18 December 2011 –

Expanding on my 15 December entry: we must fight a war against radical, jihadist Islam’s proponents. We must build a better grand strategy, one that would use our military instrument of national power, in close conjunction with our economic, internal political, and external diplomatic instruments, to defeat those who would attack U.S. territory and interests and try to subvert our constitutional form of government. We must win this war and keep our country safe from such threats. Unlike so many of the conflicts we have entered in the last several decades, this conflict does pose a major threat to U.S. security. This war should not be captured in soundbites like “expanding democracy,” or “pursuing important U.S. interests.” The soundbites should reflect danger to U.S. streets, malls, and homes and to U.S. sovereignty.

That said, our nation has increasingly capable weapons and intelligence collection equipment with which to prosecute this or any war. We have killed Al Qaeda operatives and leaders using the heat, ballast, and frag of standard explosives; but, those explosives were delivered on incredibly accurate missiles fired from drones flown by pilots sitting as far as satellite communications and the curvature of the earth will allow them to be from the actual battlefield. The main reason we are using more drones to prosecute the war against jihadist terrorists now than we did in 2008, is because we finally have more of them. Four years ago, we didn’t have all that many, probably less than one hundred in the inventory. Now, we have hundreds, and they are deployed on a well-established logistics network. I applaud the President’s policies to use such appropriate and available weaponry to send our enemies to Hell with alacrity. He is reaping the benefits of decisions made by his predecessor to build and deploy these sophisticated weapons in the numbers we have now. Thank you, Presidents Bush and Obama.

The same is true for the intelligence collection, collation, analysis, and subsequent decision-making that prepare the battlefield for the killers. Without such capability, we might as well go back to fighting each other with swords and pikes when our armies happen to stumble upon each other. For some time, it has been a truism that if a target creates heat, moves, talks, or emits electrons in any way, we can eventually pinpoint it so that the heat, blast, and frag guys can do their job. Never in the history of world has a country had such incredible weapons and the Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) to use them with. This generation of video game players may never appreciate how far the art of intelligence preparation of the battlefield and warfare has progressed in one generation.

The enemy also uses the new technology and concepts as well as anybody. They may not have the same weapons, but they do have extensive intelligence collection networks and use the world-wide net of instantaneous data and communication processing and transfer to be credible and lethal opponents in this new age of warfare. They often control the initiative and tempo of the conflict, making our C3I effort a difficult one. It is indeed a game of spy vs spy with rules for us and few rules for them.

We can win this war because, if we properly prosecute the war, the initiative and tempo will switch to our control, just as it did when we mobilized for hot and cold wars against totalitarian movements of the 20^th century. The the lonely roads in Yemen and the caves of Afghanistan are only the obvious battlefield. We must strike the more decisive blows in the economic boardrooms and laboratories of western businesses and entrepreneurs. From such politically friendly sources, economically viable replacements for oil and natural gas can emerge. Their use will wither the Islamic economic base of South Asia, the Middle East, and the Maghreb that fuels the jihadists’ engines. Can we do this? Yes, we can. But, it will require that U.S. government stop addicting businesses on the subsidies of economically unviable “green” energy and let them pursue the real economic bonanza: increased energy production in the United States and North America and the eventual replacement of oil and natural gas with another equally friendly source. Unless we create and vigorously pursue a legitimate national strategy that includes the effective use of all our instruments of national power, our victories will be tactical only, and the control of the timing and tempo of the war will continue to reside with the flexible, stateless, ideologically driven enemy.

Since we have not chosen to isolate and defang our enemies economically and diplomatically, people from all political camps lament loudly our tactical failures and try to find other ways for us to be decisive without changing our faulty strategy. With this limited thinking, some on the right say that it is difficult to isolate our jihadist enemies and destroy them militarily because our hands are tied by our not looking at the entire world, including the United States, as a theater of war. Some on the left are limited by their fixation on eliminating the use of military mechanisms to execute “due process” in capturing or killing the bad guys and aggressively look for ways to take the entire process out of military hands and to handle it as a domestic, criminal matter, under civilian court systems. Ouch! Without a clear strategy, everybody is swinging in the dark.

