Alexander the Average

Updates

2011-12-26T13:35:00.003-06:00

I've migrated my online residence to http://www.krisalexanderonline.com/ where I'll be writing about national security, the book business, writing, my novel, etc.

My novel Servants of the Light is now available. More info here: http://www.servantsofthelightnovel.com/

A Comment About the Status of This Blog

2011-11-11T12:51:00.002-06:00

I have let this blog lay fallow for a long time. I used to have more time and energy to keep it up, but that was before kids and harder jobs.

If you're finding this blog because of something else I've written, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@kris_alexander) or on Facebook. Plus, stay tuned for my upcoming novel: "Servants of the Light".

A note about my status. I haven't updated the bio on the side, but I am now back on active duty in the Army where I am a Major. I am currently earning a Master's Degree in National Security Affairs at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey CA.

And, as always, my views are mine and mine alone.

In the Debate Trenches

2008-02-21T20:10:00.001-06:00

Should I have ironed my shirt? Not too much talk about defense and security issues. Boeing's stock might jump tomorrow morning with all this talk about the virtual fence.

I find it interesting that the "commander is chief" question has taken a launch excursion back into the health care issue, which is important. But, health care is a 300 meter target. Commander in Chief is a knife fight.

Okay, now we're back on track as our embassy in Serbia burns...

Rumble on the 40 Acres

2008-02-21T18:35:00.000-06:00

The opening ceremony is underway with rousing music from the UT Band and Choir plus some general windbaggery from UT types. (Remember I'm at Texas Tech grad--get your guns up!)

Let's take a look at how the candidates stack up on issue that are near and dear to my heart: defense.

Hillary:

End the War in Iraq

Fulfilling Our Promises to Veterans

Obama:

Foreign Policy

Veterans

Iraq

Homeland Security

And one highlight: Building a 21st Century Military

The Problem: The excellence of our military is unmatched. But as a result of a misguided war in Iraq, our forces are under pressure as never before. Obama will make the investments we need so that the finest military in the world is best-prepared to meet 21st-century threats.
Rebuild Trust: Obama will rebuild trust with those who serve by ensuring that soldiers and Marines have sufficient training time before they are sent into battle.
Expand the Military: We have learned from Iraq that our military needs more men and women in uniform to reduce the strain on our active force. Obama will increase the size of ground forces, adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines.
New Capabilities: Obama will give our troops new equipment, armor, training, and skills like language training. He will also strengthen our civilian capacity, so that our civilian agencies have the critical skills and equipment they need to integrate their efforts with our military.
Strengthen Guard and Reserve: Obama will restore the readiness of the National Guard and Reserves. He will permit them adequate time to train and rest between deployments, and provide the National Guard with the equipment they need for foreign and domestic emergencies. He will also give the Guard a seat at the table by making the Chief of the National Guard a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Random, Sensless Acts of Journalism

2008-02-21T16:24:00.001-06:00

As I posted at Danger Room (where I do most of my writing these days), I am covering the Austin Democratic debate as a *gasp* journalist. No, I haven't given up my day job, but hey if they'll let bloggers in, then why not?

My initial impression of the set up is pretty good. The logisitics of about 40 satilite trucks, security, credentialing, and chow even are daunting. I will not be on the debate floor. Instead they have a press areas/free speech zone. I'm in here with some serious journalists and publications--Forbes, The Economist. My seat is next to the crew from the Huffington Post, and Maureen Dowd--love her or hate her-- is in the room as well.

Here are some pics:

Misusing History

2007-09-06T16:41:00.000-05:00

Name the place:

War displaces the dominant economic and ethnic group from power and gives a previously oppressed ethnic group power and political enfranchisement. The invading Army, viewed as foreign occupiers, tries to impose order and rebuild the war-shattered land. The displaced former power group forms militias to resist the invaders and suppress the newly enfranchised ethnic group. Violence simmers for years.

Sound familiar? But, if you said Iraq, you’d be wrong. Try the American South during reconstruction. And how long did it take for “reconstruction” to work? When did the American Civil War really end? You could argue that it took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to finally bring the Civil War to a close—a century of reconstruction, a century of Phase IV. And we still struggle with race issues to this very day, and in some quarters, the wounds are still raw, and it will always be the “War of Northern Aggression”.

Recently, the President said in a speech before the VFW that "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'."

Predictably, his statements generated a storm of controversy on both sides of the political aisle, but nobody has really talked about what not withdrawing from Vietnam would have meant. My assessment is that had we not left Vietnam in the 70’s, we would still be there today, either in a role similar to our presence in South Korea or in a prolonged occupation of the North. Phase IV in Vietnam would have lasted for decades.

It is easy to misuse the lessons of history. In Iraq, the argument is that if we leave now, the country will descend into further violence and chaos. I have no doubt this is true. The killing fields of Southeast Asia may be repeated. However, history also provides more instruction on what staying in Iraq looks like. History tells us that Phase IV lasts forever.

And that is precisely the debate that we are not having. How long can we realistically stay in Iraq? How many lives and how much treasure are we willing to spend? How many decades are we willing to stay? That’s the question nobody is asking in any of the political debates.

Update: In a Fred Kaplan article in Slate Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations says that "the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years—and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble.""

Brave New War

2007-08-19T15:45:00.000-05:00

My blogging buddy Jason Sigger over at Armchair Generalist has a great review of John Robb's "Brave New War". I read the book a couple months ago and really enjoyed it. I also got to interview Robb for Danger Room. He's an interesting and scary smart guy. I highly recommend checking out the book his blog.

Echoing some of Robb's conclusions in this month's Armed Forces Journal, retired Army Lt. Col. Scott Morrison asks the question: "What if There is No Network?"

Al-Suri's pragmatic doctrine, based on his personal experiences as well as his astute observations concerning the post-Sept. 11 operational environment from a jihadist perspective, borrows heavily from the "leaderless resistance" concept initially promulgated by Col. Ulius Amos. Al-Suri's work, in essence, provides the impetus for a revolution in jihadist affairs by suggesting transition to a highly decentralized autonomous jihad with emphasis on operational security and a de-emphasis on formal structure. Similar to our own doctrine of mission-type orders and mission-type command, which borrows deeply from German auftragstaktik, there is little doubt that individual jihadists are already cognizant of the overarching ideological mission and intent of their global struggle. This universally understood concept forms the framework for strategically complimentary yet operationally unsynchronized offensive terrorist action.

I've been toying with the term WikiWar as a way to describe this emerging phenomena.

Not The Government Storms Los Angeles (Updated)

2007-08-18T23:43:00.000-05:00

Want to learn how make somebody's eyes roll, and I mean nearly completely roll over to the back of their heads like the finale of a Blue Angels' show? Here's my secret: Tell them that your baby sister and her husband moved to L.A. with "the band" to chase fame and fortune. Works every time. Hell, I nearly even blinded this dude in my unit. Traumatic eye strain.

But, seriously, It seems that the band aka "Not the Government" has booked their first show in LA after making the trek from Texas to California. It's at some place called the Knitting Factory which I'm guessing is filled with twenty-somethings in ironic clothes. My LA reader(s) should attend the show and tip generously. Buy lots of T-shirts. Worship them like the rock gods that they are.

The good news is that my sister isn't totally assimilating to California. I asked her how she liked living in LA. Her reply: "It would be okay if it weren't for all the Californians." Sounds like Austin.

Update: This post is generating some nasty-grams in the comments sections and my email inbox. Some readers have taken exception to my tone. Yeah, yeah I get it. I'm old. I don't understand. Well, that's all bullshit. I do understand, and I'm a big fan of these guys too. It took a lot of balls to pack up the band and move to LA. And it showed a great deal of initiative and courage on the part of Brian, my brother in law. So regardless of whether or not they make it big, I think the band's display of commitment to their art speaks volumes about them as people. Everybody happy? If not, pound sand.

What Happened to the Civilian Reserve Corps?

2007-08-18T23:14:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year, the president proposed the creation of a Civilian Reserve Corps. I blogged about it. I've been eagerly awaiting news about its formation...and waiting...and waiting.

I've done some goggling about it, and it seems that Charles Rangel proposed something like this way back in 2005. I guess that he's still waiting...and waiting...and waiting.

I guess all the delays come down to this fact: our military, not our nation, is at war. Therefore, there is no incentive to create bold programs like this, especially at the end of an unpopular president's term. What short-sighted thinking.

According to the United Nation's Population Fund:

The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population will be living in towns and cities. By 2030 this number will swell to almost 5 billion, with urban growth concentrated in Africa and Asia. While mega-cities have captured much public attention, most of the new growth will occur in smaller towns and cities, which have fewer resources to respond to the magnitude of the change.

In other words, all future conflicts will revolve around urban areas, and the ability to keep cities up and running resides almost entirely outside of the military. Unpopular president and unpopular war aside, we ought to give some serious thoughts about how we fight and win the next war because its going to look a hell of a lot like Baghdad whether we like it or not.

Also, John Robb has some interesting things to say about life in the urban jungle.

The Laziest Blogger in the World

2007-08-18T22:33:00.000-05:00

I have to admit it. The Army's blogging rules/crackdown intimidated me a little bit so I started blogging less and less. I also started working on a couple other blogs including Intel Dump while Phil Carter was in Iraq and Danger Room at WIRED where I do most of my blogging now. It's an honor to be part of both sites, but they really aren't "mine".

The recent revelations that the military itself and not bloggers are responsible for more OPSEC violations, has given me some encouragement. I never really blogged about current operations or anything that remotely resembled them. So, I'm not going to worry about it.

Bottom line: my fan(s) can take heart. I'm going to start post here some more, especially on things that don't fit elsewhere. Big Brother can also take heart. I'm not going to talk about what I do in the military or any operations that I participate in.

I don't think that I'll be able to generate the volume that I was doing in the hey-day of my blogging. (if there was such a thing) But fan(s) might want to stop by from time-to-time and see what I'm ranting about.

Chlorine: Don't Call it a Comeback

2007-02-23T12:48:00.000-06:00

Cross-posted at Danger Room.

Chlorine is to WMD as Run/DMC is to rap: old school. The OG of WMD is making a comeback on the mean streets of Baghdad, and it isn’t good. Fellow Danger Room contributor Jason Sigger has pointed out the media hype that has followed these attacks. And he’s right so far. Chlorine is more hype than hurt, but it does at and ugly new facet to the war. So let’s put on our thinking hats and learn a little about our nasty little friend chlorine.

It’s everywhere and sometimes in large quantities. One of its primary uses is water purification so everywhere that there is water production, there is chlorine. Good news: in the US, Hazmat teams spend a lot of time dealing with it and training for releases. Lugging around a chlorine kit in a Level A suit is not fun (trust me), but dealing with chlorine releases is part of the curriculum for all Hazmat Technician training. There are releases, but fire departments with hazmat teams are ready.

This is not to say that these releases aren’t significant emotional events. According to the 2004 Emergency Response Guide (which every concerned citizen should know and love) the impact of chlorine release is as follows:

Small Spills			Large Spills
Isolate:	Protect Downwind:		Isolate:	Protect Downwind:
30 meters (100 feet)	Day:	Night:	240 meters or 800 feet	Day:	Night:
	.2 km or .2 miles	1.2 km or .8 miles		2.4 km or 1.5 miles	7.4 km or 4.6 miles

Isolate means block off the area and have people in the hotzone protect or shelter in place. Protect downwind has you either evacuating the population or protecting them in place. (And you thought duct tape and plastic was one big joke.) The ERG distances are a rough estimate intended as a starting point in an emergency. Weather and terrain impact what the gas will do.

A large spill in an urban area is bad news. Chlorine gas is heavier than air so it tends to hug the terrain in a vapor cloud, especially at night. Given the right weather conditions, it might take hours for a cloud to dissipate as it moves downwind or downhill. In the US, communities are prepared for this, but is the Baghdad Fire Department Hazmat team ready? I sure hope so.

Chlorine attacks the body in two ways: 1) as an inhalation hazard where it produces choking, respiratory distress, and at high concentrations our good friend pulmonary edema. 2) as a contact hazard where it burns eyes, mucous membranes, and even moist skin where it reacts with moisture forming hydrochloric acid.

According to my NIOSH pocket guide (another great document BTW), Chlorine is Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health at 10 parts per million. Air purifying respirators (gas masks) are recommended for escape use at concentrations up to 5 parts per million with the appropriate filter. The odor threshold for chlorine is about .3 parts per million. In other words, if you smell it, you have plenty of time to mask up and get the hell out, but in order to enter the hotzone and take care of business, you need to be wearing a self contained breathing apparatus and a fully encapsulated chemical protective garment. Level A all the way.

At the smell threshold, people might begin feeling other effects such as burning eyes and nose. People are chemo-phobic so even those who aren’t in an area of dangerous concentration will be worried. And the worried well often find their way to hospitals where they can overwhelm even the best emergency rooms.

So chlorine might not be a weapon of mass destruction, but it sure as hell is a weapon of mass effect. A large release done the right way can send a city reeling. The use of chlorine as a weapon indicates to me that the insurgents are adapting and upping the ante. Imagine living in a city where there are explosions, shootings, and mayhem every day of the week. Now, add poison gas to the mixture. Life in Baghdad sucks worse everyday.

If I were a planner in Baghdad right now, I’d get smart on hazmat in a hurry because I’m guessing that this is just the beginning.

Notes: I debated about writing about this for fear of giving the insurgents information that they can use. They have the internets too. Therefore, I have omitted any reference to how US Forces deal with this threat. All the information that I have used is available in open source. I hope any of the bad guys messing with this stuff die painfully in a green cloud of choking death, but that’s just me.

