zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a. “zen“]

Top Billing! Infinity Journal Volume 3, Issue 2 

IJ requires free registration but has a consistently high level of articles, for example “Strategic Culture: More Problems than Prospects” by Antulio J. Echevarria:

The concept of strategic culture has grown more popular of late than its problematic origins and dubious attempts at application warrant. Once described as having undergone three generational shifts, the concept is now in at least its fourth generation, and is no better for any of them. Over the span of more than four decades, the theory’s diachronic and synchronic tensions have resisted resolution. The concept fails, in other words, to account for change over time as well as commonality in time. It attempts to privilege continuity over change in the former sense, and uniqueness over similarity in the latter sense. Its empirical base, moreover, has not gone beyond broad generalizations that do little more than reaffirm national and cultural stereotypes. The idea of strategic culture is, therefore, in need of another more critical examination. Such a re-examination can only lead to the conclusion that, on the whole, the concept’s problems far outweigh its prospects. No doubt this condition will continue to attract scholarly interest in the hopes of resolving these tensions. However, for policymakers and strategists, the concept is best avoided, at least for another generation or two. There are enough tautologies involved in formulating policy and strategy already. It is not clear that the credibility of the process can withstand another one. […] 

William Lind –  John Boyd’s Art of War 

….Boyd had a reservoir of comments he repeated regularly, one of which was, “A lot of people in Washington talk about strategy. Most of them can spell the word, but that’s all they know of it.” The establishment’s insistence on an offensive grand strategy, where we attempt to force secular liberal democracy down the throats of every people on earth, is a major reason for our involvement and defeat in Fourth Generation conflicts. A defensive grand strategy, which is what this country followed successfully through most of its history, would permit us to fold our enemies back on themselves, something Boyd recommended. With us out of the picture, their internal fissures, such as those between Sunni and Shiites in the Islamic world, would become their focus. But as usual, Boyd was right: virtually no one in Washington can understand the advantages of a defensive grand strategy.

Being involved in every conflict on earth is useful if the real game is boosting the Pentagon’s budget rather than serving our national interests. Here too Boyd had a favorite line. He often said, “It is not true the Pentagon has no strategy. It has a strategy, and once you understand what that strategy is, everything the Pentagon does makes sense. The strategy is, don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”

Information Dissemination (Galrahn) – 21st Century Mahan 

….21st Century Mahan is a very clever book. The book combines five articles written by AT Mahan for periodicals specifically for public audiences, thus presenting AT Mahan in a way that is more approachable by those like me who can get annoyed by his difficult to read classical writing style. All five articles are very well written, but they are also relevant to the discussions surrounding the US Navy today. Benjamin Armstrong is a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy today, so the author intentionally draws no conclusions from Mahan’s work and applies them to current events. And yet, because of the presentation and delivery within the book, the reader can’t help but think about Mahan in a 21st century context applicable today. I am not sure if that was how LCDR Armstrong intended to write the book, or how the USNI editors helped arrange the book, but it is very clever and works well.

I really enjoyed the book. It helped that I had never read any of the five AT Mahan essay’s covered in the book, and it also helped that I enjoyed each of the essay’s. In particular the way the chapter involving Naval Administration and Warfare, Some General Principles came together early in the book was so well done I had to read it again with my yellow marker I was so impressed. To give one a sense of just how much easier this book is to read on Alfred Thayer Mahan than most works of AT Mahan, my 18 year old daughter actually finished the book when I asked her to read it just for an opinion. I assure you, if this was a typical Mahan book, she would not have made it past chapter 2.

If you are looking for a book with a strong authors opinion that draws conclusions for you in applying AT Mahan to the 21st century, this is not the right book for you. This book asks readers to draw their own conclusions. That detail actually defines the style of the book better than any other detail of the book, because the author doesn’t tell the reader what to think, rather asks the reader to think for themselves.

Washington’s Blog – NSA Whistleblowers: NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication 

JUDY WOODRUFF:   Both of you know what the government says is that we’re collecting this — we’re collecting the number of phone calls that are made, the e-mails, but we’re not listening to them.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. OK?