One danger here is that as the French would say it, les extremes se touchent. The extreme ends of the political spectrum are curving around to join on a single, bad solution: regular use by state and local police agencies of advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology within the United States. The right would be placated because this world-wide war could be prosecuted everywhere, with information collected in the U.S. shared with the military, of course. The left would be satisfied because the “war” would now be a local, criminal matter with the military no longer in charge. Does this sound crazy? Not to a career intelligence puke who understands the temptation for corruption that always exists in the opportunity to amass, collate, and use information about anybody. Reading other people’s mail is an incredible rush.

How tempting is it to convince yourself that you are doing something patriotic and noble by using existing technology that can detect munitions, drugs, weapons, facial characteristics, or body temperature on a person from five thousand feet above the street and then instantaneously transmitting that information to a decision-maker who can arrest or attack that person based on collating that information with other information collected by previous, equally catholic collection techniques? Dress it up any way your political bent tells you to; but, you will have a deliberate abuse of power unknown in the history of totalitarianism. The end of the political spectrum that governs at the moment would be irrelevant because such power will always corrupt the state into totalitarianism.

Is this an overreaction? Ask yourself that when you now get spam from a company whose e-mail advertisement you opened and quickly deleted without responding. Ask yourself that when you hear advertisements on the radio that sell a company’s ability to fix your computer remotely, on WI-FI even, by entering its operating system through the internet and altering, deleting, and adding programs. Ask yourself that when you see the cameras in the mall, on the main intersection near your apartment, and in all businesses. Ask yourself that when the new car you just bought transmits to a satellite where you are, how fast you are going, and what your predicted route will be, based on previous vehicle use. Ask yourself that when you are wanded then frisked then run through a fancy imaging machine at the airport before you take off. When you deplane, you then pass through a control point where a camera records your facial features and compares them to a data base of potential bad guys. If the technology exists, someone will try to figure out a way to use it to control you. Some due process, heh?

I am concerned that we are not fighting this war with the proper strategy and instruments of national power. Because of that, the results of the war may well mimic what the enemy wanted to do anyway. Who would be controlling us then? Would it matter?

15 December 2011 –

Bumper Sticker Of The Day – Government Truth: Prodigo, ergo sum.

On 30 September 2011, the U.S. Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency, remotely fired AGM-114 Hellfire missiles from MQ-1 Predator drones at a convoy of vehicles in Yemen. They killed two American citizens in the attack: Anwar al-Awlaki and Shamir Khan, both U.S. born citizens. These two men were not tragic, collateral damage in an attempt to kill terrorists who endangered U.S. security; indeed, they were the targets. Their activities, which brought down upon their heads the heat, blast and frag of U.S. military munitions, were not clandestine or minor in nature. Indeed, the opposite is true. They declared openly their hatred for the United States, they trained terrorists to conduct operations against the United States, and they operated open websites and other media that preached hatred for and encouraged violence against the United States. These men were, as a friend described them, dirtbags.

But, as American citizens, are they legitimate targets for U.S. military and CIA operations? Was the U.S. government acting with due process when it declared these U.S. citizens targets for military operations and subsequently killed them? The answer to both questions is yes, with a further explanation that the men’s U.S. citizenship is irrelevant to the argument. In the Civil War, U.S. government military forces killed U.S. citizens who declared themselves in open rebellion against the state. In World War II, President Roosevelt, acting as the Commander-In-Chief in time of war, declared German saboteurs, including an American citizen, who were captured on U.S. soil, to be under military tribunal jurisdiction. They were subsequently executed. I see firm precedence in treating openly rebellious and violent persons as Mssrs Al-Awlaki and Khan as legitimate targets of U.S. military action. These acts are wholly consistent with the intent of the expressed power of Congress and the President in Articles I and II and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Is there current legislation that authorizes such actions? Yes. On 18 September 2001, one week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). In this, Congress invoked the War Powers Resolution and stated:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.^[34]