Also, Dick Destiny has in interesting post on this. He makes some good points about the domestic panic over chemicals. Like I said, people are chemo-phobic. In the US, we’d be better served with a robust education program about sheltering in place than spending billions on protecting chemicals that are basically everywhere. Communities near chemical plants have been doing this effectively for years. Paging Wally Wise.

Finally, the Chlorine Institute is a great resource for responders dealing with this substance. Hint, hint for all you Chemical Officers in the box.

The President Stole My Idea

2007-01-29T21:49:00.000-06:00

Here.

More here at GovExec.com:

Kris Alexander, who writes a blog at DefenseTech.org, part of a membership-based organization for the military community, wrote Wednesday that he presented a similar idea last year at a symposium of the Army Combined Arms Center Combat Studies Institute.

Alexander's presentation centered on the haphazard system that he said fills many of the military's nation-building stability and support slots with just 7,000 military reservists who are not recruited specifically for their skills. "In effect, we are relying on a crapshoot to determine if we have the skilled professionals we need in the military to rebuild war-shattered nations," he said, noting that the system relies on the hope that the veterans who joined the Army years before have acquired applicable skills like police work and firefighting.

Alexander suggested that many Americans would be eager to serve their country through a broader civilian reserve program. "They would train like reservists and be available for deployment like reservists," he wrote. "They would join with the understanding that they could be put in harm's way."

Of course, its not just my idea. But, a high ranking source (I'm sure with his tongue firmly in his cheek) said to take credit for it.

Full set of my slides are here.

Fixing Phase IV

2006-07-10T15:53:00.000-05:00

Blogger’s Note: I’m back. Insert lazy blogging excuse here. Actually the truth is that I went and got myself back on active duty…errr…well kind of. I joined the active guard and reserve program. So I’m still home in sunny Austin, TX but just wearing different clothes to work. I’ve been busy transitioning careers, and the blogging policy where I’m at is a little unclear. That's the cause of the slow down. I’ve been hesitant to seek clarification lest I get a cease and desist order, but I figure blogging about this topic is okay.

I’ve been shooting my mouth of in the blogosphere for over a year now, and I guess somebody finally listened. Myself, Bobby Bran, and a couple other smart guys submitted our ideas for a panel at the 2006 TRADOC/CSI Military History Conference this summer at Fort Leavenworth. I’m pretty excited. LTG David Petraeus and Andrew Krepinevich are scheduled to be speakers.

The name of our panel is “Breaking Out of the Box” and is intended to be a discussion on how the US can better organized itself for support and stability operations. The tentative title of my presentation is: “If You Build It They Will Come: The Case for Establishing Standing Reserve Civil Affairs Packages for Nation-Building and Security Assistance Operations”.

My bright idea centers on the fact US military and government is not particularly well structured for “Phase IV” operations—that nasty “nation building” thing that we don’t do. The military is well adapted to enter and survive in zones of conflict. We second to none when it comes to blowing things up and breaking things. But, then what?

The truth is that our efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan have stalled, and the way our military and government is structured is partially to blame. We’ve wished away the nation building problem, and it’s biting us in the ass. Soldiers don’t necessarily posses the skills needed to do all the things it takes to win in “Phase IV”, and the governmental entities like USAID, although they are in the fight, aren’t “expeditionary” in nature. And military civil affairs is often stretched to thin.

What’s needed is a force to bridge the gap between military and civilian skill sets. We need a force that the military controls and doesn’t have to rely on other agencies to use. We need a way to “crowdsource” the American people. We need to create reserve civilian augmentation force to military that taps into the deep reservoir of skills that our nation possesses.

The type of person that I envision recruiting for this effort is someone who is already well-established in their career or profession-- the type of person who is unlikely to join the military or become a pay-for-play contractor, but who wants to help their country. These people would be afforded the same protections of the soldier and sailor relief act, and organized along the lines of provincial reconstruction teams. The teams would be task organized around the different regional combatant commands like CENTCOM.

The teams would be a mix of military and civilians and train to be experts in their regions. They would participate in team-building exercises like Cobra Gold, and be available for the military to use without having to say “mother may I” to the rest of the government or worse having to hire contractors.

Team members would have specialties such as agriculture, education, emergency services, small government, business, public health, utilities, information management, etc.

Of course, the military does have soldiers with these skill sets, but it’s hit or miss when or how you get them. A guy like me could join a civil affairs team and be educated to manage a certain program that I may not be an expert in. I could help you set up an emergency management program, but judging by my brown-thumb landscaping skills, I would not be the right guy to manage an agriculture program. My idea would allow the military to recruit, train, and retain, the right tool for the job. A guy who is an agriculture professor at an institution like Texas A&M is unlikely to elect to go to basic training, but given the opportunity, he might lend a hand by joining a program like this.

So what do you think? Would you join something like this? If so, what skills would you bring with you?

Noblesse Oblige

2006-04-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

Prince Harry, now a second lieutenant and infantry platoon leader in the Household Cavalry, may be kept from duty in Iraq. He's not happy about it.

“There is no way I am going to put myself through Sandhurst (military academy)and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country,” he said.

I suspect that Harry didn't need the money for college (if that's how it works in England) so he joined because he wanted to be a warrior and believed in service. In an era where the elite universities in this country try to ban military recruiters, perhaps we can learn a little from the Brits.

Movie Plot Threat Contest (Updated)

2006-04-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

From Schneier on Security:

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie. Let's kick this up a notch.

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.

Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

Post your movie plots here on this blog.

Judging will be by me, swayed by popular acclaim in the blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. And if I can swing it, a phone call with a real live movie producer.

Cool.

Note to reader(s): I've been away for a few weeks doing "AR-MEE TRAINING, SIR". I'm back now, and have dug myself out from "inbox hell". More blogging to follow.

Update:

Here is my plot idea:

Spring Break Nightmare

Every year 130,000 spring-breakers flock to South Padre Island, Texas. Wet t-shirt contests, Girls Gone Wild video crews, and drunken debauchery take over the island for the entire month of March. At night, many of the college kid make the trek to nearby Matamoros, Mexico, a border-town famous for catering to drunk Americans. This is higher education at its best, and usually, all the kids take back with them are sunburns, hangovers, and maybe some incriminating pictures. This year will be different.

Several teams of young men have slipped into Mexico disguised as students and business travelers. They are Al Qaeda operatives specially trained and selected because they don’t look Middle Eastern. These men have been recruited from all over the Muslim world. Some are Asian, some Bosnian, others are disaffected North Africans from the Paris ghettoes. Most of them do not look distinctly “Arab”, and they do not hold passports from any Middle Eastern Countries. Some have been in terrorist camps in both the Philippines and Malaysia. Others have actually attended college in the US. They all speak English and are conversant in the college lingo of “facebook” and “myspace”. They blend.

By twos and threes, the teams make their way to the border. They rent a hotel room in Matamoros and don college t-shirts and flip-flops. . They are ready to be martyred, and they won’t even have to cross into the US to do it.

They have carried with them several small aerosol containers of weaponized smallpox acquired on the Russian black-market. One afternoon, just a spring break in beginning to heat up, they face Mecca and pray. Next, they inhale a mist of virus from one of the containers and spray it on their clothes. Then they hit the clubs, human smart bombs on the attack.

For the next two weeks, as the disease incubates in their bodies, they act like all the other drunken college kids. They do tequila shots and keg stands. Some freak dance with some hotties from Texas Tech. Others get lucky with some girls from Arizona State. All the while they are spreading smallpox both through physical contact and by spraying more of the containers in crowed areas.

After two weeks, the terrorists begin to get a rash. The disease is now as its most contagious stage. Next comes the white pustules, and then a painful death or at least permanent disfigurement. It's time for Phase II of their plan. Attack North.

That night, the teams split up make their way individually to the international bridge with all the other kids headed back to Padre Island. This is the moment that all your tax dollars have been building up to. Will these two men get caught at the border?

For once, everything goes right, but it’s too late to matter. Acting on information collected by the CIA and passed to the Department of Homeland Security, the customs agents on the border detain several of the terrorists. Some slip past, but it’s a coup for homeland security as they have seemingly disrupted an attempt at terrorist infiltration. The terrorist who are caught are detained in the Cameron County jail while the feds decide what to do with them. They come in contact with guards and other prisoners—more targets courtesy of the US government.

The terrorists are sick, but nobody notices. The next day the FBI takes custody of the suspects and begins to question them. Two days later the suspects develop white pustules all over their bodies. A doctor is rushed the holding facility.

Within the hour panicked alerts begin to flash across the country. Smallpox. The nightmare is here. Simultaneously, clinics at college campuses throughout the country begin seeing students with flu-like symptoms. Some of them have rashes. In Mexico, the same thing is happening.

The US has now been under biological attack for two weeks. On the way home from spring break, the infected college students have passed through every major airport and traveled along every major highway in the US. Mexico is now collateral damage in the global war on terror. The clock is ticking on a biological time bomb. Now what?

Comments:
Benefits: You can cast young, good looking people as the spring breakers. You can have the Jack Bauer-type who “saves” the day by figuring out that the infiltrators are trying to cross the borders. Then you get a lot of cool doomsday “hotzone” stuff with smallpox outbreaks across the country.

Drawback: Bringing in the attack under the $500K price would be hard. You could get the teams trained and in place with that amount of money, but acquiring the smallpox would be tough. We would have to assume that the smallpox was acquired on a separate budget line item.

Shop and Awe

2006-03-01T10:33:00.000-06:00

Note: This post was originally supposed to run in the Washington Monthly, but the piece got killed. It has been kicked around for a while to other publications with no takers so I decided to blog it instead. It was growing stale, and I wanted somebody to actually read it. Another random act of journalism committed by yours truly. Enjoy.

Shop and Awe

During 2003, I was an intelligence officer assigned to CENTCOM in support of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. I worked hard to win, but the military machine of which I was a tiny part can only secure a partial victory. If U.S. trade policy were better adapted to the post 9/11 world, we might ultimately win by dropping more currency than cruise missiles. Call it “shop and awe”.

I spent the initial phases of Iraqi Freedom in Qatar. Right after, we had declared “mission accomplished”, CENTCOM lowered the force protection level enough for a few of us go exploring the in the souk, or market, in Doha, Qatar. Two of us wandered into a shop selling beautiful Persian silk rugs.

“You are American soldiers?” the proprietor asked in accented English. Damn, the haircut gives us away every time.

“Yes sir,” I replied. “Where are you from in the world?”

“Iran,” he stated glaring defiantly from under his turban--a challenge probably borne from watching too much “reality” TV on Al Jazzera.

“Really?” I replied. “It’s too bad our two countries don’t get along better. My grandfather spent some time in Iran, and he loved it.” (After thirty years in the Air Force, his military adventures are so much better than mine.)

It wasn’t the reply he was expecting, and the glare turned into a quizzical stare. I started looking around. My family has several nice rugs from my grandfather’s travels so I know a little about them. I showed my buddy how the weave in the silk makes them appear to change colors based on the angle you look at them.

I told the proprietor that we didn’t make anything like this in America, and that I was impressed. He smiled, and hate gave way to him offering me a special price. I almost bought one, but even with the discount they were still a couple grand. I told him that I couldn’t buy one without asking my wife first. He laughed. Some truths are universal.

For a brief moment, I was an ambassador of American consumer culture. And who knows, maybe the money from the sale would have gone to the “right” Iranians. I could have helped fund some nascent democracy movement.

But, that’s the problem isn’t it? How do we put money into the hands of the right people spurring growth and development in countries whose main export commodity is suicide bombers? The answer to the terrorism problem is a multi-faceted one, but so far, we’ve mostly sought military solutions.

Our country has not pursued a strategy that capitalizes on all our assets. We have the most powerful military in the world and have not been hesitant to use it. We also have the world’s most powerful economy but haven’t leveraged it into the fight. We should be pursuing policies that capitalize on the success of several private sector companies and jump start the economy’s of strategically important regions helping to create a bigger middle class in the Middle East. But, myopic US and European trade policy is standing in the way of total economic commitment.

Last year, Bob Dukelow, a now-retired senior civilian pentagon intelligence analyst with on the ground experience in Afghanistan, began looking into new strategies to win the GWOT. He heard about an area on Overstock.com called “worldstock” where they sell goods from developing countries like Afghanistan. Bob concluded that Overstock, and companies like it, had a role to play in our counter-terrorism strategy.

“Venues like this create better opportunities for local craftsmen in remote areas to get their products to markets they normally would not reach,” Bob says. “We can pull these craftsmen and their families into the functional core of the world's economy lessening the chance they will fall prey to the rhetoric of fundamentalist terrorist recruiters.”

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne agrees that he and his company have a role to play. Overstock’s niche is normally selling large volumes of discounted goods over the internet. They are the web equivalent of an outlet mall. But, with worldstock, Bryne seems to be committed to using a large part of his business for purely altruistic goals. Plus, he actually travels to the locations where worldstock gets its products.

“I was in Afghanistan 15 months ago. One day through a misunderstanding I found myself stranded in a Hazara village west of Kabul, and after a little bit in the open I was getting way too much attention paid to me. Just about then a convoy of tanks and military vehicles came driving up. I never thought I’d be so happy to see a tank in my life.”

Not something that you’d find on the curriculum of the average MBA program, but then again, neither are Byrne’s goals. He wants to use his company to do the same thing for third-world craftsmen that he is doing for discount electronics and apparel.

“We don't make a big deal about it, but our Worldstock is not about making profit,” Byrne says. “The goal is the artisans.”

