The mighty US war on terror machine grinds on. Big news, big news, an allegedly important al Qaeda man, nabbed by US special forces in the failed state formerly known as Libya. Hate to rain on the parade....
Read all of "We got the war on terror pensioner! Go team!" »
Raise a toast to the Fraud Anniversary. For 99 percent of America it's been all downhill ever since, including me. The GWB administration and the mainstream media broke everything with the Iraq war....
David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, his 1972 account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and...
While the rest of the country has gone to Hell over the last ten years, the Pentagon has been untouched. While unemployment and outsourcing of jobs to China surged, the US military budget ballooned. When the global economy crashed due to Wall Street malfeasance in...
Read all of "Lousy joke of the week: Pentagon apparatchiks do the China Peril thing " »
Al Qaeda's barrel-scrapers continue to be portrayed as capable of posing a huge threat to this country. Now virtually destroyed by US operations, a handful of al Qaeda pismires in a couple of dirt poor countries continue to putter with things that don't work. For...
Read all of "Republic totters on news of innovative underwear bomb" »
The US military, through a West Point terrorism training school, released documents seized during the Osama bin Laden raid, a year ago this week. Readers know that despite the formidable achievement, for which the President deserves great credit, there has been no bin Laden dividend....
If you read or sound like an old duffer or military stodge, your message may not convey quite what one thinks to a younger generation in a different country. This is one of the unintentionally humorous lessons furnished in the latest issue of the Army's...
Sometimes the boffins of bad ideas at our weapons labs are occasionally compelled to admit the atrocious quality of the things they come up with preclude them ever being implemented. And news of this was brought to us this week courtesy of Steve Aftergood at...
At Secrecy blog Steve Aftergood has posted the testimony of William McRaven, overall commander of global US Special Operations. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services committee recently, McRaven emitted statements that, with only a little translation, frankly and perfectly encapsulate the American strategy to globally...
Read all of "Bombing Paupers: The strategy of the Forever War explained" »
No one will say it in formal circles: Use of drones outside the US is all about bombing paupers or -- ahem -- the impoverished places of the world, if something less blunt sounding is needed. That's the US strategic plant coupled to the story...
Read all of "Defense cuts to cause boom in bombing paupers" »
The recently released Department of Defense Non-Lethal Weapons Reference Book shows the current listing of mostly useless gadgets, some of which can kill or maim people, currently fielded for the US military. Some have bled into US police forces as a result of the weapons...
Read all of "Blinding lasers, pepper spray and electric rays" »
Here's my conclusion from ten years of war on terror, one drawn from expert perspective. It's simple: The bad guys won. I don't mean bin Laden or al Qaeda. My view deals with the US mechanism, the security and threat assessment machine that was part...
The fan of 80 buck a bottle Kistler white wine, celebrity natsec expert Richard Clarke, officially joins the world of 9/11 conspiracy theory today....
Read all of "Crawling back for the limelight of 9/11 anniversary" »
Within the body of President Obama's June 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism there exists a tension between traditional values and the need for security. The Strategy states that one of our core values is respect for privacy rights, civil liberties, and civil rights, while later...
What constitutes war? Andrew Stigler and I point out some of the difficulties in coming up with standards: Should a 40-minute raid conducted by several dozen commandos be regarded as "hostilities" commensurate with an act of war? After all, force was projected across borders and...
Downloading the wrong papers from the Internet is a cheap ticket to the big house or Her Majesty's hospitality, thanks to the decade-long war on terror. In the Eighties the US survivalist fringe minted the mayhem papers of high stupid that traveled 'round the world....
Read all of "Documents to get you jailed, courtesy of the US survivalist fringe" »
The government and the media, will squeeze everything it can from the leftover detritus of Osama bin Laden. It will twist and twirl it out like the most distasteful piece of nose toffee simply for sales value and because it cements the directive that we're...
Some of the questions to ponder now that Osama bin Laden has been located and killed: 1) Does Al-Qaeda disintegrate, having lost its effective founder and guide? Or does Al-Qaeda now devolve into smaller, nationally-based franchises (in Yemen, North Africa, Palestine)--with no central command or...