In simple words, Congress declared that a state of war existed between the U.S. and a stateless, but in every other way a very real, movement that had committed acts of war against the United States. In fact, the attacks on 11 September 2001, were not the first acts of war perpetrated by this stateless organization. Attacks on our embassies, on the USS Cole, and elsewhere were the precursors to the horrific sneak attack of 11 September 2011 on New York City and Washington, D.C. Congress was responding, with wording that attempted to reflect the conditions of a world that defied old conventions and rules of war.

After a century and a half of international attempts to define and restrict the definition of war, combatants and noncombatants, and war crimes, the U.S. must now lead the world in forging new rules to guide a state when it prosecutes a war against those who neither wear a uniform, nor carry the commission of any state, yet are warriors and soldiers in every other sense. Congress’s 18 September 2011, actions reflect our first attempt at defining, fighting, and winning such a real war. Subsequent presidential and congressional decisions and actions to fight this war not gone smoothly. Government leaders from both political parties face harsh criticism from those won’t admit that these terrorists are, by deed, intent and their own rhetoric, combatants in a war between Western civilization and radical, jihadist Islam. These warriors’ caliphate will recognize no sovereign state borders, only the dominance of their brand of religion. The sooner our official government statements and policies reflect an understanding of this war, the easier it will be to prosecute the war in a way that will protect our Constitution and the way of life it engenders.

12 December 2011 –

Bumper Sticker Of The Day – Aren’t you glad your mother chose life?

I tried to laugh yesterday when I read a 1 October 2002, article from CNN:

“The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that a U.S. war against Iraq

would cost between $9 billion and $13 billion, according to an initial estimate

sent to the House and Senate. The report says the estimate will swing widely

depending on the size and composition of the force the U.S. may deploy to the

Persian Gulf.”

Cost estimates depend on how different accountants add them up; but, what the U.S. government actually paid out was around $845 billion. That is roughly equivalent to the cost of the President’s stimulus package in 2009. We got precious little out of either effort. I feel like I got duped into borrowing money to buy two Ferraris, was convinced I didn’t insurance, and then smashed them on successive weekends in foolhardy street races. Lest we forget, since the war started on 20 March 2003, nearly 4,500 Americans have been killed and nearly 33,000 have been wounded in the theater of operations.

The Iraq war will certainly confuse future college history majors as they regurgitate at test time the many stages of the ten-year-long conflict. What is important for these young men and women to answer competently and coldly before they become our future generation of national strategists and politicians is if the reasons declared for going to war were indeed compelling enough to commit the military instrument of national power to effect decisive change. The second thing these young Kissingers and Bismarcks need to answer is if the U.S. war strategy was sound enough to effect the desired outcome. Let me help you budding strategists.

Compelling strategic reasons for the U.S. to go to war with Iraq in 2002.

Stated Strategic Reason One: Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and needed killing.

Fact: Yup, he surely was. The world is a better place without this man who tortured and killed tens of thousands of his own countrymen and women to stay in power.

Question: But, is his bad-guy status alone a compelling U.S. strategic reason to commit military power in a full-scale conflict to get rid of him? After all, the world is full of Qadafis, Assads, and other lesser lights of evil who commit similar crimes on varying scales. Why this guy and not others?

Comment: In fact, we had contained bad guy Saddam’s expansionist and offensive activities pretty well between the Gulf War of 1991 and 11 September 2001. He was going nowhere, and his country was not to the point of uprising to throw him off. Therefore, this one point alone was not compelling enough to get rid of him with military force.

Stated Strategic Reason Two: Saddam was building atomic, chemical, and biological weapons—weapons of mass destruction, or WMD—and the delivery systems to hit US friends and allies in the region.

Fact: He was indeed pursuing these programs; but, strong, in-country investigative efforts later showed fairly conclusively that the first Gulf War in 1991 effectively stopped Saddam’s development of WMD. The remnants of his programs presented little to no military capability.