Byrne believes that by giving a venue to craftsmen he has helped create 15,000 jobs worldwide —1,500 in Afghanistan alone. Byrne believes that the private sector is uniquely suited for roles like this. He says that he has not coordinated his activities with any government organizations, but would like to see the government “help raise awareness of the successes/achievements of organizations such as Worldstock.”

And Overstock in not the only business doing this. A small chain of stores called Ten Thousand Villages does the same thing but with a lower profile. Run on Christian principles by the Mennonite Central Committee, these stores sell craft-goods from the developing world. It’s the same stuff that you’d find at a Pier1 or Cost Plus with one difference. These stores operate under the ideal of fair trade and are “designed to benefit artisans, not to maximize profits”. Cruelty-free consuming.

Company marketing director Doug Dirks has worked at Ten Thousand Villages for twenty years. “Our goal,” Dirks says. “Is to give people work and steady incomes to create stable communities. We are not donation driven or subsidized. We operate like a business, and try to help connect people to larger businesses.”

When asked if his company has a role to play in combating terrorism Dirks says “that’s not a specific goal, but we have noticed an increase after 9/11. People come to us saying that they came here because we’re trying to work with other cultures and bridge the divide.” Dirks also sees his company assisting the economic enfranchisement of people in the countries where Ten Thousand Villages operates. “We can’t do massive programs, but we can help connect people who are left on the economic fringes. We help connect them into the economy and plug them into the influential circles in their own countries.”

And Ten Thousand Villages operates on the fringes like those it is trying to help. “We aren’t plugged into other systems,” Dirks says. “We haven’t worked with USAID because there are too many strings attached. People know what they need to do with their money, and they don’t need extra assistance deciding what is best for them. Just like in our society. We actually end up cutting ourselves off from our supplier base because most people spend money on education so their children move beyond being craftsmen.”

Of course, crafts goods don’t drive powerful economies, but if the trends that Doug Dirks is seeing hold true, then the economic enfranchisement of artisans may help to create a middle class in developing nations. This middle class could form the nucleus of an investor class that may spur industrialization and further economic development. And this is the point where the developing world runs afoul of our trade policy. We haven’t pursued policies that capitalize on ideas like worldstock.

Brink Lindsey, an economist with the Cato Institute believes our policies ought to change. He says that agriculture and textiles manufacturing are the bottom rung of industrialization, but that US and European trade practices are hindering countries that are strategically important in the war on terror from getting on to that bottom rung. “US trade barriers are bad on September 10, 2001,” Lindsey says. “But they are brain dead and ridiculous today.”

Lindsey points to the success of a US/Jordan trade policy known as “Qualified Industrial Zones”. Started under the Clinton administration, this policy gave duty-free access to certain Jordanian goods. From 1999-2002 benefits from this trade policy represented 4% of the Jordanian GDP. But, this policy is not part of any greater plan or policy implemented since 9/11.

“Inadvertent consequences of US trade policy have impacted Muslim countries,” Lindsey says. “The Bush administration has signed free-trade agreements with smaller countries like Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco. And, Bush has announced that he would be willing to sign more free trade agreements with countries like Egypt as long as they open up to US products and implement reforms.” But, Lindsey says that will take too long and is too dependent on actions from other countries that may not move at the pace we need them too. He advocates unilateral duty free agreements with countries in the greater Middle East.

Economist Edward Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute agrees. “In trying to pick winners with our trade and tariff policy, we’ve created losers,” Gresser says. “In 1980 Muslim countries accounted for 13% of the World’s exports. Now it’s about 4%.”

Gresser believes that our protectionist trade policy is hurting us strategically. “What’s galling about the policy is that we’re protecting industries without jobs,” Gresser says. According to Gresser, there were about 2.4 million US workers in the garment and textiles industries in 1970. Today, globalization has forced these jobs offshore, and there are only a few hundred thousand US workers in these industries—less that .5% of the total work force—and the numbers decrease every year.

Compare this to Pakistan where 4 million workers are in these industries. Currently Pakistani garments and textiles are subject to 10-20% tariffs giving a trade advantage to countries like China. Gresser says that Europe is more lax on textile and garment tariffs but notoriously protectionist on agriculture goods—an economic one, two punch for developing nations.

In 2003, U.S. Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced legislation that would have created a trade preference program for countries of the Middle East. The legislation didn’t go anywhere. Edward Gresser thought it was a great idea. “McCain-Baucus didn’t depend on any other country for action, and it would have made a difference in strategically important countries,” Gresser says.

Tom Friedman may be right. The world is getting flatter, but there are still some steep hills between the developing world and the standard of living and personal freedoms that we enjoy in our country. People stuck down in the valleys get angry and that makes violence just as much a commodity of globalization as Indian call centers. But some guy like my Iranian friend who believes that he is getting a fair shake out of the New World Order is less likely to end up needing a JDAM parked on his head by some guy like me.

For instance, we are spending millions trying to eliminate opium in Afghanistan without providing enough of an alternative. Pistachios used to be one of Afghanistan’s main crops, so why doesn’t the president have a bowl of “freedom nuts” on his desk to promote Afghani agriculture? Hell, it worked for jellybeans.

So, four years after 9/11, why did our government spend so much political energy promoting CAFTA while ignoring trade with the Greater Middle East? Is the economic development of Guatemala more important than Pakistan? And why aren’t we demanding that the Europeans open up to agriculture imports? Currently the Iraqi and Afghani economies are clawing their way back into life. When they re-enter the global economic stage, will they run aground on Western trade policy?

The countries where we are trying to spread democracy need concrete evidence of our commitment to their long-term well-being. Last summer, the Bush administration fumbled around with the idea that we are no longer in the Global War on Terror, or the GWOT. The new term was GSAVE, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. It’s all empty semantics without real changes in our policy. Parts of the private sector are getting it right. Why can’t our government?

After 9/11, we were told to keep spending and traveling so the terrorists wouldn’t win. With some adjustments to our trade policies, we might have been on to something. So go buy a rug, and strike a blow for freedom. I know a guy in Doha who will give you a deal.

Brokeback Barracks

2006-02-27T10:24:00.000-06:00

RSS and news aggregators can sometimes turn up odd things. This is what my google news aggregator turned up for "US Army" today:

US Army Charges Gay Porn Stars

The US Army has charged seven of its most elite paratroopers for appearing in a military-themed gay porn website engaging in sex acts.

The soldiers face court-martial and discharge on charges of sodomy, pandering and engaging in sex acts for money. They will also be discharged under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy which states that “homosexual conduct is incompatible with military service.”

The seven troops are members of the elite 82nd Airborne Division, trained to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. Four additional paratroopers have been given non-judicial punishment for participating in the website.

The website does not make any reference to the division in which the soldiers who appear serve, but promises that the gay pornographic images it contains are of “real US soldiers”.

Jeff Gannon could not be reached for comment. "Airborne, All the Way!" now has a creepy new meaning. I'm guessing that some poor company commander out there is has been having a really long week.

Learning is Winning

2006-02-16T09:46:00.000-06:00

Progress.

TALL AFAR, Iraq -- The last time the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment served in Iraq, in 2003-04, its performance was judged mediocre, with a series of abuse cases growing out of its tour of duty in Anbar province.

But its second tour in Iraq has been very different, according to specialists in the difficult art of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign --fighting a guerrilla war but also trying to win over the population and elements of the enemy. Such campaigns are distinct from the kind of war most U.S. commanders have spent decades preparing to fight.

In the last nine months, the regiment has focused on breaking the insurgents' hold on Tall Afar, a town of 290,000. Their operations here "will serve as a case study in classic counterinsurgency, the way it is supposed to be done," said Terry Daly, a retired intelligence officer specializing in the subject.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.

The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq. As he described it, his approach was like that of a football coach who knows he has a group of able and dedicated athletes, but needs to retrain them to play soccer.

Understanding that the key to counterinsurgency is focusing on the people, not the enemy, he said he changed the standing orders of the regiment to state that in the future all soldiers would "treat detainees professionally. "During the unit's previous tour, a detainee was beaten to death during questioning and a unit commander carried a baseball bat that he called his "Iraqi beater."

"Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," McMaster said he told every soldier in his command. He ordered his soldiers to stop using the term hajji as a slang term for all Iraqis, because he saw it as inaccurate and disrespectful. (It actually means someone who has made the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.)

Boldness:

He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who didn't seem to understandthat such changes were necessary.

The lingering problem:

Even now, McMaster said, he understands that his success is "fragile." The city's mayor, Najim Abdullah Jabouri, is unhappy that McMaster and his unit are leaving Iraq this month. "A surgeon doesn't leave in the middle of the operation!" the mayor said intently to McMaster over a recent lunch of lamb kabobs and bread. He waved his finger under the colonel's nose. "The doctor should finish the job he started."

McMaster and Hickey tried to calm him down. "There's another doctor coming," Hickey ventured. "He's very good."

The mayor wasn't mollified. He said he has seen other American units here before, and they didn't coordinate with Iraqi forces like McMaster's has. "When you leave, I will leave, too," the mayor threatened. "What you are doing is an experiment, and it isn't right to experiment on people."

This reminds me of one of my favorite military books, The Battle for Hunger Hill. If you can learn and adapt, you can win.

NSA scandal got you worried? Then, I ADVISE you read this.

2006-02-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

Total information awareness lives! From the CS Monitor:

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
***
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.
***
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

I’m leery of this on a couple different levels. First, it seems like it would be easy to screw up. Last night on Olbermann’s Countdown the “Worst Person in the World” was a toss up between a bank and DHS because they froze the bank accounts of some nuns under provisions of the patriot act. Why? Because of they didn’t have the right info on file. And the track record of the “no-fly” list doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy about this type of program either. What happens if ADVISE and the no fly list are linked? Sorry sir, you bought a copy of the wrong book from Amazon so you can’t board the plane.

Of course, I can see the intelligence utility of such a program, but I can also see the civil liberties pitfalls. In our increasingly connected world, our society needs to think about these things. How will our government exercise independent oversight of ADVISE? Or will it be like NSA programs and be so highly classified that anyone outside the intelligence community won’t be able to see what’s going on? Perhaps we should start electing people to congress who already have Top Secret clearances.

Finally, I wonder if this is not yet another example of our country’s over-reliance on technology to try to solve its intelligence problems. UBL probably isn’t clicking around on Amazon. The bad guys are smart enough to adapt to the environment in which they live. They know when our satellites are passing over. They know that we monitor their communications and work to counter that. They’ll counter this too. I’m not saying that something like this won’t produce useful intelligence. I’m sure it will, but we’ll still be left with gaps.

The key to success in the counter-terror fight is Human Intelligence and cultural adaptability. ADVISE will be mining tons of data, but how many of its operators will speak Arabic? Not many based on our thru-put for language training. ADVISE may be able to tip or cue the intelligence community that something might be happening, but without a robust HUMINT follow through, you’re just jousting electrons.

Udate: DefenseTech has a great post on this. There is a great comment on the post as well:

I wonder how well the data mining stuff can work.

I once read the Earth Liberation Front's "How to Commit Arson" document
(I worry about the Dirt-First types and cyberattacks).

They focused a lot on how to avoid traceability through electronic
records (purchases, etc). If a bunch of shaggy, granola eating, firebombing,
hummer-burning treehuggers can figure it out, couldn't Osama & co?

Airborne Ranger...Democrat?

2006-01-17T22:40:00.000-06:00

Today, I’m doing something a little different and committing a random act of journalism.

David T. Harris in an Iraq veteran running for the congress in Texas. Part of the “Fighting Democrat” movement, Harris’ candidacy represents a break from what you would normally expect from someone wearing a Ranger tab on his left shoulder. I contacted Harris, and he agreed to an interview that focused mainly on defense and homeland security issues.

Tell me a little about yourself. How did an Airborne Ranger end up running as a Democrat in a predominantly “Red” area of Texas?

I have a very persuasive wife. LOL. Actually, I have always been involved in one way or another in politics. We settled in Texas after getting off of Active Duty in September 2002. I was mobilized in January 2003 with my Reserve unit for the war in Iraq. After returning from Iraq in March, 2004, I really immersed myself in local politics and worked on several campaigns to highlight my experiences of the war and to tell people I was I have a Democratic voting record in 3 states and in 2004, my wife and I were both County, State, and National Delegates for Texas.

Tell me a little bit about your war experience. What did you do? How do you think the reserves and guard are being treated?

I was a Logistics Officer for a Military Police Battalion. Our main missions were area security and convoy security over a 500-mile area of responsibility from the border of Kuwait to Ad Diwaniyah. I can tell you from personal experience that Reserves and National Guard were treated like second class citizens at the mobilization stations and over in theater. We had to fight for everything – from basic necessities like water and clothing to repair parts. It was sickening to see our soldiers doing the same missions as Active Duty soldiers but with equipment that was twelve years older and a lack of resources. I can go on for days about how we were treated but I will spare you for now.

How do you think things are going in Iraq? Did you agree with Rep. Murtha’s call for a quick withdrawal?

We have a very long way to go before we can even think about declaring Iraq a success story. My initial thoughts are things have gotten worse, not better. I am sure there is progress being made in some areas of the country but what else is there for us to do? We have found no weapons of mass destruction, we captured Saddam Hussein, the new Iraqi Constitution has been written, and we have seen the voting on it. What else is there for us to do? I don’t agree with Rep. Murtha totally, but I do think we need to set a timetable for withdraw. What people don’t understand is the insurgency is there because we are there, not the other way around. The longer we stay, the more it will grow because every sympathetic, wanna-be terrorist that wants to take a shot at an American knows he can go to Iraq to do it. We need to give the Iraqi’s a date and tell them that we will not be there forever and that it is time for them to take control over their future, until we do that there is no will on their part to fight.

Can you elaborate a little more on the idea of a withdrawal timeline?

