Some humor.

At least this is fun if you know what REFORGER and POMCUS are...

Now, if you're an aviator, you might find this disturbing... but the rest of us will just see the poetic justice. Oh, hi Lex!

Re: Re: Re: The Hundred Year War

Do we tell folks that they are safe BBQ'ing their hotdogs and marshamellows. All is fine?
Do we tell them they are in danger of being blown to bits?
Or do we actually "Trust The People"?
My earliest memory is October 1962...when my Dad showed up with a truckload of concrete blocks...and enough food and water to last months.(Something about living near the sub base at Groton and rushing cubans)

A quarter of century of pretense, has almost certainly not served the nation well.

Time to open the vaults of truth.

Re: Re: The Hundred Year War

I had the same thoughts: we need more information to evaluate the claim.

"Evaluate the claim?" some may ask. "You don't trust the military?"

Yes, indeed, I do -- I don't think they'd say anything that wasn't true, at least according to the view of the part of the bureaucracy that puts it out. Still, everything they say is treated as suspect by the population we need to convince. It's not enough to make claims. You've got to prove it.

My guess as to why it's short is that the information is improperly classified/FOUO/"unclass but sensitive"/whatever. Probably there are multiple gov't agencies involved, which complicates the business of getting permission to put it in the clear.

I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if CIA's Open Source Center found the websites that DOD is citing. OSC does a lot of great work. Oddly, given that they are reviewing things that are "Open Source," they aren't available to the public. Not just the analysis isn't, or pieces that would reveal how we collect from open sources -- almost nothing they do is. Few who haven't worked for the government, or certain parts of academia, know it exists.

That's really a shame, because OSC is one of the best and most successful parts of our intelligence apparatus -- and most of what they do really could be made available to the public. The public would be much better informed about what the world is really like, if this data was out there. Most of it is published in newspapers, put on the radio or TV, etc -- broadcast, that is to say. There's no real reason it shouldn't be available. The translations are paid for by taxpayers, after all, and something that has been openly broadcast is not secret.

In the case of the maps, I assume some bureaucrat decided that we didn't want people to know what we've decided we're interested in reading. Doubtless even getting the two graphic maps published was a fight, because somebody said 'Well, then they'll know we're monitoring them, and that will change their content...' and someone else said, 'They posted it on the internet. They can't have expected we wouldn't see it,' and so forth.

Probably it took a month or more to get even this much approved. We aren't even told whose maps these are. The maps are color-coded, but the importance of the colors to the plan is not explained.

(Best guess about that: Green is obviously lands thought to be Islamic, as green is the color favored by Islamic movements. I'm guessing that black is for places considered to be 'historical dar al Islam,' but not currently so -- Spain, India, parts of Thailand. Purple and red I take as a notion about the degree of difficulty moving Islam into those areas, with red areas being relatively easier. Yellow appears to be lands never subject to Islam, nor likely ever to be, like the lands of the Russians and the Chinese.)

To return to the web of classification-and-almost-classification:

If that's the problem, this really is the best we can do. Until we streamline declassification in a serious way, we have internal blocks to information flow. It's not going to get any better. There are too many people with the authority to block up information, and therefore to stop any part of the government -- including the military -- from disseminating it.

I think that streamlining is a very important thing to do anyway, for political reasons associated with having a republican form of government -- how can we judge our representatives, both elected and civil service, lacking key information? We need a way of making sure important secrets are kept, but that things which are no longer important are pushed out into the clear as quickly as possible. We ought to know.

OSC's work should be made available to the public anyway, with certain exceptions (we don't need to give away our analysis of the pieces; we don't need to give away our methods when they aren't obvious; etc). That would be a major boon to the information war right there -- making sure that Americans outside the bureaucracy know what's being thought and said worldwide, and are free to discuss it. There's a lot to be learned, and no good reason I can see for not letting people get on with learning it.

This isn't a problem for the government alone. It affects us all. We would do better to all be as informed as possible. The only way to do that is to keep secrets as infrequently as reasonable. There are a lot of smart people in America who aren't in the government. If they had access to more and better data, they just might come up with something.

Why There Are MilBloggers...

Imagine if Ernie Pyle's World War II headline had read, "More Troops In Germany Means More Targets For Hitler".

Imagine if Winston Churchill had said instead, "Don't sign up. Don't ever, ever sign up."

Thankfully, neither of them could muster the self-loathing necessary to utter or pen such vile, defeatist notions. We need them now. More than ever.

If anyone in the media business ever wondered why there are MilBloggers and why we are so passionate about what we write, I would suggest that those individuals not look outward at us for explanation. Rather, look inward, please.

USAToday: More troops means more targets for snipers in Iraq

One need not read the article. It deviates not from the headline displayed above.

So many in the media have routinely and regularly carped that there are not enough troops in Iraq and front-paged any figure of note that would profess the same, often passing commentary as news. Now, sending more troops is not the key to victory, but just the key to more death at the hands of an invincible, invisible enemy that apparently stands ten feet tall.

Are we to believe that our brothers and sisters land in Iraq and waltz aimlessly through the streets waiting to be picked off as defenseless twits on an afternoon stroll?

Is there not one redeeming quality left in America - much less its professional fighting forces - that some care to recognize?

Is this the best that the journalists, writers and editors of a national daily publication can muster? I know they can do better. I've read one recently, and was so impressed that I felt compelled to leave the USA Today a comment, something I believe I have never done. But it was a commentary column and appropriately placed in the Opinion section. The headline chosen for the above article [More troops means more targets for snipers in Iraq] clearly indicates that the article is commentary under the guise of hard news. (Note the url - http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-10-24-sniper-targets_x.htm) It appears not primarily intended to impart fact, but rather to sway or impact the reader.

I maintain with assertive conviction that which I addressed at the first MilBlogger Conference:

The American public would be far better served by military subject matter experts in a journalistic environment than by journalistic experts in a military environment.

The common media response in defense has been that such placement would generate biased reporting.

To that I say: Read the headline above and come back to the argument when there are arrows in your quiver.

Another Hero Story...

....from Chuck Simmons, who has a bunch of 'em. So start with this one, then book mark here.

Re: 100 Years

Via Instapundit, a brief recap of the DoD vs bloggers stories over the past couple of weeks.

The peace time military

Monday was the anniversary of the Beirut bombings ('round here we don't need to ask "which ones"?).

241 GIs died that day. But it wasn't the single largest one-day loss of life suffered by the U.S. military in the past three decades. That event occurred two years later, at Gander.

Sometimes things work in odd synchronicity. A year ago, when I wrote of the 20-year anniversary of Gander, I somehow ended up also writing about the caliphate, and those who were sneering at the threat. Their basic premise: that threat was overblown, much as communism was during the cold war - a tactic used by the capitalist oppressor to enslave the ignorant working class through fear.

There may be some useful information at that second link for those who are tired of hearing that sort of talk and would like to reply to those who attempt it. But be advised that facts and numbers won't sway the die-hards, those whose feelings about a subject are already set.

Whodda Thunkit

Milbloggers aren't completely one-dimensional. Some of us can sing.

Not me though. Unless showertime renditions of The Dukes of Hazzard theme song counts.

Re: The Hundred Year War

Funny you should mention that...

I recently received an email from CENTCOM Public Affairs* pointing me to a new product they're making available via their web site. It's called "Nature of the Enemy", and it presents information gained from open-source material available on the web.

Here's the latest issue (pdf). Take a look at it before you read the rest of this post.