Question: Why were we fooled so badly into thinking that Saddam had such weapons of mass destruction?

Comment: The U.S. intelligence community, of which I was part during this episode, produced massive amounts of data and analytic products on this specific subject. Everything I read throughout the 80s and 90s told me that while there was no incontrovertible evidence that Saddam was indeed producing WMD, he certainly had the resources and the capability to do so, if he chose to. It also showed me that he had no moral compunction against using such weapons, demonstrated by his gassing and killing rebel Kurds in the 1980s. Finally, my readings showed clear statements of belligerence and offensive military threats to his enemies, including the United States. These were the generally accepted facts. From this, the intelligence community’s analytic effort produced two arguments, the first being the far weaker: 1) Saddam was a real and compelling threat to U.S. strategic interests in the area, and decisive action had to be taken immediately to stop that threat; 2) there was no verifiable evidence that WMD was being produced in Iraq, the dictator’s bellicose emanations to the world were for internal pumping up of his image rather than external effect, and there was no compelling threat to U.S. strategic interests that required immediate military action. The Bush administration’s neoconservative leaders chose to use the first argument as the basis of its causus belli because it suited their purposes. It reminds me of a cartoon where a seminary student was pouring through the Bible. His instructor asked him what he was doing so intently. Without looking up, the student answered that he was looking for proof to back up his preconceived notions.

Stated Strategic Reason Three: Saddam Hussein allowed Al Qaeda to train in and operate out of Iraq.

Fact: At the time of the U.S. invasion, there was little to no AL Qaeda activity, training or otherwise, in Iraq—and certainly no overt support by the Saddam regime for Al Qaeda operations against the United States. Saddam did praise Al Qaeda actions against the U.S—again for internal purposes.

Question: Why then were such dubious ties presented as a compelling reason for U.S. military action against Iraq?

Comment: Saddam and Al Qaeda both were enemies of the U.S.; but, they didn’t like each other and never played well together during recess. Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship was a secular-based power grab over a particular region and little else. He could have been espousing K-Martism as his guiding philosophy; but, his power was rooted in the effective terrorizing of his own people. Nothing new there. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, was a fundamentalist religious movement that stressed violence against secular rule of any Islamic state or people. Its stated enemies were secular dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and their supporters such as the United States and the decadent West. And, of course, Israel. States such as Saddam’s dictatorship in Iraq were far closer to being enemies than friends to Al Qaeda. A world-changing act allowed neoconservatives to strengthen the dubious connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam into a compelling reason to attack Iraq: 9/ll. Al Qaeda being under every rock in the Middle East was then the fear. It was an emotional, but fatuous, connection between AL Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq. Any intelligence analyst who had looked at the area for more than a week dismissed the connection. But, it was a handy pile-on reason to make the case for war. Tragic and ironic is the fact that it wasn’t until after the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and subsequent mistakes in handling the peace that the conditions were right for Al Qaeda to spread its tentacles into Iraq and attack U.S. forces.

Not one of these reasons eventually proved to be compelling enough to use the U.S.’s military instrument of national power to effect decisive change. Now, the administration’s spin meisters are asking if the Iraq War was a “dumb” war. That is not the adjective to use around anyone who ever served there. It probably was an unnecessary war. Therefore, all reasons to double down and “win” the various mutations that followed the initial conflict probably have been just as unnecessary—as compellingly as they may have been presented to the U.S. public. All victories claimed also are somewhat meaningless. The President’s year-end pull-out of troops, therefore, cannot be spun into some courageous move to end Bush’s War. In fact, the Iraqi government refused to accept the latest proposed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing the actions of U.S. forces in Iraq. Anyone who has ever served in the military overseas knows that without a SOFA, U.S. troops simply cannot operate. We didn’t leave. The Iraqis threw us out. We shouldn’t spin the end of the war any more than we should have spun the start of the war.

