Rapid Fire

Posted on 26 April 2011 by SJPONeill

3 cups of tea

Literally a storm in a teacup…I doubt there is anyone who ever published a book than was 100% honest in EVERY way and which did not lean towards one agenda or perspective or another in some way…

Greg Mortenson shot to worldwide fame with the book “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time,” which describes his getting lost in an effort to climb K2, the world’s second-highest peak, being rescued by Pakistanis in the village of Korphe and vowing to return there to build a school for local girls.

Now it appears that it wasn’t quite as he says which is causing a little embarrassment around the traps for those who may have supported his initiatives financially or, like the US DoD, who may have extracted insights from Three Cups of Tea for use in COIN doctrine and TTPs…personally I agree with the headline, if not all of the content, of the Wired article on the subject Does It Matter If The Military’s Fave Do-Gooder Sells Three Cups of Snake Oil? When an organisation like the military moves out of its comfort zone, in this case, of large very structured kinetic military operations like Grandad used to do, it has to cast its net wider for ideas…

Let’s not forget that the COIN effort in Iraq got off to a false start as too many people heralded the false zealots of COIN the Malaya way, the US in particular, picking the wrong time to listen to its vocal but fickle ally from the other side of the Atlantic…it was only the efforts of David Petraeus, David Kilcullen et al who turned the tide towards a COIN strategy that would (and did) work in Iraq, this being encapsulated in the December 2006 version of FM 3-24 CounterInsurgency (don’t knock it unless you have actually read it!!). But, however applicable that FM 3-24 might have been in the Iraq of 2006, it was less applicable to the almost-forgotten Afghan war which had been festering away since March 2003 and which, as a problem, bore little resemblance to Iraq.

So, more power to those who cast the net wide in their attempts to get a better handle on the specific of the Afghan problem…Jim Gant with his One Tribe at a Time paper was one; those promoting Three Cups of Tea were others…and so what if Mortenson streamlined his experiences or even made them up? Are we still so template-ridden from the Fulda Gap that we can not think for ourselves and extract the nuggets from the rough…it’s just slipped my mind but one of the tenets that I referred to often in my work in the late 90s came a from a source that I eventually tracked back to one of Don Pendleton’s The Executioner pulp paperbacks…someone that I was working with at the time was mortified that I might draw real world insights from such a ‘disreputable‘ source but so far as I was, and am, concerned, it is not who the source is that is of prime importance but what it is saying…One area in which this has become very apparent and implemented in SOPs is in the Lessons Learned world where collection teams will endeavour to draw observations, issues and lessons (OIL – yes, it’s still all about OIL!!) from as close to the horses mouth as they can get – the trick, of course, being to avoid the equine’s other end…

On failed states

Got the cue on this article from Michael Yon’s Facebook page…always a good source of links to interesting articles…as well written as it is, I think it’s all semantic smoke and mirrors…three decades ago our biggest threats came from established states like France, the Soviet Empire and Maoist China…once again we need to resist the temptation to slap a template on a nation and use that to determine their level of potential threat or risk or not…as above, we should be able to consider each form or threat and risk on its own merits or or lack of thereof and draw our own conclusions…this sort of pseudo-analytical, ‘Eureka!‘ style of writing really leaves me cold…

Kiwi Gunners

On a positive note, I came across this great written snapshot of a Kiwi gunner’s perspective on Vietnam and the New Zealand of the time, again drawing the cue from someone’s (sorry, can’t remember the source) Facebook page….it’s not that well known that our artillery was in Vietnam well before there was any infantry deployment…and especially topical when one remembers that yesterday was ANZAC Day…

A slow morning over DC…

Posted on 8 April 2011 by SJPONeill

…even the airline pilots were lining up for a spot of noughts and crosses…

This was the view that greeted me when I drew back the curtains this morning….and great intro into what has been quite a painless day…an EKO which allowed me to wander along the river to the Iwo Jima Memorial…

This is only a klick or so from where we have been working and I had thought I might not get time to visit it – the memorial is in a great location in a park not far from the Potomac, lined up pretty much with Lincoln Memorial and the Mall across the river…

We went to a Kiwi work dinner tonight, Flying Fish in Old Alexandria, very nice but typical mega-sized US servings – even the appetiser would have done me for a meal…great beer too…something called Dogfish Head…I’ll try to bring some home but my last experiment with beer in the checked-in luggage was kinda messy at the other end…we drove past Arlington Cemetery on the way to Old Alexandria – if I had realised that it was so close to town I would have pushed on in that direction this afternoon….

