David Ignatius wonders how in the world President Obama will be able to make an informed opinion on the "success" of Teh Surge 2.0 if it takes a year to get every last soldier and Marine into the theater.
I asked Lt Gen. David Rodriquez, the No. 2 US commander [...]
Ray from the UK continues to follow the Iraq War investigations, sending this article for our observation. Everyone is trying to follow former Prime Minister Tony Blair's logic here.
Speaking on BBC One's Fern Britton Meets programme, Tony Blair was asked whether he would [...]
The FAS Security News notes that the Obama administration is coming out with its guidance on controlling unclassified information. The post suggests (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the government doesn't always go by the regs, preferring to use the guidance as a vehicle for keeping general unclass information from the public.
In [...]
Army public affairs officer Gary Tallman reminds the USA Today journalists that it is, in fact, not illegal to hire retired general officers acting as individuals and not as a company representative. It's not something he ought to have to say, but for some strange reason, some people [...]
New York City got hit with a dose of white powder, and it didn't come from the sky. It hit the American Express headquarters in lower Manhattan.
Detective Mindy Diaz said no injuries were reported after the police were called to the building in [...]Global Security Newswire reports that the Washington DC metro is going to get updated chemical and biological sensors in addition to video links - because although it's been eight years since 9/11, 14 years since Aum Shinrikyo, and there are no terrorists known to [...]
Once again, there appear to be parts of the Obama administration who don't seem to understand that they can, in fact, reverse stupid decisions made in the previous administration. From Defense News (subscription required):
The United States and Poland have drawn up an [...]
TalkingPointsMemo has been late in discovering this strategy model that attempts to depict the complex interactions that take place in a counterinsurgency campaign. Others in the blogosphere have commented on the spaghetti graphic that it appears to be (all hail to His mysterious [...]
I've been told by fellow insurgents and progressive sympathizers that the failure of the National Strategy to Counter Biological Threats should not be blamed on the State or Defense staffers who actually do give a damn about this issue. The NSC does, in fact, [...]
Matt Ygelsias asks the question - how is it that Taliban soldiers are paid better than Afghani army soldiers, when the US coalition has so much more money than the Taliban warlords? More importantly, is there a flaw in our cost-effectiveness approach in that the Taliban soldiers can get [...]
I become more and more frustrated with the seemingly inability for Democratic administration officials to think clearly about the issue of countering weapons of mass destruction or terrorist CBRN incidents without falling back on trite, overused, and inexcusable exaggerations developed by alarmists, extremists, and right-wing politicos. Ellen Tauscher has released [...]
I become more and more frustrated with the seemingly inability for Democratic administration officials to think clearly about the issue of countering weapons of mass destruction or terrorist CBRN incidents without falling back on trite, overused, and inexcusable exaggerations developed by alarmists, extremists, and right-wing politicos. Ellen Tauscher has released [...]
The FAS Secrecy News blog finds that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) conducted an aerial radiological survey of downtown Washington DC in January 2009, prior to the presidential inauguration.
No statistically significant man-made radiological activity was detected in the survey. Typical variations [...]
Work has been a little heavier than usual, perhaps as government agencies try to complete their projects before the Christmas holiday incapacitates Washington DC. So I'm glad that Spencer Ackerman is on the job, watching the congressional hearings on Afghanistan.
But both McChrystal and Eikenberry replied that the administration [...]
The Washington Post reveals that Under Secretary of State Ellen Tauscher (Arms Control and International Security) is in Geneva, at the Biological Warfare Convention (BWC) talks, where she intends to reveal a new national strategy addressing biological threats. As is increasingly apparent with this [...]
Former Senator Bob Graham, half of the comedy team "Graham-Talent does World at Risk," referenced my blog in recent op-ed in the Miami Herald. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or annoyed. He was explaining how their little video decrying the use of [...]
I've been viewing with some amusement the flame wars going on between Matt Yglesias and Andrew Exum on the subject of think tanks and their culpability to the overall military industrial complex. Matt started with a Wired blog post by Nathan Hodge on [...]
I don't mean to sound off like an arrogant and ugly American, but it irritates me every time I hear President Obama or one of his administration officials state that there are 43 countries in the US coalition for Afghanistan. Bush and his administration used to say the same thing [...]
It's amazing to me that we're still talking about the federal government assisting states in the stockpiling of potassium iodide for the purposes of responding to a nuclear reactor incident or accident. But here we go again - from the NY Times:
After the terrorist [...]Last week, former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld claimed that he had never heard commanders in Afghanistan ask for additional troops during his tenure.
