the distribution of population densities. I constructed it from the information contained in Brown’s interview. As you can see, McChrystal plan opens his biggest military campaign to date by invading a region that has seen many invasions and much fighting during the last two thousand years, including operations by Alexander the Great (also shown on the chart), both of the 19th Century Anglo-Afghan Wars, and the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s.

Original Story at CounterPunch

 

Historically minded tribal cultures, like the Pashtun, have had plenty of time to learn and remember the strengths and weaknesses of this terrain by resisting these invaders using the timeless arts of guerrilla war. Note, for example, the stunning similarity of Alexander the Great’s invasion route in the figure to that of the Soviet’s shown here.

McChrystal’s first move in implementing his pacification strategy was to invade Marjah (which is in the western part of the shaded area) in mid February. The aim of this operation was a variation of Marshall Lyautey’s ink spot theory: namely to clear the Taliban out of Marjah, secure the area, and prevent the return of the Taliban. Success in this operation would set the stage spreading the area of pacification by clearing the Taliban out of the more populated city of Qandahar. And so, moving from west to east along Alexander’s (and the Soviet’s) route, the ink spot would spread to Qandahar in the eastern part of the arc.

Without being critical, I note that neither Porter nor his sources mention the role of Afghan army and police forces in the unravelling of McChrystal’s plan. Porter is certainly aware of these limitations, having written several important reports on this subject. Nevertheless, the implication of the Taliban re-infiltration of the Marjah region is clear: the Afghan security forces in the region are either insufficient or ineffective (or both) to perform their job of protecting the people by permanently cleansing the area of Taliban.

The inability to spread the “ink spot” McChrystal tried to insert with the Marjah offensive has its roots in the central flaw highlighted last September in my critique of McChrystal’s escalation plan, which was submitted to President Obama last summer. This inability also means that US forces will be needed to provide security to the Marjah region, if McChrystal sticks to his strategic aim. This requirement, which would have been easily foreseen, had McChrystal presented Mr. Obama with a straightforward assessment of the very limited capabilities of the Afghan security forces, will now result in our forces being spread out to protect this region, assuming we want to protect the Marjah “ink spot.” The deployment of US pacification troops will probably take the form of an array of strong points and outposts, backed up with quick reaction reinforcements, kept on alert in nearby bases, together with airpower.

If our troops are being deployed this way, they will be unavailable for the upcoming Qandahar offensive. Moreover, they will become vulnerable to being attacked piecemeal in a series of irregular, but frequent hit and run attacks on bases and supply routes. This kind of rope-a-dope strategy will keep our troops on edge and put them under continual mental and physical stress — and they will be vulnerable to being ground down much like the British troops were last summer. The continuing pressure will naturally increase the jumpiness of our soldiers and marines and, if past is prologue, will likely increase their trigger-happiness, including more calls for artillery and air support. More firepower means more civilian deaths in the “pacified” region, and the rising bloodshed will play into the Taliban’s hands by alienating the hearts and minds of local population we claim to be protecting, a process which is already in progress.

This hydra of emerging pressures, which is probably just beginning to be appreciated, is probably why the looming offensive to secure Qandahar that McChrystal was broadcasting in April is now being scaled back in its aims.

Later this summer, as these problems become more apparent and American mid-term elections loom, we can expect to be subjected to a unseemly spectacle finger pointing and a search for scapegoats. In the end, the debacle will be fault of Obama and by extension the Democrat’s, because the President ignored Sun Tzu’s timeless wisdom, when he approved McChrystal’s fatally flawed plan, despite the cabled warnings of retired Army general Karl Eikenberry, his ambassador to Afghanistan.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com