This is my third visit to DC and each time I explore a little further and learn a little more…I think I am back here a couple more time this year so am planning on exploring further…hoping for another EKO tomorrow so that I can finish off domestic shopping obligations – already I have stocked up the library with a few books that I had been unable to find back home…and speaking of stocking up, I was unable to resist Heinkel Model’s latest work…

It is the Nautilus as she was envisaged by Jules Verne…I was unaware until the design thread for this version appeared on Paper Modelers that the most common and available version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was not actually the complete novel as crafted by Verne in French…that “…the 23% of text that had been expurgated by the original translator for political, ideological and other reasons…” (a modern translation is available at Black Cat Studios) nor that the design known to most people from the Disney movie bears little resemblance to the Nautilus as described in the book…

Lastly, Dean @ Travels With Shiloh has put me onto a new intel-related tome to review as a possible guide to unraveling intelligence in the contemporary environment…it is a hundred + pages and again I find myself tempted to grab one of these new-fangled e-reader gadgets so that I can read on the move….Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances from the Behavioral and Social Sciences can be found here…I am very interested to see what insights that another discipline might add to the analysis conundrum just as I found Beniot Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets last year…(yes, I will get to finishing my review of this…)

Knowing…

Posted on 31 March 2011 by SJPONeill

…me, knowing you…it’s the best we can do…

Thanks, ABBA….it’s all about knowing when to do something and more importantly sometimes, when not too…

This idea for this post came from observing so many of the comments made in the immediate aftermatch of the February 22 earthquake and that we’re starting to hear again from Japan…it was reinforced again by the Daily Post question last week When is it better to be sorry that safe? As posts go, I’d rate it as less than average – if all you have to do to meet a Daily Post obligation is ask a question, I’d be in like Flynn but I think that any post worth its electrons needs to be a little more substantive than that…

Knowing… in her blog piece Three Times You Have To Speak Nilofer Merchant argues that there are three times (in bold print) when we ought to speak up:

When it will improve the results of the group.

When it gives others permission to speak their truth.

When the costs of silence are too high.

But her key point is hidden away in her summary text “…knowing when to speak is an art, and like any art, requires skill….” Conversely, knowing when to shut the hell up is equally as much a skill that requires practice…

Yeah, whatever, Mike...

A more pertinent observation from a more professional organisation...

Not really picking on Mike Yon this time…it’s just that he happened to launching off when I first started to draft this…what actually got me going on the subject was rather vocal comments from a number of sources regarding the Civil Defence effort in Christchurch in the immediate aftermath of the Feb 22 quake…calling for reviews and investigations and labelling staff as incompetent is simply not productive when responding to the most major natural disaster ever to hit the nation. There is a time for all hands to the pump to just get things done and another for later introspection and review…

In a similar vein, are all those second-guessers and self-appointed experts who, possibly with the best of intentions, promulgate such guff as the discredited Triangle of Life technique to save oneself during an earthquake or those who, like at Pike River, state it would have better to rush into collapsed buildings to try to rescue trapped and injured people. The harsh truth is that there is bugger-all to support such ideas and plenty to prove that they are more likely to hinder than help. Like we say it the doctrine world, it’s all about ‘applying with judgement’ and not just charging in – or applying by rote…thinking thinking thinking….