I mean, that’s why they had to build Bluffdale, that facility in Utah with that massive amount of storage that could store all these recordings and all the data being passed along the fiberoptic networks of the world. I mean, you could store 100 years of the world’s communications here. That’s for content storage. That’s not for metadata.

Metadata if you were doing it and putting it into the systems we built, you could do it in a 12-by-20-foot room for the world. That’s all the space you need. You don’t need 100,000 square feet of space that they have at Bluffdale to do that. You need that kind of storage for content.

Joshua Foust –The Miranda Detention: Troubling from all Sides

….So, this is complicated. The UK authorities were correct to question David Miranda, but they were stupid, wrong, and abusive to have held him for so long — and in doing so, they ruined any possible legitimacy their questions might have held. It was a needless own-goal.

More immediately, too, the instinctive reaction of far too many journalists to shriek about their own spouses being targeted is going to have a downside. Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

Chuck Spinney – An American Sun Tzu – John Boyd

Dr. Chet Richards – Spinney and Lind 

BLACKFIVE celebrates National Airborne Day ( it was a perfectly good airplane….)

Dr. Steve Metz – Strategic Horizons: The Revolution in American Security Policy 

War on the Rocks – ( COL David Maxwell) UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE DOES NOT BELONG TO SPECIAL FORCES and (Jason Fritz) COUNTERINSURGENCY IS NOT THE PROBLEM 

Small Wars Journal – The Roots of Military Doctrine: Change and Continuity in Understanding the Practice of Warfare,  Cartel Car Bombings in Mexico and ( Kyle Fonay) On Guerrilla Warfare: Two Takes, Mao vs. Guevara 

Feral Jundi –Executive Protection: So Who Does Warren Buffet Use For Security? 

Eeben Barlow – THE DANGERS FACING REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENTS 

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Top Billing! Adam Elkus –Banquo in Bandit Country 

One long, deadly night in an isolated outpost in a place few Americans could place on a map. A tragic turn of events and Americans dead. The headline could stand in for a dizzying number of places from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan. So why Benghazi? Why has it stuck in the spotlight while the others have not?

Partisanship is a big reason. Like many post-Bush security debates, it’s easier to point fingers when the other guy is sitting in the Oval Office. But this doesn’t really begin to get to the bottom of the puzzle. The public has evinced little interest in Benghazi. The political press has mostly forgotten about it. So why do DC insiders fight so heavily over it? And why is CNN claiming in its latest scoop that the “CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out?”

Benghazi is the Banquo’s Ghost of the post-Bush counterterrorism wars, a lingering symbol of a dangerous flaw within a consensus national security policy that many in Washington have convinced themselves is the way to fight the wars of future while avoiding a heavy ground presence. To be sure, the Macbeth analogy here is not a one-to-one mapping. The “ghost” here is a metaphor for the lingering specter of the disaster, its dead, and what the torching of the consulate represents for the indirect strategy. Like Banquo, the specter lingers during what should be a feast and time of celebration. But a review of the strategic landscape in the so-called “arc of conflict” reveals little to celebrate.

To understand why, it’s important to briefly review some parts of the Benghazi affair that have mostly escaped attention in the political obsession with tactical marginalia….

SWJ Blog  (Gian Gentile) Counterinsurgency: The Graduate Level of War or Pure Hokum?,   (Robert Bunker)-How Caribbean Organized Crime is Replacing the State and (William Olson) The Continuing Irrelevance of Clausewitz 

….This notion of counterinsurgency warfare requiring a special martial skill set because of its so-called difficulty that conventional armies by nature do not have is nothing new in modern history.  Starting in the 19th century, the French and British armies began to treat small wars (an earlier moniker for counterinsurgency) as a special form of war requiring officers with unconventional skills who can transform the hidebound conventional armies that were resistant to change.