My point about the timetable was that we have set a timetable for everything else that we have engaged in Iraq: Invasion, establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the hand-over of power from the CPA to the newly formed provisional Iraqi government, the Iraqi elections, the establishment of the Iraqi Constitution, and the voting on the Constitution. We need to put a mark on the wall to tell the Iraqi populace that we are not going to be in their country forever, because until we do, the Iraqi government will not be truly legitimized in their minds. We need to look at force structures and base our timetable on a combination of time, security, and political stability. The focus should be on time because the other two will not be achieved for years to come, if ever. Whether six months, a year, or five years - we MUST set a deadline for withdraw from Iraq. We can still base a large contingent in Kuwait or surrounding countries and with the Army's effort to create more rapidly deployable Units of Action (UA). This can be a validation of that concept. As a military officer I have always been taught that for every operation or mission there must be a task, purpose, and end state in order to have a reasonable expectation for success. The end state has not been articulated in Iraq and until it is, we can never truly achieve success or claim victory. The one underlying assumption of President Bush's plan for victory in Iraq is the Iraqi security forces to be robust enough to defeat the insurgency and secure their country. I don't see that ever happening - we are the most powerful military on the planet and we have the most professionally trained soldiers, airman, sailors and marines, yet we still cannot defeat the insurgency. So how is it that we can expect the newly formed Iraqi Army to do this when our Army that has been around for over 230 years cannot?

What do you think the geo-political implications are for our involvement in Iraq? What are the long-term implications of success…or failure?

I think we have completely damaged our geo-political reputation around the world. We are no longer seen as the beacon of hope that countries used to look up to us for. Given the current state of affairs in Iraq and our reputation for torturing we cannot lecture on the world stage with any sort of credibility for a long time to come. We lied about intelligence, we lied about intent, we have tortured, and we have spied on our own people. How do we convince anyone to follow us in the future? We have already failed in Iraq – there I said it. We had a small window of opportunity to make a difference and we squandered it. We are occupiers, even if we continue to tell the world we are not. We have not lived up to our pre-war promises and now the longer we stay; the more the Iraqi populace will want us gone. They want their country back and we need to honor that – we can no longer be the keepers of their destiny.

As a legislator, how do you think you can influence how the GWOT is conducted? How would you have voted in the run-up to the Invasion of Iraq?

I know I could ask the hard questions of the administration as it related to funding, equipment, intelligence, planning, and the long-term goals on the ground. I would hope to produce legislation that properly equips and supports our military members and their families BEFORE we commit to a conflict. I would also push for cooperation with our allies in times of peace, not just in times of crisis. I can’t say for sure how I would have voted at the time. Knowing what I know now, there is no way you can convince me this war was justified. I would have had some hard questions about Afghanistan and its completion before giving the President the authority to wage war on Iraq.

How do you feel about the US treatment of prisoners in the GWOT? What are you feelings on torture? Would you vote for the McCain amendment?

It’s criminal, that’s the bottom line. We get outraged as a Nation when we have people captured and we expect the enemy to treat them humanely, but what do we show the world – torture and degrading treatment of enemy prisoners. It is total hypocrisy. That is why we have the Geneva Conventions – the protectors of humanity while engaged in combat with another Nation. It is the only hope that soldiers have if captured; the hope that the enemy will abide by the articles of the Geneva Conventions. By torturing those from other nations, it sends a clear message that the protections under the Geneva Conventions don’t matte.

How do you think we’re doing in Afghanistan? Is it truly the “forgotten war” or are we on the right track?

I think we are doing considerably better in Afghanistan than Iraq today. With that being said, I think we missed the opportunity for success to capture Osama Bin Laden long ago in the hills of Tora Bora. We took our eye off the ball in order to go into Iraq. Just imagine what 150,000 plus troops on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan could do to really catch the guy responsible for the 9-11 attacks. I think we either need to commit to the effort there 100% or get out. We cannot continue this long, protracted war on two fronts indefinitely. If we really wanted to catch Osama Bin Laden, I think it would have happened long ago. My conspiracy side says this is just another way to keep Americans scared and believing in the GWOT; the fact that OBL is still out there – planning, waiting to hit us again. One thing for sure, the defense contractors are loving G.W. for this.

Four years after 9-11, many Democrats believe that we are not as safe at home as we should be. Do you think this country is on the right track regarding Homeland Security? As a legislator, what would you do?

Anyone that believes we are safer at home because we are fighting two wars on the other side of the world needs to get a good dose of reality. Hurricane Katrina exposed the Federal government and showed the American people they have been lied to for the last four years. If anything, Homeland Security has taken a turn for the worse because we taking funding away from the departments that need money here at home to fund the never-ending war in Iraq. As a legislator I would make sure that when money is budgeted for programs, it stays with that program and does not get sucked up by some discretionary clause tucked away in the funding bill.

In congress, you will control the purse strings of the military. Do you think military spending is on track? There have been lots of arguments that our military spending for future programs does not reflect reality in the world. What do you think?

I think the military can do a better job with spending. I have witnessed gross mismanagement of money and budgets throughout my career and especially in Iraq. I think we really need to do a worldwide threat assessment and target our spending to mitigate emerging threats that will affect us over the next 10-15 years. I think we really need to look at our contracts we have on the table for future weapon systems and make some common sense decisions on feasibility. We have the most powerful military in the world, yet on 9-11 nineteen men with box cutters brought this Nation to a stand still. In Iraq, we can’t defeat the growing insurgency even with all of our smart weapons, intelligence, and the best soldiers in the world - that should tell you something. Bottom line, we are missing the mark.

If you could give our readers a list of five books that should be on their required reading list what would be on it?

Bill Clinton’s “Between Hope and History”
Richard Haass’ “Intervention”
Harry G. Summer, Jr.’s “On Strategy: A critical Analysis of the Vietnam War”
Kenneth N. Waltz’s “Man, The State, and War”
Calvin L. Christman’s “America at War”

Note: Blogging normally lends itself to a high degree of partisanship which I try to avoid. This interview or related blog linkage does not imply any endorsement, agreement, or campaign collaboration on my part. I thought it was an interesting thing to do so I did it. Welcome to the new journalism.

Cross-posted on Intel Dump.

Afghanistan Highlights for 2005

2006-01-11T11:04:00.000-06:00

Reuters has an excellent summary of what happened in Afghanistan in 2005.

Here's what happened on my birthday:

7 July - The Afghan government and the United Nations celebrated the end of the disarmament and demobilisation phase of the UN-backed Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) as the last ex-militia member was disarmed at a ceremony in the capital, Kabul, on Thursday. "I am proud to have surrendered my arm to the president of my country, I hope I will now join the reconstruction Jihad [holy war]," said Jalalludin, a former officer of the 717 Kabul brigade and the last Afghan ex-combatant in DDR. He was speaking immediately after surrendering his AK 47 to president Hamid Karzai as a symbolic move to mark the formal end of disarmament.

On that day, my head was surrendering more hair in the my loosing Jihad against my encroaching middle age.

An Army of One...IQ Point?

2006-01-10T13:53:00.000-06:00

Fred Kaplan has an interesting piece in Slate:

Three months ago, I wrote that the war in Iraq was wrecking the U.S. Army, and since then the evidence has only mounted, steeply. Faced with repeated failures to meet its recruitment targets, the Army has had to lower its standards dramatically. First it relaxed restrictions against high-school drop-outs. Then it started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the armed forces aptitude test—a group, known as Category IV recruits, who have been kept to exceedingly small numbers, as a matter of firm policy, for the past 20 years. (There is also a Category V—those who score in the lowest 10th percentile. They have always been ineligible for service in the armed forces and, presumably, always will be.)
***
The evidence is overwhelming. Take tank gunners. You wouldn't think intelligence would have much effect on the ability to shoot straight, but apparently it does. Replacing a gunner who'd scored Category IV on the aptitude test (ranking in the 10-30 percentile) with one who'd scored Category IIIA (50-64 percentile) improved the chances of hitting targets by 34 percent. (For more on the meaning of the test scores, click here.)
***
Smarter also turns out to be cheaper. One study examined how many Patriot missiles various Army air-defense units had to fire in order to destroy 10 targets. Units with Category I personnel had to fire 20 missiles. Those with Category II had to fire 21 missiles. Category IIIA: 22. Category IIIB: 23. Category IV: 24 missiles. In other words, to perform the same task, Category IV units chewed up 20 percent more hardware than Category I units. For this particular task, since each Patriot missile costs about $2 million, they also chewed up $8 million more of the Army's procurement budget.

Well, duh.

Right after graduation from college my first military assignment was as a recruiter for the Army ROTC Battalion at Texas Tech. Basically, I was in a holding pattern until I shipped to infantry school and being a "Gold Bar Recruiter" was a way to keep me off the streets and out of trouble.

Part of my job was visiting high schools and talking to guidance counselors and teachers about ROTC and seeing if they had any students who might be interested. I was always amazed at the dregs of the student body that I would end up talking to. There seemed to be this belief that the Army was only a fit for dummies, losers who couldn't hack it in the real world. Never mind that I was recruiting for college ROTC which required some degree of intellect. (Insert Texas Tech joke here.) It took a lot of effort to explain that the Army wasn't a good fit for people who could barely read or didn't have the wherewithal to graduate from high school. And now look where we're at.

This policy will bear fruit for decades to come. Dumb fruit. If anything we need to be recruiting in the opposite direction. You're not good enough, cool enough, or smart enough for my Army. That approach has worked with my own company. I'm very selective as to who I will take as transfers into my unit, and I let the recruiters know not to put any dummies in my company. This has had ripple effects. People want to join our unit because they know we won't take just any one. The soldiers feel good to be part of an organization with standards.

What really scares me is that we might be recruiting more Lyndie Englands.

LT Smash on the Attack

2006-01-09T16:12:00.000-06:00

I don't always agree with all his politics, but I really admire the way LT Smash boldly stands up for what he believes in. He is one of the few guys out there who will actually engage the opposition in a battle of wits...and comes out on top.

His latest post is where he engages Congressman Bob Filner in a town hall meeting is classic:

SMASH: Sir, I've been there --

FILNER: And you know, your brothers and sisters killed, something is wrong. ...And, you know, if we shouldn't have been in there to begin with, then it should not be incumbent on me to try to define getting out.

But I would say, that an international police force, which could keep the peace, it would -- that if we should put that in place at least --

SMASH: Led by whom, sir?

FILNER: The United Nations.
(applause)

SMASH: But, who provides the troops, sir? ...Every international peace force that's ever been of any substantial size, has been led by the United States. There is no other --

FILNER: Well, you know, it doesn't have to be, because it was in the past. But, the British have shown that they want to put troops in, we've got all kinds of --

SMASH: They're already there, sir

Read the whole post. It nicely sums up what I feel is wrong with my end of the political spectrum. The congressman sounds like an earnest guy who is just flat doesn't know his ass from a ~~hole in the ground~~ Iraq. If democrats/liberals/progressives (whatever we're calling ourselves this week) are serious about being in power, then they've got to get serious about the issues of the day. The Cindy Sheehan camp has to quit driving the train. If (we) they don't like how the administration is doing things, come up with something better. There is no workable liberal foreign policy solution to our problems. Wishing that the UN would come in an make it all better just won't work.

Hook 'Em Horns!

2006-01-04T23:25:00.000-06:00

I'm a Texas Tech** grad, but you've got to give the Horns props. Some days its just plain good to be a Texan.

Now, I'm waiting for the riots to begin here in Austin...

**Note: Alabama? We couldn't beat Alabama?

Is Texas Burning?

2006-01-04T10:47:00.000-06:00

There is a saying here in the Lone Star State: "If you don't like the weather in Texas, wait five minutes."

It seems like five minutes ago we were fighting Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Hurricane season is over, but mother nature is still in the fight. Drought and weather have given us a one-two punch of perfect conditions for fires. Last week the small city of Cross Plains burned. And there have been multiple fires throughout the State.

From the latest Texas Division of Emergency Management Situation Report:

The State of Texas in the last 24-hour period responded to 20 fires statewide. 26 homes were lost and 8 homes were saved. Texas aircraft flew 659 missions dropping in excess of 806,780 gallons of fire retardant. Since December 26th, there have been 159 fires burning approximately 254,555 acres. For the same period, there have been 238 homes lost (reduced from 278 previously reported due to more detailed investigation of damaged areas) and 250 homes saved.

Texas is currently mounting a massive response
with Local, State, and Federal Resources.

Local governments are also in action declaring disasters,
burn bans, and banning New Years fireworks.

Coordinating this massive effort is the best little agency you never heard of, The Texas Forest Service. The service only has about 350 employees but is a massive force multiplier in any emergency response. Click around their website and you'll be impressed.

Oh and by the way, if you're a smoker who feels compelled to throw your cigarette butts out the car window, you're the dumbest kind of dumb ass. You start fires and put lots of people at risk. One county in Texas had a volunteer firefighter severely burned putting out one of these fires. He's spending the New Year in the burn unit at Brooks Army Medical Center.

New China Blogger

2006-01-03T13:16:00.000-06:00

Last summer, I introduced you to Tanya, a college student majoring in Asian Studies at Swarthmore. She will be spending the spring studying in China. Tanya always has some interesting things to say, and she's started her own blog.

Her latest post is interesting:

Democracy may be coming to China, but if it does, there is little indication that it will come for the reasons that the West expects or that it will take the shape that the West demands. If democracy comes to China, it is unlikely that it will come as a result of a rising tide of Western-style human rights awareness.

I don't know jack about China so I'm looking forward to seeing more from the latest addition to the blogosphere.