No doubt there are some major issues appearing in, not just Civil Defence, but most agencies involved in the recovery effort as they adjust from the initial response to the long haul of recovery and clean up…now is the time to start collecting the raw OIL (observations, issues and lessons) across the entire response force to identify what we did that we shouldn’t have done and what we didn’t do that we should have done…it’ll be interesting to see how a government-level lessons learned project might emerge from this…

As you can see this was a post that was started and never quite polished off…I’m still a bit behind the 8 ball on this one as well but completing ‘Knowing’ also meets another WordPress Daily Post challenge – even if it was from last Friday – Go to your drafts folder and finish an old post…I have to say that the Daily/Weekly Post challenges are great motivators to keep up the momentum…I get an idea and launch into a draft but then either get distracted or want to polish just a little bit more before publishing that it never really gets done…as it says in today’s daily challenge, “…Writing is therapeutic…” Yes, it is and although I now have more writing tools, I don’t write as much…ten years ago I had a good half dozen scripts bubbling away, was prolific in a number of online forums and was writing reviews and papers on a range of subjects. Today, the ideas are still there but the delivery mechanism seems to be jammed on ‘Start’ and locked out of ‘Develop’ and ‘Complete’…all I can say is that I’m working on it…

Defence At Work

Posted on 28 February 2011 by SJPONeill

40 Squadron B757 at Christchurch Airport

As at Saturday 26 February 2011, more than 1400 New Zealand Defence Force personnel are now committed to the earthquake response efforts in Christchurch City.

NZ Army personnel and their Singapore Armed Forces counterparts are continuing to provide the 24/7 cordon around the central city, with security patrols also in place in the suburbs of Bexley and Waltham.

Engineers are still producing clean water for the public in the New Brighton area, and are manning a water distribution point in Lyttelton.
Two Environmental Health teams are working with the Ministry of Health, while the catering teams are producing 1900 breakfasts, 2000 lunches and dinners and 350 midnight meals per day.
HMNZS OTAGO, HMNZS PUKAKI and HMNZS CANTERBURY remain in port at Lyttelton.
HMNZS CANTERBURY provided a further 500 meals into the Lyttelton centre last night, and 50 packaged meals for the NZ Fire Service. CANTERBURY will provide one further meal service tonight before she sails to Wellington tomorrow.
Navy personnel are providing security patrols in the Lyttelton town centre.
The Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) has now moved 1542 passengers in and out of Christchurch, and 121,000 tonnes of freight has been facilitated by the RNZAF into Christchurch in the last 24 hours. Many thousands more tonnes of freight from international military aircraft have also been unloaded and moved into the city.

"Hey, you fellas want to swap patrol cars for the night? Ours has got flashing lights..." "Nah, bro, sorry, ours has got a jug and a cooker..."

HMNZS Canterbury in Lyttleton Harbour

Good old Canterbury…despite all the bad things the uninformed said about her, she’s certainly proved her worth this week…at the beginning of the week she was only named for a patch of ground between some lines on a map; at the end of the week, she now carries a name synonymous with the spirit of a people…

Christchurch Earthquake: A Montage Of Footage Set To The National Anthem

Facebook and Twitter strike a blow for democracy…

Posted on 13 February 2011 by SJPONeill

Egyptians celebrate on the streets after Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down from his position

…a title that’s about as catchy as Jay and Silent Bob Do The World…and with about the same level of connection with the real world…Facebook and Twitter did NOT overthrow the President of Egypt, nor were they much more than enablers for communication (until the Egyptian government turned the internet lights out anyway). A population taking to the streets to demand the removal/resignation of a leader is not that common but it’s also not THAT unusual…Anyone who thinks that the ‘power’ of social networks created an unstoppable critical mass is living in LaLaLand (L3) – that the demonstrations continued after the net was switched off is a good combat indicator here.

If the conditions are right and there are some suitably skilled organisers/agitators available, then mass demonstrations are pretty easy to orchestrate…there are plenty of examples of this across history even prior to the invention of the interweb…to focus too much on social networking software is to distract oneself from the more important topics of the networks themselves AND who is manipulating them.

That a Google executive was involved in this right from the start is indicative of some form of leadership, planning and organisation and NOT of the spontaneous mass uprising that many in the media would have us believe this transfer of leadership relied on. I can’t not say transfer of power because it is simply too early to determine where the real power will lie…I also wonder how many remember how Hosni Mubarak came to power and that his strong consistent hand has probably saved Eqypt from the Moslem Brotherhood of Really Bad People Out For Some Headlines and World Peace (or some such group)…noting that and the lack of any sort of succession plan, I wonder how Google defends its ‘Do No Harm’ motto if Egypt continues to unravel (think it’s run it’s course)?