Counterinsurgency experts, especially since the Vietnam War, have written histories of various cases of counterinsurgency warfare with the idea that a special form of war requires special skills as a foundational premise.  For example, in The Army and Vietnam, Andrew Krepinevich argues that the American Army lost the war because it could not break out of its conventional war mindset that focused on the abundant use of firepower instead of the correct and special methods of COIN designed to win hearts and minds.[3]

Unfortunately, counterinsurgency is not the graduate level of war, it is simply war.  Moreover, the notion that counterinsurgency wars require the soldiers who fight them to possess special skills is not supported by historical evidence.  And contrary to what writers like Krepinevich and Cassidy say, counterinsurgency wars have not been won or lost by the tactical methods of the armies that have fought them.  Instead, as historian Douglas Porch argues, they were won or lost “because the strategic context in which the wars were fought defied a tactical remedy.”[4] 

Pundita –You didn’t actually think Obama would let Greenwald testify to Congress about NSA, did you? and Let’s roll: Some legislators mount desperate campaign to save the U.S. republic 

Raúl goes on to speculate about other possible reasons for the President’s ploy. My take is that Obama had already lost face with Liberals over drone war and related issues. And I don’t think there is one genuine Leftist or civil libertarian in the world who has any illusions left about what Obama is.  

Yet it was the American Leftist, law professor and political scientist Stephen F. Diamond who alone pegged Obama during the Democratic presidential primary campaign in early 2008.  After studying Obama’s political career up to that point he said that Obama was no Leftist; that he was an authoritarian — although what specific type, he wouldn’t speculate at that early stage.  

“Isn’t that just like a Leftist,” I observed sarcastically at the time. “When one of their own turns out to be a monster they say, ‘Oh that’s not a real Leftist.'”  But I listened to Steve despite my grumbling, and made sure Pundita readers heard what he had to say.  I am very glad I did.

The American democracy may be strong enough to survive the Obama presidency, but there are many younger democracies that can count themselves lucky he wasn’t born there.

The secret origin of Doctrine Man!

Not the Singularity (Steve Hynd) – NSA Surveillance Didn’t Help Identify New Alleged Al Qaeda Threat and ( Matthew Elliot) – Weekend NSA Reader

BLACKFIVE – Brian Stann – The Dark Side of a Warrior 

Slightly East of New – Incestuous delusion

Dr. Tdaxp –Pimps, Hos, and When to Get Out of the Ghetto

Nick Carr – PRISM and the New Society

Bruce Schneier – XKeyscore and Scientists Banned from Revealing Details of Car-Security Hack 

Presentation Zen –Good science makes for good story 

Eric Drexler – Transforming the Material Basis of Civilization:

The Long Now Foundation blog – Language may be much older than previously thought

Aeon Magazine – Out of the Deep 

Studies in Intelligence –Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf

NRO – Jeb’s Education Racket  

Democracy Journal – An Elite Deserving of the Name 

Reason – Thanks to NSA Surveillance, Americans Are More Worried About Civil Liberties Than Terrorism

Recommended Viewing:

Top Billing! John Robb  DATA Dystopia. The NSA Scandal and Beyond. , Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy Thinking , and Canada Makes the Automation of Tyranny Easier 

John went from near blog dormancy to en fuego in a week.

….It’s safe to say that at the end of the day, there’s not much you can do without big brother detecting it.

So, should you be worried?  Of course.  There’s all sorts of nightmare scenarios that can emerge from this collection effort can enable the automation of tyranny (and that’s a very bad thing).

What do I find interesting about this situation?  

First off, it’s amazing how few people care about freedom and privacy.  In short, people have become so dependent on the bureaucracy, they will accept nearly any insult.

Secondly, this activity is clear proof that the government security system increase views all Americans as potential enemies.  It’s also a good indicator that people inside the system don’t have the backbone/character to stop this type of gross infringement from occurring (NOTE:  I don’t know what Snowden’s motivation was, so I’m not holding him up as a example).  We saw something similar with torture a couple of years ago.

Thirdly, this scandal is a good milestone on the decline of the national security system.  Simply, when the costs of it (snooping) far outweigh any potential benefit (protection), it needs to go.  Further, since the nation-state derives most of its legitimacy from its ability to deliver security to citizens, this failure is more proof that the nation-state is in decline as a form of governance.