"I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006," Rumsfeld said. "If any such requests occurred, [...]
Well, I passed my fifth year of blogging this weekend. Officially it was December 3, 2004, when I launched this blog. My first real post was titled "Where are the WMDs?", just a few months after Charles Duelfer reported to the Congress that [...]
It's a popular statement for the right-of-center to claim that setting a date to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan is a mistake, especially if it is only a short 18 months away. The really insane ones talk about how the Taliban is going to wait centuries, [...]
Dan Gerstein has written an interesting book in his review of how the US government has reacted to the bioterrorism challenge over the past eight years. Gerstein wasn't traditionally a bioterrorism expert until he started taking the PhD program at George Mason University. [...]
Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat
If you have some time, listen to the Charlie Rose show titled "Live analysis of President Obama's address on Afghanistan 12/01/09" - there's no direct link, but you can access it under "recent shows." In particular, Dexter Filkins (NYT) and Martha Raddatz (ABC) make some very good points and are clearly [...]
Al Kamen reminds us of the hysterical Republican party's reaction to handing the Panama Canal over to Panama ten years ago - because it was just an insane idea that the US government wouldn't want to continue occupying a country with military and civilian [...]
I used to respect David Ignatius and enjoy his columns. I enjoyed his narration between Bret Scowcroft and Zbignew Brzezinski in "America and the World." Then he took a few helicopter rides with Gen. Petraeus and I think they replaced him with a pod [...]
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathy Sebelius has thought about all the challenges with getting the H1N1 vaccine out to the public, and she's convinced that many of the problems are due to the lack of modern technology. So she's called for a review.
"Today, [...]
I wanted to get back to William Owen's article in Armed Forces Journal. He's concerned that the military obsesses a bit too much on terminology at the cost of not appreciating the universal nature of war. And by "universal nature of war," he means [...]
For those interested, here's the WaPo coverage and the White House transcript. For the WMD crowd, here's the money shots:
"The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because [...]
2003: "bring this war to a successful conclusion..." good start. Oh, shit, he's pulling out the 9/11 argument. "to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network... we sent our troops into Afghanistan." So when do we invade Saudi Arabia?
2008: The Iraq war took the majority of our resources... no kidding. "we will [...]
... that the British political leadership was aware that the WMD intel was weak to nonexistent and still marched on to war in 2003.
Tim Dowse, the Foreign Office’s head of counter-proliferation at the time, said that in 2001 the threat from [...]
So in the true spirit of LBJ, President Obama is going to double down on the Bush decision to "muddle through" Afghanistan, because (as SecState Clinton said on Monday) we can't allow "an environment in which terrorist groups thrive" - as they already have in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, [...]
A report from the Senate's Foreign Relations committee suggests that SecDef Don Rumsfeld and General Tommie Franks allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. It was a deliberate decision not to engage with overwhelming force that was available and [...]
This video is dedicated to William F. Owen and all the true believers who attended the Army War College and believe in conventional combined arms warfare as the be-all and end-all. Yes, they really believe in this man's writing that much.
UPDATE: Sorry, didn't realise the video has [...]
President Obama has hit the "go" button to begin escalating the troop strength in Afghanistan by more than 30,000. Now for the rest of today and through tomorrow, you will hear from retired general officers and Republican politicians and right-wing pundits about how this was a Good Decision, and [...]
Major Robert Thorton at Fort Leavenworth provides his two cents on the recent media articles about retired general officers and flag officers providing mentoring advice to active duty officers.
As an active duty Army major, I have a different perspective on the use of senior mentors. I have seen [...]
Check out this dialogue between a person associated with the Army's Chemical Materials Agency and curious laypersons. It's pretty interesting and somewhat entertaining... the expert here is calling himself/herself "sniff," which is funny (considering the topic - sorry, we're all sick puppies).
mfriedm 16 points [...]
I really thought the day of the Neocon was over when most people admitted what a screw-up the Iraq war had been, from start to almost-finish. But here we have Fred and Kim Kagan gloating in the Washington Post about the inevitable "troop surge that [...]
Spencer Ackerman has found out what crap the made-for-television movie "The Plan" was, and he's not a happy man.
...what Plan did the Cylons have?
They were planning to destroy humanity. You know, the thing we learned in the very first episode of the fucking — [...]