Much as I’d like see see the recent event in Tunisia and Egypt as a triumph for the information militia, I just can’t see any proof that it was…the upside of the information militia for the most part remains collaborative discussion on the like of Small Wars Journal whose discussion board and blog continue to make my brain run marathons; the downside is the like of Michael Yon who continues to just not get it.

Yes, I am miffed (but not that surprised) that he can blatantly claim that he has only ever blocked/banned 14 people from his Facebook page when the number is well above that; and doubly miffed that my name doesn’t appear on the list of those blocked – I learned today that one should only consider oneself banned if one also ‘unlikes’ Mike on FB as well – preschool hairsplitting at its best. I’m not losing sleep over Mike’s antics – following his FB page is like watching a good soap: you keep watching just to see what inanity happens next – but it annoys me that his antics drag others in the information militia down with him…what force would ever want an embed (from anywhere) are reading Mike’s slurs on GEN McCrystal and BGEN Menard last year? Or after considering the damage he has done to the coalition by constantly attacking key members of coalition forces – who needs the Taliban when Mike’s on your side?\

The Yon saga has been laid out in three interesting threads here:

Overview of the Michael Yon Saga PDFs: [Overview of the Michael Yon Saga – Comments Overview of the Michael Yon Saga – Perspectives]

Banned by Yon! [PDF: Banned by Yon – Perspectives ]

Michael Yon Needs Money

I think the guy just needs some perspective in his diet and needs to get over being a 19 year old E-5 and look to what he is really good at (besides pissing people off and mudslinging) and get back to telling the human side of conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, and also offer an alternative perspective to events like Thailand’s recent Red Shirt troubles – when he was there: reporting from afar on Egypt does really cut the mustard…

On the topic of internet shutdowns, Wired has an interesting but pretty light article (PDF: US Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators _ WIRED) on the US’ apparent ability to turn it back on if it so desired – this concept is not really cutting edge. Yes, the delivery mechanisms will have a certain geeky appeal but the concept has its roots in the Voice of America broadcasts over the Iron Curtain and the Allied broadcasts into occupied Europe (you remember, Europe, the last time that everyone else had to come save you) during WW2. In Tom Clancy’s The Bear and The Dragon, Beijing after the US unleashed free (in every sense of the word) braodcasts into Chinese TV and radio systems, spurring a (you guessed it) population uprising.

And there we are back where we started…the good old spontaneous uprising…when it all gets post-mortemed, I am fairly confident that the dead Germans will have played a strong hand in all of it…that is, that the popular interpretation of Clauswitz’ trinity will bear out: there will have been a leadership group, an action arm and, coming a very slow third (like always), ‘the people’, the poor old bloody people…Small Wars Journal has on its blog, a very robust discussion entitled A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy which talks about the role of ‘the people’ and how best to engage them…it was quite satisfying for a while (won’t last) to see some other contributors following my practice of parenthesising ‘the people’ as an indication that the word represent influence and power that doesn’t really exist…

[RDFs: A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Small Wars Journal; A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Comments 2; A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Comments 1]

PS…when I post links to online discussions, it is with the faint hope that one or two readers might be bold enough to contribute their own thoughts to those discussions…Small Wars especially has not pretty impressive street cred in its active community (yeah, I know, they list Mike Yon as a author but no one’s perfect)…I recently read through some of the 65-odd pages of the ‘Introduce Yourself‘ thread and was humbled to see in whose presence I virtually walk…

My fellow Americans…

Posted on 8 February 2011 by SJPONeill

Many great addresses have begun with those words but few more memorable than those spoken on August 11, 1984…My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

The 40th President of the United States

100 years ago today, Mrs Reagan had a baby boy she named Ronald Wilson…who became an actor most remembered for playing with a monkey…and a President who brought an Empire to its knees…The 80s were an interesting time…little leadership had been shown anywhere in the 70s and, really, it looked like the whole planet was going down the gurgler…Iran had toppled, the Russians looked like they were heading in that direction via Afghanistan, the Domino Theory looked like it was alive and well in Southern Africa and the Soviet Bear kept leering at Western Europe…post-Vietnam America, who we most looked to for leadership and support appeared weak and disorganised, apparently bent on returning to the isolationist days of the 30s…