Happy New Year, Ya'll

2005-12-31T19:54:00.000-06:00

It's been one hell of a year, and it doesn't look like the pace is going to slow down any time soon.

I believe in New Years resolutions. Last year's went okay. But, a goal is not a goal unless you declare it, right?

So here's what's on tap for 2006:

Be an excellent dad and husband.
Publish another magazine or newspaper article.
Score a 290 or above on the Army Physical Fitness Test. I worked on getting in better shape in 2005. I'm down to the same pants size and weight that I was when I graduated from college ten years ago. Now, I need to smoke some 2LT ass. (2LT B this means you, smart ass!)
Get promoted to Major and deserve it. (I'll think I'll save the field grade lobotomy for 2007.)
Work on my fiction writing. For those of you who didn't know, I'm an aspiring novelist. I've written the best novel you've never read. Actually, it needs a lot of work. This year, I get it done.
Cut back on the Diet Coke. Anyone who knows me knows what I'm talking about.
Start graduate school. Texas State University has a campus in Round Rock TX where they offer a degree in Public Administration with an International Relations focus. I figure I'll just blog my dissertation. That will work right?
Learn something that is new and unnecessary.

Sounds like an OER support form. Any of my reader(s) want to share their resolutions for 2006? And if any of you out there are literary agents, feel free to email me.

Dude, You're So Grounded...

2005-12-30T16:31:00.000-06:00

I wrote for my high school newspaper too, but I was never this ~~idealistic~~ crazy:

A 16-year-old from Florida who traveled to Iraq on his own without telling his parents has left the country and is on his way home, the U.S. Embassy’s consul general said Friday.
***
Using money his parents had given him, he bought a $900 plane ticket and took off from school a week before Christmas vacation started, skipping classes and leaving the country on Dec. 11.

His goal: Baghdad. Those privy to his plans: two high school buddies.

And he actually ended up in Baghdad. Nuts.

Houston's Katrina Crimewave

2005-12-28T08:49:00.000-06:00

According to the Houston Chronicle Mayor Bill White is seeking funds from FEMA to pay police overtime after a spike in crime attributed, in part, to Kartina evacuees.

From the Chronicle:

Concerned by a spike in homicides and other violent crime in certain neighborhoods, Houston Mayor Bill White Monday called on FEMA to fund a $6.5 million task force to focus on "hot spots" for crime.
***
While White and Police Chief Harold Hurtt emphasized that the uptick in crime is not solely attributable to Hurricane Katrina evacuees, White said the Federal Emergency Management Agency should pay the bill because of the strain the 100,000 to 150,000 new residents have put on the Houston Police Department.

Houston Police Department has created Neighborhood Enforcement Team Task Force to help curb the crime. Houston has asked FEMA to pay for the program. (You can read more about the Task Force here.)

The task force is the second program to increase police presence that the city has unveiled in recent weeks, amid concerns about manpower and a swelling homicide rate — up nearly 25 percent over last year and 70 percent this month.
***
Many of the problem areas fall in southwest Houston, particularly in apartment complexes housing numerous Katrina evacuees, White and Hurtt said.

"Crime is unacceptable, especially the murder rate, in some of these hot spots," White said. "We had criminals here before the evacuation and we had some more criminals here after the evacuation."

The task force will be staffed by officers working overtime between Jan. 1 and July. Their work load will be equivalent to adding 150 officers to the force, Hurtt said.
***
Katrina evacuees have been linked to at least eight of the 121 homicides in the city since they began arriving in September, Hurtt said.

Analysis: This makes sense. When I did some googling on this issue, I found some fairly repugnant postings attributing the race of the evacuees to the crime spike. Race doesn't have anything to do with it. You add over a 100,000 people to a city, and you are going to have a corresponding increase in crime. The problem isn't race. It's that the federal government is breaking new ground with this issue.

FEMA's funding mechanism is designed for disaster response, not instituting community policing programs. However, Houston's program directly stems from the disaster, and the federal government is asking a city to do something that it has never really done before: take responsibility for the long-term care of people who are not citizens of the City or State where they were evacuated to. The evacuees aren't leaving any time soon, if ever. Houston is stuck with providing care and services for the duration.

I wonder what other upsurge in costs Houston is experiencing. Judging from the evacuees poverty level, I'm guessing that there has also been an upsurge in unpaid medical costs. Are they going to ask FEMA to pay for this to?

Mayor White said if the Feds don't come through then he is seeking recourse from the State of Texas which probably doesn't have the funds either. Maybe he should send Governor Blanco the bill.

Related: Slate has a good article on the recovery effort in NOLA.

DHS's Ugly Birth

2005-12-22T11:07:00.000-06:00

Homeland Security Watch has an excellent post on the birth of the Department of Homeland Security.

I think we're still feeling the affects of the flaws that were built into DHS's inception. Basically, its become the giant check-book in the sky instead of a dynamic organization that actually helps me do my job. I'll take the money, but that's about all I get in added value. It also added a cute layer of extra bureaucracy that came to fruition during the Katrina response.

Measuring the Consequences of Failure in Iraq (Updatedx2)

2005-12-21T14:05:00.000-06:00

The issue of whether or not we can win in Iraq is being hotly debated in this country. Rep. John Murtha’s demand for withdrawal and the subsequent period of news cycle domination lead to heated discussion in the MSM and blogosphere. This seems to have sparked a candor offensive from the administration where the crux of the president’s argument is that regardless of how we got into Iraq “failure is not an option”.

The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq states:

Failure is Not an Option.
Iraq would become a safe haven from which terrorists could plan attacks against America, American interests abroad, and our allies.
Middle East reformers would never again fully trust American assurances of support for democracy and human rights in the region -- a historic opportunity lost.
The resultant tribal and sectarian chaos would have major consequences for American security and interests in the region.

And it’s not just the administration saying it. In a recent editorial, Henry Kissinger said, “if, when we go, we leave nothing behind but a failed state and chaos, the consequences will be disastrous for the region and for America's position in the world.”

In a November press release, Sen. John McCain stated: “We must get Iraq right because America’s stake in that conflict is enormous. All Americans, whether or not they supported American action to topple Saddam Hussein, must understand the profound implications of our presence there. Success or failure in Iraq is the transcendent issue for our foreign policy and our national security, for now and years to come. I would submit that the stakes are higher than in the Vietnam War.”

And in November upon return from a trip to Iraq, Sen. Joseph Liberman said, “the cost of successfully completing our mission here will be large in terms of American lives lost and money spent, but the cost of failure here would be catastrophic for us in the U.S. and for the Iraqis, of course -- and I believe for the entire Middle East.”

Of course, there is dissent, and the immediate withdrawal argument still has political traction. In New York, Jonathan Tasini is running against Hillary Clinton. He argues that they reasons against pulling out are myths and states that “the troops must be brought home now.”

The media, both new and old, is filled with endless gas-baggery about what got us into Iraq in the first place. Of course, this debate is important to a robust and vibrant democracy, but it doesn’t solve our problems in Iraq. This month’s elections seem to indicate progress. The initial results seem to favor Shia dominance, but there still remains the possibility of a political compromise.

Whether or not we ultimately achieve our goals as outlined in the president’s strategy remains to be seen, but it is clear that none of these goals will be achieved if we pull out now. So what are the second and third iteration effects of failure? What makes defeat “catastrophic for us in the U.S. and for the Iraqis, of course -- and I believe for the entire Middle East”?

There are two possibilities for failure in Iraq: catastrophic and creeping failure.

Catastrophic failure is the worst case scenario made most possible by a mishandled withdrawal from Iraq. The result is a full-scale sectarian civil war which sucks in the rest of the region. Many argue that the civil war has already started, but it is contained to a simmering conflict—car bombs and assassinations. Catastrophic failure looks like Afghanistan after the Soviet pull out in which, by design or circumstance, the rest of the region becomes players.

Iran has an interest in what happens both because of the religious connection the Iraqi Shias and the overall desire for a stable neighbor. Iran’s desire to insure a favorable outcome could resemble Pakistan’s desire for a stable Afghanistan. The end result? In Afghanistan it was the Taliban. In Iraq the result might be a government that resembles the increasingly radical, nuclear ambitious, Iranian theocracy.

And the other nations in the region, or non-state actors within them, won’t stand by while this happens. Radical Sunnis will probably provide support to the Sunni minority in its fight against the Shias. Sunni governments would abhor the idea of Shia dominance and would seek to thwart Iran’s ambitions. Chaos and instability is the result.

Iraq has already become a terrorist breeding ground, and the violence has spread to Jordan. In catastrophic failure, where does it spread next? Saudi Arabia is a logical next step, and the hardest wildfire to put out once it starts.

Will Saudi’s security forces, sitting on 25% of the world’s oil reserves, be able to handle battle-hardened terrorists fresh of the Iraqi battlefield? There is also an oppressed Shia minority in Saudi. Do they get sucked into the conflict? Then there is the other oppressed group in Saudi: foreign workers. There are several million in Saudi, and after years of abuse, how easily could they be radicalized? (The movie Syriana has a great subplot illustrating just how this could happen.)

And don’t expect the West to rush to stabilize Saudi Arabia. The Europeans will probably lack the political will to act, and a US intervention would just invite more hostility. US forces have completely withdrawn from Saudi, and their return would be an AQ recruiting boon. We could effectively end up trading one unpopular occupation for another but this time with Mecca and Medina thrown into the equation. But, something would have to be done or the results for the global economy would be disastrous.

A destabilized Saudi Arabia would spell trouble for its neighbors. How long before the chaos spread to tiny Qatar who possesses the world’s third largest natural gas reserves? Or Kuwait? Or Yemen which has already had problems with extremism?

And don’t forget the Kurdish wildcard in the Iraqi civil war. The Kurds have long desired a country of their own. Currently, they are marketing themselves as “the other Iraq”. A civil war would give them the chance to succeed from Iraq and establish Kurdistan. This would embolden the already repressed Turkish Kurd minority.

Historically, Turkey has responded harshly to Kurdish ambitions. A similar response to a renewed drive for a greater Kurdistan might jeopardize Turkish membership in the European Union. European rejection of Turkey would further isolate the Muslim world from the West and may spur further unrest in Europe’s Islamic minorities. Iran also has a large Kurdish minority, and Iranian suppression of the Kurds may also further distance Iran from the West.

This encroaching chaos would undermine U.S. credibility and influence throughout the South Asia and the greater Middle East. Democratic reform, economic development, and women’s rights would all take a back seat to “stability”. And how will the 600 pound, nuclear armed gorilla—Israel—react to all this?

In order to avert this chaos from spreading, taking hold, and disrupting the world’s economy the US military would be forced to remain in the region in large numbers. Leaving Iraq would not mean leaving the Middle East.

The second, more probable but less dramatic, possibility is creeping failure. In this scenario, the US leaves too soon before the Iraqi government and military are truly viable entities. Iraq sputters along for a few years with an ambient level of sectarian and ethnic violence. Eventually, democracy is traded in for the “stability” of a renewed dictatorship.

This dictatorship could be a return to Sunni dominance or, more likely, an Iranian backed Shia state where the roles of oppressed and oppressor are reversed. The Kurds will again retreat into Kurdistan. The rest of the region will react accordingly, and the US will most likely be forced to retain a large military presence in the region to keep the peace. Countless lives and billions of dollars will be spend will no progress to show for it—strategic failure.

There have been arguments that the U.S. survived the strategic failure of Vietnam, but that comparison is imperfect. Vietnam was never the centerpiece of the Cold War. The defense of Western Europe was. Right or wrong, the Bush administration has made Iraq the centerpiece in the global war on terror, and pinned success in that struggle to success in Iraq.

At whatever point we declare “Victory in Iraq” and leave, there is no assurance that all or some of these negative possibilities won’t come to fruition. The U.S. has unleashed something in which it cannot be sure of the final results. However, there has been a great deal of intellectual immaturity and insensitivity in the debate about Iraq.

Many who do not support the administration and its policies have not yet come to grips with the consequences of failure. Loosing Iraq might discredit the Bush legacy and be a serious reversal for the conservative movement in this county. The reward may be electoral victories, but the consequences for this country would still be grave. Whoever replaces the conservatives in power would inherit a discredited American foreign policy and a destabilized Middle East. It will take decades to make it right.

It is possible to politically distance yourself from the president and his policies while still striving for a favorable outcome in Iraq. The intellectual valid outcome for any debate about Iraq should be an improved policy which sets the stage for a successful exit, not a haphazard withdrawal. The mature voices on the left side of aisle understand this, but the galling idea of trading tactical political victory for strategic defeat still has traction. The nearly casual approach with which this strategic defeat is relished in some circles is maddening.

We have sacrificed over 2,000 American servicemen and untold numbers of Iraqis in this endeavor. While we can disagree with what got us into Iraq, their blood is the currency on which we trade our political barbs. A robust debate on what got us into Iraq is necessary as a check and balance for future military interventions, but the cynical certainty with which some dismiss this sacrifice bodes ill for our country and for the world. Are we that willing to condemn millions in the Middle East to chaos and barbarism? Do 2,000 lives mean nothing?

The administration has been criticized for painting too rosy a picture about the probable outcome of the Iraqi invasion and has made grave mistakes in the occupation. They did not understand the consequences of their actions. Yet, the administration’s critics are guilty of the same intellectual falsity in their lack of a sober assessment of the consequences of failure. There is a difference between accepting a risk and gambling. Staying in Iraq means accepting the risk that things may end up turning out badly no matter how hard we try. A botched withdrawal means rolling dice with the strategic future of this country—an unacceptable gamble for future generations.

Update: Bobby has a great post on Iraq over at his blog. Worth reading.