Finally, unless something drastic occurs, this type of data will NEVER be deleted.  It’s there forever.  It will be used against you decades from now.  How it could be used against you is a matter of speculation today, but due to software automation, it could be used to do very bad things against a great many people in a very systematic way. 

Pundita – 2006: NSA Killed System That Sifted Phone Data Legally (ThinThread) , Classifed documents reveal “top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant.” New Guardian report. , Ed Snowden is a transgender CIA operative from outer space: America’s Tin Foil Hat Tribe gets to the bottom of the NSA Affair 

 The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project — not because it failed to work — but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency’s surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls. 
Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. 

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have: 

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy. 

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency. 

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records. 

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations

Small Wars Journal – Bandwidth Cascades: Escalation and Pathogen Models for Cyber Conflict Diffusion 

Adm. James Stavridis- The New Triad 

WIRED –Introducing Aaron’s Law, a Desperately Needed Reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act   

Bruce Schneier –Has U.S. started an Internet war?

Foreign Policy – TOTAL RECALL 

New York Times –Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders

Ribbonfarm –War and Nonhuman Agency

Recommended Viewing:
Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn’t belong to a robot

Top Billing! T. Greer –What Happens When Wall Street Goes Up Against the CIA? 

….I would like to focus on one sentence hidden in the body of the report. Shortly after the implementation of the Merida Initiative in 2008, the Mexican intelligence agency CISEN discovered that various cartels were employing American trained, ex-special forces. Understandably alarmed, American intelligence agencies floated a proposal to cut the power of the cartels:

“Anxious to counterattack, the CIA proposed electronically emptying the bank accounts of drug kingpins, but was turned down by the Treasury Department and the White House, which feared unleashing chaos in the banking system.”This one sentence betrays Washington’s distorted foreign policy priorities.  The CIA proposal had several clear benefits: drug lords forced to pull their investments would have less incentive to stay in the game,  cartels would be robbed of operating funds, and most importantly of all, the proposal could be implemented with minimal American involvement. [2] There would be no need for more boots on the ground. The drawbacks were also clear: folks on Wall Street would lose money. The White House took Wall Street’s side in the debate, and favored a policy designed to kill or capture the “high value targets” whose bank accounts were not to be touched.  (Readers curious about the cost of these operations — in terms of man-power as well as money — will find plenty of details in the last few pages of the Washington Post report.) 

SWJ El Centro – Friction Rises as Mexico Curbs U.S Role in Drug Fight and Mexican Cartel Strategic Note No. 14: Narcocantante (Narco-singer) Assassinated in Mission, Texas 

….If the investigation determines that Quintanilla was killed because of his narcocorridos it would be the first known assassination of a narcocantante (narco-singer) in the United States.  This would be a significant shift in targeting and the U.S. would be firmly in the operational zone of targeted killings to shape the ‘narcosphere’ or ‘drug war zone.’  

Quintanilla was identified with the CDG: Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel) and had dedicated songs to Tony Tormenta (Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén)[6] the CDG capo who died in a battle with Los Zetas in November 2010.[7]  One of his songs, “Estamos En Guerra (Los Zetas Vs. CDG),”chronicled the battles following the Gulf-Zeta split.[8],[9]

It is possible that Quintanilla became a target of one or both of those cartels as a result of his characterization of their activities in the current conflict in Tamaulipas.  Certainly both cartels have a presence in Texas and could operate there as seen in recent reports of narcobloqueos (narco-blockades) in Texas.[10]  It is also possible that he crossed other criminal enterprises (such as U.S. gangs) or was targeted for more mundane criminal reasons.  Nevertheless, the modus operandi or tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) involved in his death are consistent with those of narco-assassinations. 