War was a real and present threat…the IRA was in full howl and in 1981 terrorists seized the Iranian Embassy in London; Maggie Thatcher had to sort out Argentina in 1982; in 1983, America faced terrorist in Beirut and destabilisation in Grenada, and Russia thought it was OK to shoot-down civilian airliners; in 1985, it was still OK to use your air force (Navy in this case) to force down another nation’s airliner because you wanted to have a word with a terrorist on board; we all wondered if that nutjob Ghaddafi was going to spin out and take us all with him – and in January 1986, we thought he might have done it when Challenger exploded. It’s odd but my clearest memory of that morning is not of televised debris trails over Florida but of peeling potatoes…I was on Infantry Corps Training at the time and maybe we were in the kitchen at Balmoral Camp – or maybe that was a few months later when the US Navy gave the Libyans so lessons in dissimilar air combat…

But all through those years, there was this calm force that never seemed to get angry or upset but who stayed his course…who stared the Russians down and set the scene for Saddam’s first serious trouncing, who led his nation out of the morass of the 70s (The 70s Show only shows the good stuff) and laid the path for the next two decades…I have no idea who Reagan’s domestic policies were like of how he fared as a leader internally – the he was re-elected in 1984 is probably a clue – but as a world leader, he excelled…

He gets results

I missed the media release but ‘He gets results’ was the title of the email sent to me to let me know…and indeed he does…Martyn Dunne is straight shooter and straight talker who expects the same from those around which, I believe, some may find a tad disconcerting…I first met him when he was a colonel and I was a lowly juniuor officer running projects to develop and introduce new clothing and personal equipment for soldiers in the mid-90s – projects in which he took a personal interest. I always found him very direct and confident in his views but also willing to listen to and discuss (with some vigour!) contrary points of view but not once did I ever know of him abusing any advantage in rank…I was pleased to see him promoted to Brigadier as our senior representative in Peter Cosgrove’s INTERFET headquarters and only 18 months later, attain Major-General as the commander-designate for the new joint headquarters. Here, not only did he have to get a new headquarters up and running while commanding operations from domestic activities through East Timor and Bougaineville to Bosnia and Afghanistan, but also had to merge into a team, three previously-separate environmental commands that had a long history of not working and playing together particularly well…

Three years later, with that task a success, at a point where other generals might be eying up the golf course, he became Comptroller and Chief Executive of the Customs Service, again successfully leading and reinventing that service, for the last six years. And now, when the bach and golf course might be beckoning again, he has accepted another challenge in the diplomatic realm as High Commissioner to Australia…look out, Aussies, there’s a new marshal coming to town…

Something fishy

A couple of littlies

I got this long but interesting article from Dean @ Travels With Shiloh‘s Facebook page a week or so ago (it’s been sitting open in browser ever since as I don’t have a good system of ‘post-it-ing’ interesting links I come across). There are some comments at the end of the article but they are only worth ignoring. The reason this article struck a chord with me is that it is a great article of the sort of things that we never really think to much about until it’s all too late and, in this case, the fish are all gone…

Harking back to one of my frequent soapboxes, that of countering irregular activity, the stripping of non-renewable (well, not quickly) fishing grounds is happening now. As a destabilising activity (I like destabilising better than irregular), the rape of East African fisheries is a direct catalyst for the Somalia pirate problem that is keeping a number of navies off the streets at the moment. In our neck of the woods, we are constantly aware of various nations attempting to curry short-term favour with Pacific Island nations in return for fishing rights, or sometimes, maybe just a blind eye from time to time. Even domestically, it is illegal to list trout on a commercial menu here because it is pretty obvious that this would lead to a gutting of our trouteries in about six months…it’s fine to catch a trout the old-fashioned way and take it to a restuarant to be prepared and most of them, especially in this region, will do a bang-up job of it.