Second Update: John over at Democracy Arsenal has a good post that asks the question: Is Iraq simply immersed in the darkness before a painful dawn, or have things really slid off the rails in such a profound way that it makes sense for the United States to begin a careful withdrawal?

Note: I have cross-posted this piece on Intel Dump, the much more popular blog to which I am a contributor. I expect that there will be a lively debate in comments section, and my reader(s) are invited to the fray.

Transforming at Glacial Speed

2005-12-19T14:02:00.000-06:00

According to the CS Monitor, "U.S. doctrine moves away from solely emphasizing the waging and winning of wars". Here.

Key details:

With little fanfare during the past few weeks, the Pentagon has rolled outone of the most significant changes to military doctrine since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The policy directive recently signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declares that the job of planning and training to win the peace after a war is now virtually as important to the military as the conflict itself.

The document marks a sea change from the ideals of the past, when the military was loath to take on any responsibility beyond waging and winning wars. Indeed, it suggests that the Pentagon increasingly sees Iraq and Afghanistan as templates for wars of the future, with success hinging not only on military superiority, but also on the ability to reconstruct failed states.
***
"The [Pentagon] directive will help ensure that the Department of Defense develops the capabilities required to meet future stability operations challenges as part of an integrated US government effort," says Jeffrey Nadaner, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for stability operations, by e-mail.
***
The Pentagon has so far rejected the idea of special stability-operation units in favor of plans for a more general indoctrination of all troops. And that should not interfere with the military's dominance on the battlefield, writes Mr. Nadaner: "The effort to improve the balance between stability and combat operations should not undermine the warrior ethos, which is the foundation of armed forces."

But there are some doubts:

But especially at a time when the Army is accepting more recruits who make substandard scores on aptitude tests, some analysts wonder whether the new approach asks too much. "There is a point beyond which it isn't practical to expect so many different things from the same group of people," says Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the Lexington Institute in Arlington.

Already, the Army has been asked to become more flexible, more agile, and more intelligent to make up for the decreased size of the force since the end of the cold war. The new directive could call on it to fundamentally change its culture and training: Each new hour of stability-operations training could mean an hour of combat training lost. No longer are they simply machines of war, grinding toward some military objective. Now, they are to be intermittent instruments of peace, as well.

The problem, suggests Dr. Thompson, is that "people who are good
killers tend not to be good mediators."

Remember kids we don't "do" nation building except when we "do" nation building. It's good that DOD is acknowledging the need for this change. How it reflects in how units are structured, trained, and equipped remains to be seen. The quote that "people who are good killers tend not to be good mediators" probably has some validity. One of the key points that has come out of some of the Katrina after action reviews that I have heard is that the "tactical" types were not always a good fit for operations in the disaster zone. Jailers tended to work better because they had more experience dealing with people and their myriad problems. So do paratroopers make good peace keepers? Maybe not.

I think the military ought to invest more in creating units that are capable of operating in the "three block fight" environments. We somehow have to bridge the gap between the Special Forces teams that are built for this fight, but are too few to handle a large chunk of territory like Iraq, and the larger civil affairs units which are mostly concentrated in the Reserves and not build for combat. The Provincial Reconstruction Team concept may be a good start. The military ought to begin to formalize these topics in its training. I've graduated from a ton of Army schools, and not one of them had a formal civil military operations component.

I also think the federal government beyond DOD has a role to play in this. Our government has no "expeditionary" component beyond its military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. However, there is certain expertise that does not reside in any of the entities. USAID does some heroic things, but does not particularly function well in non-permissive environments. Perhaps we need to start looking at military units that have a mix of federal civilians on them.

Change is coming, but we'll have to see how fast.

Historic Day

2005-12-15T08:56:00.000-06:00

Graphic from MSNBC

The Iraqis have started voting in their election. There have been reports of sporatic violence, but Sunni turn out appears to be high. From MSNBC:

Already, there were indications of a large turnout in the country's more than 33,000 polling stations, especially among Sunni Arab voters who boycotted the last election on Jan. 30.
***
Sunnis appeared to be turning out in large numbers even in insurgent bastions such as Ramadi and Haqlaniyah in an effort to curb the power of Shiite clerical parties who now control the government. Major insurgent groups had promised not to attack polling stations, and some polling centers in Ramadi were guarded by masked gunmen.

I came here and voted in order to prove that Sunnis are not a minority in this country, said lawyer Yahya Abdul-Jalil in Ramadi. We lost a lot during the last elections, but this time we will take our normal and key role in leading this country.

Teacher Khalid Fawaz in Fallujah said he also participated so that the Sunnis are no marginalizednalized.
***
This is the day to get our revenge from Saddam, said Kurdish voter Chiman Saleh, a Kirkuk housewife who said two of her brothers were killed by the ousted regime.

This is a key day for sucess in Iraq. If a viable, equitable government emerges from these elections, then we're just a little closer to sucess. If the Sunnis are given an equal chance, and feel that they have not been stripped of their power and their say, then this might reduce some of the insurgency. It worked for Sadr, and his Mahdi Army. It might also drain some of the support for the Zarqawi-types who are really just interested in destruction and not building Iraq.

My optimism is very guarded, but I'm hopeful for the Iraqi people.

POTUS Speech Open Thread on Intel Dump

2005-11-30T10:10:00.000-06:00

I've started an open thread at Intel Dump on the President's speech.

Here is what I had to say:

I just finished listening to the president’s speech. I think it was one of the better speeches of his administration. He did a good job of explaining some of what is happening in Iraq.

The first third of the speech was standard administration boilerplate. It’s the standard Iraq “chicken or the egg argument”. Was Iraq more of a thread before or after the invasion? Either way, we’re there, and we have to figure out a way to win. The middle part of the speech was the real meat of what he had to say, and he told me some things that I did not know about what the Iraqi security forces have accomplished. And that’s a problem. I’m a fairly well informed person. I should know these things. If the Iraqi security forces are doing as well as the president says, the administration better figure out a way to start showing that progress in order to instill confidence in both the Iraqi and American people. Why are there no embeds in Iraqi military units? We ought to be publicly pressuring media outlets like Al Jezzera to start showing what is happening. What the president had to say has an interesting juxtaposition to James Fallow’s story in this month’s Atlantic.

The final third of the speech was more boilerplate, but I did like what the president had to say about embracing the debate about Iraq. I also agree that the debate over Iraq is disconcerting for those in uniform. When I was deployed, there were protests in Austin, my home town. It made me angry, and I’m fairly left-leaning for a military guy.

My main fault with the president (hope I’m not violating the UCMJ here) is why did it take so long to start making these speeches? Why did it take so long for them to publish a public “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”? Maybe the political bruising that they’ve taken in the last few weeks has convinced the administration to finally engage with American people over this issue.

I’ve downloaded the Iraq Strategy and will post on it after I’ve read it. That I just typed that sentence speaks volumes about the age that we live in and the freedom’s we enjoy.

What are your thoughts on the speech? Personally, I’m wondering how long it will take before somebody accuses me of “drinking the kool-aid”. And Phil Carter is actually engaged in training the Iraqi Army so I'm hoping that he'll be able to post about this as well.

Feel free to join the fray.

Was Murtha Wrong?

2005-11-22T11:40:00.000-06:00

Rep. John Murtha's proposal was the political center of gravity last week and over the weekend. The end result was too much grandstanding and not any solutions. Yes, Rep Schmidt we understand that “cowards cut and run”, but it also takes moral bravery to tackle the tough issue of Iraq.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has actually read Murtha’s proposal and has an excellent roundup. He concludes:

So, the pertinent question becomes: What is the best way for redeploying? In other words, by what timetable (whether one is explicitly announced or not), after what political and military actions? How many U.S. troops should be left behind, and what should they be doing? Where should the others be redeployed, and under what circumstances will they move back into Iraq? Do we have any realistic strategic goals left in this war (one big problem in this whole fiasco is that the Bush administration never had any from the outset), and how do we accomplish them?

There's a very serious debate to be conducted in this country—not only about the future of our involvement with Iraq, but also about the use of force, the response to threats, the war on terror, the shape of the Middle East. John Murtha's proposal leaves open a lot of questions, but—seen for what it really says, not for how it's been portrayed—it's a start.

Kaplan also points to a study by the Center for American Progress that I am currently reading, and Bobby over at Bobby’s World has a good post on the issue.

So was Murtha wrong? Yes and no. The administration has argued against setting dates and timelines, but today, Iraqi leaders publicly called for a pullout timetable. Are they cutting and running?

And I have never understood why we haven’t set dates for certain milestones. We should set a date for when we are going to get power production back to pre-war levels. Deadlines drive results. As it stands, Iraq is too open ended without any way for the American public to measure progress.

I also see some truth to the idea that the very presence of American troops in Iraq is driving much of the violence. At some point, we become a burden to Iraqi peace and stability. If we truly are acting as regional terrorist “flypaper”, then it’s the Iraqis who are bearing much of that burden.

But, what bothers me the most about this “debate” is that Congress appears not to be living up to its end of the bargain. From the WAPO:

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

So basically they voted to send me to war based on “faulty intelligence” that they couldn’t be bothered to read. And now they are deciding the collective fates of millions of Iraqis and thousand of soldiers without any real debate or discussion of the issue.

Here’s what I’d like to see from our law-makers:

Hearings about the impact of US withdrawal. Seek testimony from both inside and outside the government. Invite regional political leadership from countries such as Jordan to participate.

A “Course of Action Comparision” discussing our options in Iraq.

Demands of a timeline for certain milestones such as power production.

Do you think there is any chance at all of this happening?

But, I think Murtha was on to something with his ideas about a quick reaction force in the area. There are many ways in which we can support Iraq with a reduced footprint on the ground.

Here’s how:

Airpower. Either carrier-based or out of Kuwiat or Qatar can assist Iraqi security forces where needed.

Intelligence. Most intel systems don’t produce much of a signature. Predators and other collection systems can be launched from Kuwait or other locations, performs their missions, and return home without the awareness of the average Iraqi. Analysis and production can be done at remote locations and then shared to the Iraqis.

Advisors and training. US forces can continue to build the Iraqi Army through the presence of low-profile advisors. Some of the training could be shifted to Kuwait or Qatar.

A regional quick reaction force (QRF) that can quickly be sent to trouble spots at the request of the Iraqi government. The QRF could consist of other things besides raw combat power. Intelligence, medical, and logistics support could be part of the package.

So what should we do? I have never been an advocate of cutting and running in Iraq. We’ve sacrificed too much to just leave. Plus, we owe the Iraqis and the greater Middle East a shot at stability. To some, failure is a foregone conclusion. I disagree, but I’d like to see more serious discussion from our political leadership as to how we succeed.

What’s troubling about Iraq is where I think we’re going to end up without a major shift in policy. We’ll have an Iraqi government whose continued viability is in question. Iraq will still be plagued by sectarian violence with Saddam’s brutality replaced by Zarqawi’s fanaticism. We’ll have a continued large scale military presence in the Middle East. Our troops will continue to be targets for Khobar Towers style attacks while also fueling the animosity that drives extremist recruiting. The Iraq intervention will not have solved the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, another roadblock to regional stability. In other words, its looks like we’re going to finish almost exactly where we started.

Iraq Open Thread on Inteldump

2005-11-01T22:42:00.000-06:00

I've started an open thread on Inteldump looking for new ideas on what we should be doing in Iraq. The goal is an intellectual knife fight where only the strongest ideas survive. Click here to join the fray.

A Grim Milestone and the Battle of Perceptions

2005-10-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

This week, on the day that the Iraqi constitution passed, we reached 2,000 casualties.

From msnbc:

The U.S. military announced the death of an American soldier wounded in Iraq on Tuesday, bringing to 2,000 the number of American service members killed since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A Pentagon announcement Tuesday said Staff Sgt. George T. Alexander*** Jr., 34, of Killeen, Texas, was wounded by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad and died in San Antonio, Texas, last weekend. Earlier Tuesday, the military announced the deaths of two Marines in fighting with insurgents last week in a village west of Baghdad.

The reaction in some quarters of the blogosphere was predictable although some were more balanced.

All this happened the day after the insurgents staged a “made for TV event” by detonating car bombs outside hotels that house journalists in Baghdad. The blasts were caught on camera, and the images dominated the news cycle until the 2,000 dead mark was hit. The passage of the Iraqi Constitution was forced into the background, and any positive reports about the passage were qualified with statements about the deteriorating security situation.

Again, reaction to the situation has been predicable, and polling numbers show that support for the war is down, way down. But, are things as bad as they seem?

The following slides are from the The Brookings Institution's latest Iraq Index and an Iraqi Opinion Survey conducted in July by the International Republican Institute. The numbers in Iraqi Opinion survey are a bit dated, but they still seem to be a fairly good representation of what Iraqis think.

Here is the data:

Slides 1-2: US casualties are getting lower. There have been spikes in fatalities, but the number of US wounded indicates that the US casualty rate is down. Of course, this could just mean that the insurgents are going after different targets.

Slide 3: Casualties on Iraqi Police and Security forces appear to be slightly declining as well.

Slides 4-6: There has been a spike in bombings and civilian casualties in the month leading up to the constitutional referendum, but up until then, the numbers were trending down.

Slides 7-8: In July, even as the security situation was slightly improving, Iraqis main concern was security, and many appeared to believe that their country was moving in the wrong direction. The spike in attacks may off-set any positive feeling generated by the passage of the constitution.

However, Slide 9 reveals that Iraqi remain optimistic about the future--at least for now.

Analysis: What does it all mean? Despite the 2,000 dead mark, things are incrementally getting better in Iraq, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Things are bad but slowly getting better. Iraqis still believe in their own future, but the insurgents retain the power to influence the perceptions of the Iraqi, US, and international populations.