Southern Pulse –Cleaning up after Operation Limpieza 

….Prosecutions of government corruption initiated under the Calderon administration are falling apart in the early months of the Peña Nieto administration, leading to accusations among Mexico’s political elite. On one side, PRI officials say the Calderon government abused its authority, relied on untrustworthy witnesses, and targeted politically convenient officials. On the other side of the debate are concerns that the PRI is allowing impunity for corruption and harming relations with US agencies that provided evidence and want corrupt officials out of government. Regardless of whether the officials named were or were not working with transnational criminal organizations, the Mexican government’s failure to successfully investigate and prosecute high-level corruption should be a source of concern. Rumors of high level corruption have only increased since ex-President Felipe Calderon declared a war on violent drug trafficking organizations in Mexico upon taking office in December 2006. 

SWJ Blog –Cyberwar in the Underworld: Anonymous versus Los Zetas in Mexico

WIRED –Don’t Panic, But Mexico’s Zetas Cartel Wants to Recruit Your Kids 

FOXnews Latino –Mexico’s Blog De Narco Author Gives First Major Interview 

Washington Post – Obama’s trip to Mexico hints at new balance of power and What did we learn about Obama’s thinking in Mexico?

OTHER TOPICS:

TIME C. Christine Fair –Can This Alliance Be Saved? Salvaging the US-Pakistan Relationship

J.M. Berger –FORECASTING TERRORIST ATTACKS WITH BIG DATA AND THE WISDOM OF CROWDS… OR NOT

Steven Pressfield Online (Shawn Coyne) –Getting Screwed is a Compliment 

Global Guerrillas-The Flaw that May Bring Down Bitcoin or Change it Forever 

 Information Dissemination (Robert Farley) Book Review: China’s Search for Security 

Col. Pat Lang –“Israeli attacks inside Syria risks widening war” CSM 

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

A harbinger that we are in grave danger of becoming a nation of autistic mimes

[ by Charles Cameron — playing the two great games, from Caxton to Le Carré ]
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Karla, the Russian spymaster in John Le Carré‘s Smiley novels, is represented as the white queen in the 2011 Tomas Alfredson / Gary Oldman film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (lower panel, above).

In chess terms, that’s quite a step up for spies — pawn promoted to queen.

**

Before the digital age, in the early years of printing, way back in 1474, Thomas Caxton‘s press issued the second book ever printed in England — his Game and Playe of the Chesse — and things were subtly different. The eight pawns, for instance, differed one from another, each representing a different human type or craft, and named accordingly: “Labourer, Smith, Clerk, Merchant, Physician, Taverner, Guard and Ribald.”

It’s the Ribald (in the upper panel, above) who interests us here — for he’s the spy on the chessboard, as surely as Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh were spies in the land of milk and honey. Caxton describes the Ribald, stationing him in front of the Rook, thus:

The rybaulders, players of dyse and of messagers and corrours ought to be sette to fore the rook/ For hit apperteyneth to the rook whiche is vicayre & lieutenant of the kynge to haue men couenable for to renne here and there for tenquyre & espie the place and cytees that myght be contrarye to the kynge/ And thys pawn that representeth thys peple ought to be formed in this maner/ he must haue the forme of a man that hath longe heeris and black and holdeth in his ryght hand a lityll monoye And in his lyfte hande thre Dyse And aboute hym a corde in stede of a gyrdell/ and ought to haue a boxe full o lettres

And what should be the appearance of such a one?

And thys pawn that representeth thys peple ought to be formed in this maner/ he must haue the forme of a man that hath longe heeris and black and holdeth in his ryght hand a lityll monoye And in his lyfte hande thre Dyse And aboute hym a corde in stede of a gyrdell/ and ought to haue a boxe full o lettres

Let’s go over that first part one more time, and make sure we understand it:

It pertains to the Rook, which is vicar and lieutenant of the King, to have men available to run hither and yon to make inquiries and spy out the place and cities that might be contrary to the King.

**

And isn’t that precisely what Moses sent Joshua and Caleb out to do, when he instructed them in Numbers 13.17-20:

Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain: And see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; And what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong holds; And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land.

**

Espionage has been around longer than chess: some things never change — and some things have changed significantly.

Today, you can’t tell one pawn from the next…