A few years back, we had a doer-upper bach in Purakanui – beautiful spot but really too far away for us to use or even do any work on some rather sadly we let it go…at low tide, most of the inlet would empty out and you could dig up cockles on the sand bar exposed…the legal limit is something like 40 per person but some weekends we could see greedy and unscrupulous restaurateurs come out from Dunedin and plough up the whole bar for cockles – they would bring out babies so as to beef up the limit they could take away i.e. 40 x the number of people in each group regardless of age…the legislation is too weak to cover this abuse…and it’s not hard to see that this one will end in tears as well…

Purakanui - you can stay overnight (via Bookabach) in the red and white cottage in the upper right - highly recommended!

Wry humour

These have also been sitting on my browser for the last few days…

Julian Assange claims success in free release of information…oh…uh-oh…it’s not meant to work like this…not when it’s about me...just goes to show how trivial ever aspect of this issue is…

and how to fail Bombmaking 101…probably way more to this story than Wired knows but these days it almost counts as a War on terror feel-good story…some of the coments are quite revealing too…

Surely not?

Posted on 1 February 2011 by SJPONeill

Just saw this item on Michael Yon’s Facebook page…you can read the actual article on Wired. I have to admit that I find this an excellent source of hints for places to look and issues to consider…

It would be quite scary to think that our intelligence apparatus weren’t being filled by our best and brightest but then there was this bumper sticker I saw…

In all seriousness, if we’re fighting in an environment where information rules, surely it is critical that we resource the mechanisms that process and analyse our information accordingly…?

Reading between the lines in the article, it sounds as though there is quite a bit of tap-dancing and backstepping going on – and that all the checks and balances one would assume at that level weren’t so much no in place but simply weren’t being followed…it’s all a bit difficult…

Ha–bloody – ha

Posted on 12 January 2011 by SJPONeill

Hyena-laughing

It’s been a while since I visited my blogroll but I am making a serious attempt to get back into a proper work routine that balances my blogwork with Air Force projects, domestic ‘honey todos’, and my relationships with Hawkeye UAV and FX Bikes…I’m well into my summer programme which seeks to do as much work from home in order to optimise the longer summer days for honey todos: it’s just a case of getting the balance right…

So, having spent a day on base reviewing draft doctrine and keeping up with ASIC admin, I’m now feet up catching up with UK Masterchef and attempting some concurrent activity blog-surfing…

My first stop was Coming Anarchy…twas a bit of a worry when the first headline I saw was “Invade New Zealand!” but fortunately it’s actually a series of links to some great satirical Aussie piss-takings from a couple of years back – have a look and a laugh!

Speaking of having a laugh, and the reason for this post’s title, was a brief commentary on Julian Assange’s lawyers having a squawk because the same media that he used to publish the latest batch of wiki=leaks is now printing his linked Police record…oh dear…! WHat has Assange wrought the title asks…pretty much exactly what he has sown, I’d say…it seems that his urge for openness doesn’t apply to his own information…it amazes me how self-righteous Assange’s supporters become when their own privacy is challenged as it is now being at the rapid rate by various US government and law enforcement agencies…how dumb are some of these people when they blithely use US-based communications and networks, and then bleat when the US asserts ownership over information on those US-based networks, you know, things like Twitter, Facebook, Paypal, Google, etc, etc, etc…

Also on wikileaks, Chirol asks some long overdue questions about Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the Western world…

Even before Wikileaks, it was abundantly clear that Saudi Arabia is the largest financer of terrorism in the world. The US knows this, and Saudi knows we know. The continue to do to a half-assed job, doing enough to keep us happy but not enough to seriously attack the problem. My question, given that Saudi Arabia is not actually a major oil supplier to the United States (see Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria etc), what is keeping us from really putting the screws to them? Is it because maintaining an uneasy friendship and geting some cooperation is the lesser evil than making them an enemy? That is my reading of the situation. Would serious pressure even make them an enemy or could we still maintain decent relations? The more I think about it, the less I understand the special relationship we have today.