In the US, people are not seeing real progress or positive “metrics” on the situation. I shouldn’t have to tease data out of think-tank reports in order to make an argument about our successes. This is information that our government should be talking about with a loud voice. We need a better way to address these issues than the same old rhetoric about “staying the course” and endless invocations of 9-11. There has been much discussion about the lack of a US strategy in Iraq. Do we lack an effective strategy or do we lack an effective method of communicating it? Ditto for communicating with the international community.

In Iraq, public perception is important to victory. If Iraqi optimism can be bludgeoned out of them, the insurgents can still win. So it’s a matter of continuing to try and shape public perception in Iraq. The bad guys are good at it so we need to be just as effective. Time will tell who is better, but the insurgents have the cultural home field advantage.

Some bloggers and pundits have said that 2,000 is just an arbitrary number not to be emphasized. But, the “grim milestone” has impact both emotionally and rationally. Emotionally 2,000 dead Americans looks like failure. Without effectively communicating what those 2,000 lives have purchased with their sacrifice, Americans will loose their will to fight. You can blame whoever you want for this, but its reality.

Rationally 2,000 dead means the insurgents are still very much in the fight. They still have the freedom to act. They still have the initiative and some measure of support within the Iraqi population. They believe that they can drive us out of Iraq if they can kill enough of us, and they might be right. A true indicator of success will be if we can go an extended period of time without a loss of life. That will allow us to break the insurgent’s gory dominance of the news cycle, but sadly we’re still a considerable distance from that goal.

***Note: SGT Alexander, as far as I know, is not related to me.

The National Intelligence Strategy

2005-10-27T11:29:00.000-05:00

The Director of National Intelligence has just released the National Intelligence Strategy for 2005. You can download the full 32 page document here. I’m going to take a look at it, and I might blog more about it. But, for now, here is what the press release says:

The Director of National Intelligence today released the National Intelligence Strategy for the United States of America, a publication that establishes the strategic objectives for the Intelligence Community.

“This strategy is a statement of our fundamental values, highest priorities and orientation toward the future, but it is an action document as well,” said John D. Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence. “For U.S. national intelligence, the time for change is now.”

The document sets forth the framework for a more unified, coordinated and effective Intelligence Community and was written in consultation with the relevant departments. Its publication coincides with the six-month anniversary of the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Outlining the document’s two types of strategic objectives – mission and enterprise – the strategy recognizes each Intelligence Community member’s strengths and competencies.

“At its core, this National Intelligence Strategy capitalizes on the extraordinary talents and patriotism of America’s diverse intelligence professionals, those serving today and those joining us tomorrow,” Negroponte said. “It relies on our nation’s tradition of teamwork and technological innovation to integrate the work of our distinct components into collaborative success.”

The National Intelligence Strategy will guide Intelligence Community policy, planning, collection, analysis, operations, programming, acquisition, budgeting, and execution. These activities will be overseen by the ODNI, but implemented through an integrated Intelligence Community effort to capitalize on the comparative advantages of constituent organizations.

Fiscal Year 2008 Planning, Programming, and Performance Guidance will reflect the mission and enterprise objectives. Ongoing program and budget activities for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007 will adjust to these objectives to the maximum extent possible.

Mission Objectives
As detailed in this strategy, mission objectives relate to those efforts to predict, penetrate, and pre-empt threats to our national security and assist all who make and implement U.S. national security policy, fight our wars, protect our nation, and enforce our laws. Missions objectives outlined in the National Intelligence Strategy are:

Defeat terrorists at home and abroad by disarming their operational capabilities, and seizing the initiative from them by promoting the growth of freedom and democracy.

Prevent and counter the spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Bolster the growth of democracy and sustain peaceful democratic states.

Develop innovative ways to penetrate and analyze the most difficult targets.

Anticipate developments of strategic concern and identify opportunities as well as vulnerabilities for decision-makers.
Enterprise Objectives
Enterprise objectives relate to our ability to transform faster than threats emerge, protect what needs to be protected, and perform our duties according to the law. Enterprise objectives in the National Intelligence Strategy are:

Build an integrated intelligence capability to address threats to the homeland, consistent with U.S. laws and the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

Strengthen analytic expertise, methods, and practices; tap expertise wherever it resides; and, explore alternative analytic views.

Rebalance, integrate, and optimize collection capabilities to meet current and future customer and analytic priorities.

Attract, engage, and unify an innovative and results-focused Intelligence Community workforce.

Ensure that Intelligence Community members and customers can access the intelligence they need when they need it.

Establish new and strengthen existing foreign intelligence relationships to help us meet global security challenges.

Create clear, uniform security practices and rules that allow us to work together, protect our nation’s secrets, and enable aggressive counterintelligence activities.

Exploit path-breaking scientific and research advances that will enable us to maintain and extend our intelligence advantages against emerging threats.

Learn from our successes and mistakes to anticipate and be ready for new challenges.
Eliminate redundancy and programs that add little or no value and re-direct savings to existing and emerging national security priorities.

You Aren't Reading This...

2005-10-26T15:47:00.000-05:00

The Stars and Stripes has an interesting article about military blogging and OPSEC rules.

Key grafs:

WASHINGTON — Army officials this week issued new warnings to soldiers about posting personal stories from combat zones on the Internet and taking photos at overseas bases, saying those actions could jeopardize troops’ security.

The list of prohibited activities includes taking photos of Defense Department facilities, posting any official Defense Department information and releasing information detailing job responsibilities.

“Whether it is a family Web page or a personal blog, safety and security measures must be strictly observed,” the message said. “Sensitive DOD information must not be divulged to the public at large for national security reasons.”

***

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said the goal isn’t to prevent soldiers from writing about their time in a combat zone, and said he knew of no discussions considering shutting down blog sites or banning the use of personal cameras.

But Boyce said soldiers need to know that simply taking photos could threaten operational security.

“We’re just re-emphasizing the danger here,” he said. “We have warned soldiers to please be extremely careful of any photography, especially street scenes, because they could be useful to the enemy.”

Boyce said shots of the aftermath of insurgent attacks or roadside bombs are especially dangerous, because insurgents could use them to gauge the effectiveness of their attacks.

***

Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker released a memo to unit commanders telling them to take the issue more seriously.

“The enemy aggressively ‘reads’ our open source and continues to exploit such information for use against our forces,” he wrote. “Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information to Internet Web sites and blogs. … Such OPSEC violations needlessly place lives at risk and degrade the effectiveness of our operations.”

Comment: Roger, got it. But, I wonder how much of this is about OPSEC and how much is about public relations. One blogger put it like this:

Course, they're attempting to control the flow of information, to control perceptions. There seems to be some other subterfuge, trying to smoke us out, shut us down, but you know what? It's a big-ass Internet... and my grasp of language is disproportionate to my ambition. Bottom line is, basically if you ain't passing out Teddy Bears or soccer balls to war orphans, DOD doesn't want to hear about it.

My take on it isn't quite that extreme, but it makes you wonder. I haven't seen too many of what I would consider OPSEC violations on military blogs. I've seen some good taste violations and some things written that would flat out piss me off if the blogger was in my chain of command. But, I don't think anyone has crossed the line into giving away too much that the enemy could exploit. It is a "big-ass" internet, and there is plenty OSINT (open-source intelligence) for the bad guys to collect. Most of it has nothing to do with bloggers.

I wonder if OPSEC is the Trojan horse that DOD will use to shut down more blogs with "objectionable" (read anti-war/military/administration) content. There have been warnings about this as well.

Unless they clearly cross OPSEC lines or spew genuinely offensive content, I think this would be a huge mistake to start shutting down blogs or making diluting them so they all read like DOD press releases. The American public remains largely disconnect from its armed forces, and military blogging provides unique perspective on what its like to serve in wartime. I'm willing to accept some pissed off E-4 ranting about how bad the Army sucks in order for people like me, MAJ K, and Phil Carter to keep getting our ideas out there...not that my ideas or writings are anywhere near as good as theirs. But hell, CENTCOM public affairs keeps pinging me and other bloggers to post links to them and their information so somebody has to think we're doing okay.

Plus, if we're going to start policing content, then is anyone going to say anything about the extreme political partisanship that is evident on many military blogs? In my (not humble) opinion, some of what my fellow military bloggers have to say about the people that they have sworn to protect is incredibly offensive. When I write, I am mindful of OPSEC and the military ideal of political neutrality. I have a political point of view, but I am very careful in how I share it. (Note: Go ahead and flame me for writing that. But, I wonder what the milbog content would have been like during the racial integration of the military or the civil rights movement. At the time espousing racially biased rhetoric would have been perfectly within social norms, but beyond the pale by today's standards. Think about it.)

I hope that these new policies don't mean the beginning of the end the end for military blogging or force it below the radar. I post under my own name because I take ownership of what I write. There is some risk in this. I accept it. I rather quit blogging than be anonymous or "factory approved".

Another Person to Add to the "Friends in Iraq" List

2005-10-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

Here.

Can Afghanistan Sustain Democracy?

2005-10-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to post about the recent parliamentary elections in Afghanistan for a while, but I got busy with Hurricanes.

The good news is that the elections went off with a minimum of violence, and the votes are still being counted with the final tally expected in mid-October. The Taliban and its ilk proved unable to disrupt the elections as they had threatened. There have been allegations of corruption and fraud, and fears that too many unreformed Jihadis will gain power. But, regardless of the flaws, this is a step in the right direction.

The only question is how long can Afghanistan keep it up?

The elections were a huge financial and logistical challenge which Afghanistan could not have done by itself. The total cost was upwards of $149 million dollars, and it required 1,247 donkeys, 300 horses, 24 camels, 1,200 trucks, 9 helicopters, and 39 transport planes to get ballots to the 26,250 polling stations around the country. There were also almost 3,000 external election monitors to insure fairness. All of this was provided or paid for by the US and international community.

According to the Asian Development Bank ***, Afghanistan’s GDP (excluding opium production) for 2004 was estimated at $5.4 billion. So, the election cost represents about 2.76% of the country’s GPD, and 24% of the government’s $609 million operating budget (2004 estimate). Scheduled at every five years, parliamentary elections will be a recurring expense. On top of this, Afghanistan is still a pauper nation, and its government depends on handouts from the international community in order to function. Free elections in Afghanistan are dependent on the continued generosity of the outside world.

The election also exposed a fault line in Afghani society. Illiteracy is so pandemic that candidates were identified by symbols or pictures. The ballot for Kabul was reported to be seven pages long. Many voters were also confused as to who they were voting for.

The literacy rate begs the question as to whether or not Afghanis are an informed enough electorate to make the kind of choices that we expect in Western-style democracies. Or will voting blocs fracture around ethnic and tribal lines?

And the elections are bringing something new to Afghani society: political campaigns. Candidates were officially limited to spending $15,000 (aprox. 641,550 Afghanis, a lot of money) on their campaigns, but how long will it take, if it hasn’t already, before “soft money” creeps into the Afghani electoral system?

Afghanistan is a cross-roads of competing ideologies and interests. Iran, India, Pakistan, China, the other ‘stans, the US, and the international community all have different ideas of what Afghanistan should look like politically. And don’t forget the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s continuing influence. They have money too. And opium production adds another estimated $2.8 billion a year to the Afghani economy so narco-trafficers represent a powerful “lobby” as well. How will these interests influence future elections, and are the Afghani people politically savvy enough to understand what is happening? And is the US smart enough diplomatically to prevent outside influence from interfering with its desired endstate for Afghanistan?

Democracy is beginning to take root in Afghanistan, but its hold in tenuous at best. The US needs to get beyond the backslapping, congratulatory phase of this struggle and start focusing on what it will take to sustain democracy in Afghanistan. We tend to by myopic on issues like this, and without a long-term agreed upon strategy for continued democratization, we will eventually fail. How long until the politicians decide that it is too expensive to bankroll Afghani elections while we area paying for other long-term expenses like the rebuilding of New Orleans?

There are some key issues that need to be addressed in any plan.

First is the long term financial support and economic development of Afghanistan. Afghanistan doesn’t need to live paycheck to paycheck on international aid. Perhaps we need to establish some kind of trust with the goal of financing Afghani elections for at least a generation. This needs to be coupled with economic development that weans Afghanistan off foreign aid.

Second, the long-term education level of the people needs to be addressed. The coalition is already doing great work by building schools, but we need to insure that we help create and educated, media savvy middle class as well. This means more things like university exchange programs or perhaps even an American University in Kabul. Another part of this is helping create a media system that is independent of tribal and ethnic lines.

And finally, the US people and our political leaders need to understand what’s at stake and the burdens that we signed ourselves up for by invading Afghanistan. Collin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rule remains in effect. The political winds of this country may blow right or left, but that does not need to impact Afghanistan’s long-term stability.

***Note: Estimates of the AFG GDP vary greatly, and I’m no economist. The CIA fact book has the GDP at $21.5 billion. The Asian Development Bank’s figures seemed to be more in line with other estimates so I went with their numbers. I am fully prepared to be “fisked” by all you financial gurus out there.

Cross-posted at Intel Dump.

Hurricane Wrap-up

2005-10-03T22:36:00.000-05:00

Things have returned to normal here. Texas is very much in the fight with recovery efforts, but I'm out of the Hurricane business for now. Overall, I'd give the state a C+. We got the job done, but we need improvement in certain areas.

I'm busy catching up on other stuff so posting will be light for a couple days. Here are some "action" pics from our end of the disaster. I'm just glad that they are not pics of my pecan trees blown down after tropical force winds hit Austin.

Yours truly in the EOC. (Note: I air brushed out my agency logo on the shirt and the badge on my hip. Security.)