The word's officially in. Guys waving V signs in pickup trucks as they speed toward Tripoli speed back just as quickly. The inability to handle weapons, or even fight, can't easily be overcome. They're not the Desert Rats. Even a Bernard Law Montgomery could be...
Read all of "Bombing Moe: Rebel rabble routed plus General Electric funnies" »
Watch tv and you know the 'rebel' force Odyssey Dawn is supporting is just a lightly armed rabble. The pictures of the favorite weapon of the impoverished, a light pick-up truck with an old surplus Eastern bloc machine gun mounted in the back, are inescapable....
The classic arguments on Odyssey Dawn, made by the celebrity pundits and serious people arranged in Washington like gilt furniture never mix in what's going to continue to happen to the the middle class because of more big war adventure. Since the middle class had...
Read all of "Bombing Moe: Gilt furniture and calculating a war dividend " »
Figure of the day, token British missile strikes: 130 US Tomahawk launches and 6 UK Tomahawk launches. Total equals 136 launches. Brit explosive contribution to 'the Coalition,' 4.4 percent by weight in Tomahawks....
Read all of "Bombing Moe: The 4 percent Brits, never bombing banksters and more " »
It took fifteen minutes over the weekend to demonstrate one of the most important reasons for Bombing Moe. The photos of Tomahawk missile launches and the pics of Libyan tracked artillery pieces with their turrets upside down blew everything else off the news. One can...
Read all of "Bombing Moe: "The Tomahawk is neat,' 'fascinating,' and other Sunday morning funnies" »
Reason Number One, update Saturday: Republicans will be tied in knots. They're always for bombing Muslims in a foreign country but hate the President. They love war to defend oil but are against everything the President commands....
Read all of "Bombing Moe: Five more breaking reasons the Prez said go" »
Reason Number One: Bombs for Moe, austerity for the US middle class. Whatever it costs in cash for another war, budget cutting for domestic programs that benefit working Americans. That's because bombing Moe comes out of the special overflowing cash sack for war. It's the...
Read all of "Bomb Moe -- Ten reasons why the Prez decided so" »
HBO's Battle for Marjah documentary is not worth your time. That is, most already know the war in Afghanistan can't be won. But there is no political will to end it. However, as a working metaphor for that dilemma, the documentary is fine....
Because Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, comes from the hacker underground, its actions often look taken from the POV of a desire to expose stuff just for the sake of exposing it. This was always part of the mindset of the hacker fraternity....
The current strategy for Afghanistan is not working. It can not. It is too big. While General Petraeus can tick off signs of progress, including expanded American control farther outside of Kandahar, this does not make any difference. Even if such assessments are accurate, they...
Ever since the US invasion in 2003, opium has been a problem in Afghanistan. It was a traditional crop which had been virtually eliminated by the Taliban in one of the few positive aspects of their repressive, fundamentalist regime. Ironically, its resurgence now fuels the...
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, now ground down by 40 years of warfare with broad areas dominated by brutal Islamic fundamentalists. The traditional power structures are inadequate to meet the challenge, especially with so many killed, including by Taliban assassinations....
Read all of "Refashioning Afghan Strategy: Nation Growing" »
The core objective of national strategy is to insure the survival of the nation and the lives of its citizens. For a number of years, Soviet missiles actually threatened our national survival, and this threat obviously had a natural priority - prosperity and the institutions...
President Obama's strategy announcement for the war in Afghanistan raises more questions than it answers. But some answers are starting to come, and they're not good news. The first and most important question, of course, is the feasibility of the strategy. On this question,...
Read all of "President's Afghanistan Strategy - More Questions Than Answers" »
No one is satisfied with the current strategy in Afghanistan, but there is deep uncertainty on how to best address the challenge of a resurgent Taliban. Uncertainty over the importance of the struggle in Afghanistan and how it fits into overall US strategy is coupled...
Time in Afghanistan is on the side of the Taliban. They live there and will be there a long time after the the Americans are gone. They only have to be patient and they will get the country. Or so they would like people to...
Today, a collection of items having to do with the tradition of blaming China and its mighty but hard-to-see cyberwarriors. As stories on our nation's cybersecurity strategy and the military's plans for a cyberforce unfold, you'll continue to see a lot of this. For example,...
Read all of "Rule Number One: Always Blame China, then Russia" »
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