9 December 2011 –

Bumper Sticker of The Day – Social Security: The Ultimate Ponzi Scheme

Yesterday, a dear friend of mine referred to my blog entries about sovereignty. Her opinion is always to be carefully considered, therefore, I start today with a few sentences from her e-mail.

“Your thoughts on sovereignty were particularly relevant as was the questioning of

traditional means by which we recognize sovereignty. Though I have no answers,

I can't help but wonder what might be possible if we simply abandon Western imposed

and conceived border constructs for certain segments of the world and create altogether

new approaches. There are always winners and losers when it comes to people, land,

and authority, so such an action would undoubtedly generate instability and violence. I

wonder if starting over would be worth the initial pain to get to a more sustainable peace.”

Hmm…I admire my friend’s backbone of idealism and principle. Concepts like “abandon[ing] Western imposed and conceived border constructs..,” and “starting over,” show that she contemplates what “could” and what “should” be in life. But, what makes her a trustworthy idealist is her steely pragmatism and ability to do everything that can be done when implementing lofty plans. If dominant western powers—or the collective ineptitude of the UN—gave her the strategic task to start over in places like Egypt, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the Horn of Africa, I believe that her pragmatism most certainly would guide the operational phase. She certainly would not imitate President Wilson’s efforts to “make the world safe for democracy” after World War One when he arrogantly dictated from the outside what a liberated region’s borders should be. Such impositions are the spoils left to ruthless conquerors over the hapless conquered. In fact, such forced agreements inhibit the necessary sense of ownership, the expanded cohesion if you will, among the people in the region if they are to prosper.

Besides, history of the last two hundred years shows that once a sovereign border is declared, it is almost impossible to change—without the violence my friend referred to—because it serves so many purposes for so many people in and out of the region. In the worst case, borders add one more point that can local power mongers can pick at until it too becomes a painful sore on the body sovereign; instability, therefore, continues, and evil people continue to make money on the pain of others. In the best case, borders serve as a symbol that those on one side of the border now identify themselves more by where they live than by the skin color, language, or religion that may tie them to those across the line. An in-between case would be where a cohesive group of people, divided by the border, ignores the line, pays unto Caesar what Caesar demands on both sides of the check points, and still identifies itself by more fundamental cohesive factors (The U.S., in the case of its southern border, is somewhere between the in-between and the best cases).

Most borders in the “developing world” probably are going to stay as we western imperialists drew them in the sand with our riding crops. Nonetheless, most people in those regions are going to continue to identify themselves at least as much by other fundamental, cohesive factors such as language, race, culture, or religion, as they are by the name and benefits given to them by living on one side or the other of an international border.

What about in the European Union? Will identification with basic cohesive groups and the traditional countries that have more or less coalesced around those groups hold significant sway? Yes, especially now that the monetary crisis brought about by profligate government spending has ostensibly created a rich North and a dependent South Europe. What remains to be seen is if the sacrifice necessary to maintain the higher level of EU sovereignty among the Greek, Italian and Spanish Europeans will continue to be worth it to the German Europeans. It seems that higher orders of sovereignty work—until they don’t.

What about the United States? Specifically, is our grand experiment on this side of the pond sufficiently strong to maintain the aegis of sovereignty over a country that increasingly panhandles for the benefits that come with such concepts as diversity and and group rights. A useful exercise for Americans would be to list, in priority order, the titles and names they are most proud of and most loyal to. American? African American? Polish American (For you, Grandma)? Texan? Father? Mother? Baptist? Democrat? Moslem? Jazz Saxophonist? Rapper? Military Officer? Cowboy? Senator? Academic? National Education Association (union) Member? Well, do our titles allow us to embrace American sovereignty, exemplified by her borders and Constitution, as being in synch with the rest of who and what we are? It is a useful exercise to determine loyalties, cohesion and sovereignty. Would it be worth the effort—the violence or pain—to realign our priorities? To drop some titles? I do know that I would not be comfortable with the titles world citizen, fellow traveler, or Facebook follower.

More tomorrow.