Not new news perhaps, when you get down to it, Osama Bin Laden was their dog and they’ve naff-all to shoot him or any of his rabid takfiri spawn…John Birmingham also makes a similar comment on spinelessness in the Gulf after wikileaks exposed “…Arab governments who’ve been caught out urging an attack on Iran…” He also comments on various leaked discussions regarding China’s true military capability and intentions with a link to a further Australian commentary on this topic…it’s worth a read but possibly only to see how confused Australian strategic thinking has been in the last decade: China has now taken over from the Indonesian bogey-man of the 70s and 80s, justifying Australia’s really quite amazing military expansion of its own…

Wiki…whatever….

Posted on 2 December 2010 by SJPONeill

Julian Assange’s latest exploits from Wikileaks have caused about as much real news as Y2K on 1 January 2000…after all the hype and expectation-massaging, the latest torrent of leaked documents is about as inspiring and memorable as George Lucas’ attempt at a prequel trilogy to the Original Trilogy…I once heard somewhere that the body doesn’t remember pain: it’s not that great at remembering boredom either and hopefully once the ripples in the pond subside, Assange will be marginalised by the growing realisation that he has actually done anything…all the risk was taken by those who actually leaked the quarter of a million documents in question and anyone who believes that one disgruntled PFC who’s just been dumped by his boyfriend can steal such a range of classified documents is living in Lala-land (much, in fact, like those in my previous post…)…

Michael Yon puts it all in perspective on his Facebook Page by linking Assange to other nutjobs….

It is HIGHLY doubtful that the United States government would kill Assange. If Assange is killed, the hit more likely would come from a lone wolf or someone else’s government. The conspiracy theorists might then “prove” that it was a CIA hit ordered by the same people who killed Kennedy, and that we didn’t really land on the moon but we do have a secret moon base. And 9/11 was a Jewish plot…

Never really thought about that before either…that the same people who deny the moon landings are the same ones who think the US/UN World Government has a secret Moonbase…but then again, when I was 10 I was a big fan of Gerry Anderson’s UFO and thought that building a secret Moonbase (complete with chicks with purple hair – the penny relating to the benefits of the short skirts hadn’t really dropped when I was that old) was a. pretty cool and b. pretty simple…

Dean covers it all pretty well in Wikileaks and ‘cablegate’ and I share his desperate plea to stop adding ‘gate’ to everything that has the slightest potential whiff of scandal attached to it…much the same as could we please stop referring to every campaign or initiative as a ‘war’ unless we really mean to fix bayonets, send in the Marines and let Air Combat Command off the leash…

And on ‘wars’, let’s not forget that, rhetoric aside, we’re not really at war at the moment…in at least one…yes, certainly…but ‘at’ war…no, not really: we’re not harnessing all the instruments of national power to quell the adversary and most definitely, we are not acting against those who seek to undermine the ‘war’ effort through accident or deliberate action. And that, boys, girls and family pets, is why people like Assange get away with what they do: because they are not breaking any laws…that their motives and actions are reprehensible is beyond question but even if it can be proved in the World Court (where else would have jurisdiction?) that the wikileaks were directly responsible for deaths in Afghanistan or elsewhere, it is not an offense to publish leaked material – not unless perhaps there is some form of court-ordered suppression order in effect. Even then, with the internet being what it is, it is unlikely that this would be that enforceable or provable…

But that notwithstanding, the lunatic fringe is out there demanding that Assange be arrested, assassinated or otherwise jabbed in the calf by a ricin-loaded umbrella. There’s a good thread at Small Wars Journal that hammers out the why-nots of this issue. In fact, Small Wars seems to be all over this one…WikiLeaks, Round Three provides a comprehensive list of links to various comments and reports on Assange’s latest non-event: note the DoD caveat at the top of the list, two or more wrongs DO NOT make a right:

Department of Defense personnel should not access the WikiLeaks website to view or download publicized classified information nor should they download it from anywhere, regardless of the source. Doing so will introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks. Executive Order 13526 states ‘Classified Information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information.

Digital security problem is bigger than Assange and PFC Manning discusses the likelihood of kneejerk reactions to PFC Manning’s indiscretions (so just how does one PFC access let alone copy 250,000 classified military and diplomatic documents between making coffee, sweeping the floor and being unappreciated?) leading to balkanisation of military and government information systems ( and Dean raises this as well)…might as well since most of them can’t talk to each other anyway, but doing so effectively cedes the public information domain to the other guys – which is probably not the sharpest move we’d want to be making…

And finally a word from our sponsor for the current ‘war’, Secretary Gates, once again courtesy of Michael Yon :

I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think — I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

The sooner we forget about Assange and let him be consumed by his own insignificance, the better…the real problem raised by the unauthorised release of close to half a million classified documents is what are we going to do a. about those who are releasing them in the first place (there can’t be THAT many briefcases and thumb drives left on the train each night)? and b. how do we train and educate their replacements that doing these is the wrong thing to do…?

Like, hello?

Posted on 27 November 2010 by SJPONeill

Is this where some people live?

I noticed an item on the Small Wars Journal blog this morning on my pre-breakfast scan of what’s up on the planet…in it Dr. Christopher Paul comments on an article (also in Foreign Policy) that is strongly critical of the RAND study Victory Has a Thousand Fathers, of which he was the lead author.

Dr Paul would be correct in his comments on the Hoyt/Rovner article except for the minor point that THEY are actually correct in what they say…

I hadn’t read the RAND ‘study’ in question until seeing this item in the SWJ Blog this morning but it is one that would have eventually crossed my desk for review…it’s 187 pages but having just read the summary and introduction, I don’t think it’s going to be a critical read for me anytime soon…

Although it quotes William Rosenau “…insurgency and counterinsurgency. . . have enjoyed a level of military, academic, and journalistic notice unseen since the mid-1960s…”, the authors have not included one single case study from this period that was the heyday of COIN (both as we know it and how others like the USSR and Cuba applied it)…like, hello? By selecting on those campaigns that started after 1978 – you didn’t consider Northern Ireland? Like, hello? – the RAND study only really focuses on a very narrow range of campaigns and even then I’m not convinced that there is much rigour in the selection of campaigns…we all know the COIN campaign in Kosovo, right? and Croatia and Bosnia? Some bad things may have happened in those countries but COIN? Hardly…the COIN campaign in Somalia was concluded in 1991? Papua New Guinea was a COIN loss? By PNG one assumes that the study is referring to Bougainville which is actually a success in that Bougainville is still a part of the nation it sought to break away from and the campaign that was conducted on that island actually addressed the root issues underlying the ‘insurgency’ – actually IAW one of the key COIN trusims…I also note that the use of repression as a strategy is frowned upon when, whether we in the West like it or not, historically (before and after 1978) it is one of the more consistently effective means of keeping a population in line…

I suspect that if I opt to wade through the remaining 161 pages of this ‘study’ (I have to use the term ‘study’ loosely), I will find find more such weak ‘logic’, poor research and inconsistency – and having written this, I find myself resigned to having to read the rest of it…

I wonder to what extent this paper was driven by statements at the COIN Symposium in May where various staff called for a COIN checklist, displaying a fundamental lack of ‘getting it’? While there are some fundamental principles/tenets/truisms for Countering Irregular Activity (COIN is too narrow a term for modern use) that a study like this may have analysed, one of them is that every campaign must be considered on its own merits i.e. there is no checklist in CIA!!

Perhaps, instead of using his position at Foreign Policy to have a self-righteous whiny-nana, Dr Paul might want to reflect on the comments here and in the Rovner/Paul article, and then go back to RAND and redo the job properly this time…

Critical thinking more and more seems to be superseded by a level of superficiality that is quite scary and I wonder if this is due to the economic crisis really putting the acid on academics to publish or really perish…? The really annoying this about products like this RAND ‘study’ is that so much information is freely available for them to do the job properly – the analysis is not that difficult – it’s the application in the contemporary environment that offers up the true challenges and weak superficial work like Victory Has a Thousand Fathers offers nothing to mitigate those challenges…

Later that day…Edit: just used this line in a discussion on this paper on Facebook…pretty well sums up my feelings…

“…I think it’s even worse than that…I simply don’t think they ‘get’ the environment we are operating in now so what they’ve done is pretty much like setting off to study the Third Reich and then limiting themselves to 1946 onwards…”