The EOC in action. Lots of money went into this facility, and it paid off.

Whiteboard in action. This was from when we were trying to figure out how to get people who did not have cars back to their hometowns. I'm left-handed, and my handwriting sucks. That's actually the reason I "like" powerpoint. I can actually read what I write. This leaves me going "huh?"

EOC disaster supplies. Who bought all the sprite? No caffeine so it's useless. That will be sitting outside my office for months.

Life in the EOC is bad for you. I didn't gain any weight though. We've got an APFT coming up in NOV and I want to smoke 2LT B's bags. Have to show these twenty years olds who's boss.

First Reports Are Always Wrong

2005-09-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

Interesting Post called Katrina: Folklore vs. Fact

I can't believe anyone actually bought this one:

Folklore: Katrina cannibalism. "Black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive."

Fact: Nope.

Another rumor that I've been hearing is that Los Angeles affiliated gangs (Bloods and Crips) shipped in looters all the way from California that stripped the city bare. Supposedly they specifically targeted all the jewelry stores. I guess they needed some "bling".

I call bullshit on that.

I'm guessing that most of the jewelry store owners probably evacuated their wares or at least locked them up in fairly robust safes. So unless the gangs brought demolitions specialists with them, they probably weren't getting at any jewelry.

Plus, how did they get in? A pimped-out hovercraft?

There is an old adage in the military: "First reports are always wrong."

I'm just sad that people were so inclined to believe the worst about their fellow countrymen. That's the real cannibalism in this disaster.

Hurricane Rita: Post Landfall +48, The Misery Index Rises

2005-09-26T18:40:00.000-05:00

Houston and Galveston dodged a bullet.  The coastal oil and gas industry didn’t take much damage.  There won’t be a five dollar gas, and we can all breath a sigh of relief.  Unless you live in East Texas where things remain bad and aren’t going to get much better for several days, maybe even weeks.

We now face a cascading impact from the storm.  The storm has disrupted interconnected systems creating ripple effects throughout the region.  Power failures lead to water failures which lead to shelter failures.  Plus, we are having a record heat wave.  The cumulative effect is misery.

The State of Texas is now in a logistical fight.  How much logistical support can we generate in a short time to sustain thousands of people in a non-permissive environment?  Or do we start evacuating people again?

Here is the current situation:

Heat. Without power for air conditions and limited water supplies, people are now at risk, especially the very young and very old.

Transportation and Fuel. There are still severe fuel shortages and blocked roads in East Texas. Fuel shipments are being moved in and consumed at soon as they arrive. Local jurisdictions are struggling to keep emergency responders on the road. Roads are still cut by debris or water causing relief shipments to be slow. The National Guard has flown multiple rotary wing missions into the strike zone. But, you can only “live off the hook” for so long.

Power. Several thousand customers remain without power and will remain so for up to three weeks. This creates the largest cascading effect knocking out sewer and water supplies. Life is untenable in Texas without air conditioning. There is a tremendous need throughout the state for large generators to bring critical systems back on line.

Life Support Systems: Beyond sewage and water, other systems are out. Hospitals and nursing homes remain without power, and drastic change in the storm forecast left many of them stuck. Even those special needs/critical care people who got out the strike zone are now stuck in areas without power. Think about all the elderly people that are on oxygen. Without power, oxygen bottles can’t be filled so full cylinders have to be pushed into the strike zone. There are also lots of dialysis patients.

Shelters. I can imagine pure misery in the shelters. No power, sewage, or water. Limited food. Texas did a great job of getting people out of the surge zone, but the cumulative friction of the last week left a large segment of the population in need. There is a huge logistical push going on right now to re-supply small towns throughout East Texas, but it will take time.

Communications. There are severe disruptions because of power outage and wind damage. Emergency communications towers for fire, police, and EMS are knocked down. Ditto cell phone towers. Small, rural jurisdictions that have limited communications capacity to begin with are now effectively black holes. The State sent representatives by air to many of the smaller communities to assess the situation. That was the only way to be sure contact was made.

Special Needs. Extra capacity in the state is already maxed out from Katrina. There is now a state-wide scramble to find extra beds.

What’s happening at my location?

We’ve spent most of the day returning people to their homes. We received many evacuees by bus so we undertook an effort to return them by bus. Our shelter population has dwindled from a peak of 20,000 to about a thousand. We are going to end up sheltering people from East Texas for at least another week.

We still have many Katrina evacuees from the initial evacuation and some that we received from Houston and other areas. Nobody is prepared to take them back because systems are beyond capacity. Given, what Rita did to New Orleans, I think we can now officially say that we have refugees in this country.

What happens in the next 24-48 hours?

The State is evaluating what to do with the special needs population, especially the nursing home patients. They will probably be moved to more tenable locations throughout the state.

The State might also set up more shelters outside of the strike zone and move people to them, especially those from the areas that will be without power the longest.

Vector control. Mosquitoes will become a nuisance and then a potential health hazard. Controlling them will become a priority.

The logistical effort will take shape and gain momentum, but it will take time. This will be a coordinated local, state, and federal effort.

Friction Points:

Power. It all comes down to how long it will take to restore power.

Katrina Evacuees. We still have them locally and spread throughout the state. Another disaster, this region will be severely taxed, maybe to the breaking point.

My Assessment:

We need improvement in communications. Local, State, and the Federal government have spent millions on radio interoperability, and this is a smart effort. But, not enough money has been spent on other forms of communications. Perhaps we should start spending money on satellite voice and data communications. I’d like to see satellite phones and data links in every county seat in Texas, especially in the rural jurisdictions that are the most vulnerable to having their communications cut.

We also need to re-vamp our special needs evacuation plans. I’m not satisfied with the evacuations of nursing homes. I think we did better than Louisiana and New Orleans, but not good enough. Some people have commented on this blog that more regulation won’t solve this problem. I’m not so sure.

Landfall+ 38: Situation Update

2005-09-25T15:21:00.000-05:00

Here is the current situation in Texas:

1.1 Million customers remain without power; priority of restoration goes to shelters, critical care facilities, and government. Some areas may be without power for up to three weeks.

Texas remains critically short of fuel, especially in Eastern part of the state.

Debris removal teams are moving into strike zone. Actually, they are cutting their way into the strike zone. Yes, we have trees in Texas and many of them are now blocking the highway.

In the strike zone, 12,700 special needs people were evacuated by air.

Many towns and counties remain without power, water, sewage, fuel, and supplies. There is a currently as massive airlift underway to re-supply these locations.

One of the main priorities is opening, or keeping open routes, into the strike zone in order for relief convoys to enter.

Generators are the most in demand resource right now. Many city water supplies will not be back online unless large generators are delivered.

Shelters are emptying out as people return to their homes. The state has asked people to stay in place until they are asked to return. Houston has implemented a phased return plan.

Our local situation:

Shelter population peaked at 20,000 but is shrinking hourly.

We are currently coordinating re-entry transportation for those evacuees who don’t have their own resources.

We are currently working on identifying those people who will need long-term sheltering.

We anticipate being asked to provide resources to aid in the recovery.

Friction Points:

Special Needs. Keeping mental patients, nursing home patients, and other critical care people in shelters is not the best solution. They need to get back into their facilities where they can get the best care.

Key Considerations for special needs re-entry:

Is the facility staff back in place?

Power? Water?

Damage, structural integrity of the facility?

Emergency services? Are the local police and fire departments capable of responding to emergencies?

Roads open?

Can the people travel? Evacuation might have stressed weak patients, and they may not be ready for a return trip.

Adequate transportation resources available? Some special need people require ambulances, an in demand resource.

Next 24 hours:

Relief operations into the strike zone and damage assessment.

Continue re-entry planning.

FEMA/State of Texas sets up their Disaster Field Office in East Texas

Landfall+36: Back on Shift

2005-09-25T13:53:00.000-05:00

I'm back on shift, and extremely busy. Will post more when I get a chance.

More to follow, stay tuned...

Landfall +12: Re-entry Planning and Damage Assessments

2005-09-24T14:06:00.000-05:00

I’m off shift again. I left the EOC as the sun was coming up this morning. I can’t tell you how many times that I’ve come stumbling out of an operations center at dawn. When there is action, you never really want to leave, but at some point, you have to walk away. Get some sleep. The fight will still be here when you come back.

As I walked to my car there was actually a rooster sounding off somewhere in the distance. Why anyone has a rooster in Austin, I can’t explain. But, it sounded nice, probably because it doesn’t live in my neighborhood.

The first morning of OIF, I remember coming out of the CENTCOM operations center and walking back to the warehouse where we slept. Qatari mornings can be pleasant. On this morning the air was filled with the sound of jets streaking north to Iraq to visit destruction on the enemy. Today, Rita was out there with her own brand of shock and awe, but all we could feel in Austin was stiff breeze. Sometimes, during the war, I would come off shift early enough to hear the morning call to prayer in the distance, a reminder that you are a stranger in a strange land. The rooster reminded me of that.

So what happens today?

Today the state and local governments shift gears. The focus up until landfall was evacuation. Now we have to switch to damage assessments, re-entry planning, and if necessary, search and rescue. There have been no reported fatalities so hopefully, we won’t have to switch gears yet again into a recovery effort. However, it will be a miracle if nobody dies.

Re-entry will be our nut to crack. Today we have to sort out what to do with the 17,000 people in our shelters. I talked to my boss this morning when I woke up. He said the shelters were emptying. But, what does that really mean? People could just be stretching their legs and getting some breakfast. Or they could be going home.

The goal is an orderly, planned return, not an exodous. The state has told people to stay put, but we’ll see how that goes.

Today, the state has to do now is figure out which roads are open, how much fuel is available along the re-entry routes, and what areas are safe to go back into. I have a feeling that most of the people from the Matagorda Bay and Corpus Christi areas will leave today. But, that might not be the right thing to do at this point. There might not be enough fuel to sustain their return.

Over the next 24 hours our shelter population will dwindle, and we’ll be left with people who can’t return home either because there isn’t a home to return to or conditions aren’t safe along the route.

There are also reports of large-scale power outages so you don’t want to send people back into untenable circumstances until you know how long it will take to get the power back on. The storm is now stalling, and there will be floods. We don’t want to send people back into a flood zone. There is going to have to be a large amount of coordination and public outreach between the state, jurisdictions in the strike zone, and evacuation jurisdictions.

At some point today, the president is supposed to visit the State Operations Center in Austin where I used to work. No telling how much that will actually slow down the process. Does any work get done when you hear the general is headed towards your TOC?

Landfall. Are We Out of Diet Coke?

2005-09-24T02:45:00.000-05:00

Landfall.

And we’re all waiting for Anderson Cooper to end up in Oz.

Evacuees are still trickling in, but we’ve still got shelter capacity. So far, so good. Our plan worked.

Basically, we’ve had a rolling shelter operation. As shelters fill, new ones are opened. All this has to by synchronize with our public outreach program. Signs have to be moved on the evacuation route. Radio messages changed. Staff alerted. Security dispatched. It’s a multi-agency, multi-jurisdiction response, and we’re doing well.

This could have been a lot harder. If the storm had followed the original track, then, by Saturday morning, we would be doing this in tropical storm winds and rains. There would have been debris, power outages, and potential floods—all of which could have derailed us. We got lucky.

There has been friction. Bus loads of hungry people arrive at newly opened shelters that food hasn’t been dropped at. Dialysis patients and diabetics arrive in need of immediate care. Pissed off school principals. Bad coffee. Doctor Phil on one of the TVs. Who new Tony Danza was still on TV?

Anyone who has spent time in a military operations center knows what life is like in an EOC. Time ebbs and flows seemingly at random. People on the other end of the line just don’t understand when you’re not jumping through your ass to solve their problem. Higher just doesn’t get it.

Snippets of running conversations:

“Starbucks still open???”

“Uhhh, they need dialysis? Now? Shit...”

“That girl on the weather channel right now is hot…”

“I understand that’s its one in the morning, but we really need you to open your school right now. No, we don’t know exactly when the evacuees will arrive. There are 2.7 million people on the roads…”

“Who wants Whataburger???”

“Eight buses just are in route, which shelter should we send them to???”

“Shit. Are we out of diet coke???”

“No. Look outside my office. There are about 10 cases…”

“Uh, those eight buses have special needs people on them…”

“But, they’re not cold…”

“Define special needs…”

“You want cheese with that wine???”

“Mental...”

“Mental crazy or mental challenged???”

“You want cheese on your burger???”

“Challenged…”

“Yeah, no lettuce…”

“They should have gone to Temple. That’s the special needs shelter hub...”

“Like I’m going to remember how you like your fucking burger…”

“They’ve been on the road for 12 hours...”

“Then write it down…”

“We’ll take them…”

The eye just made landfall.

H+14: The Waiting is the Hardest Part

2005-09-24T00:33:00.000-05:00

Back on shift…

Things are actually slow in the EOC so I have time to write. We’ve peaked at about ~~15,000~~ 17,000 evacuees in 49 shelters, and things have gone well. One interesting note is that we’re currently sheltering about 1,000 animals. This being Texas, we had incorporated livestock evacuees into our plan, and low and behold our expo center filled up with horses on the first day.

Here’s the current situation:

As of about 2230 CST, Rita was 55 miles southeast of the Sabine Pass. 15-20 foot storm surges are expected in Jefferson and Orange Counties. Expect tornado spawns from the storm. The forecasts are also saying that the storm will stall over East Texas and dump 10-15 inches of rain. There is a possibility of 25 inches of rain in some locations. This is what Tropical Storm Allison did in 2001.

And estimated 2.7 million Texans have evacuated so far. Yup, we do everything bigger here.

Evacuations continue, but now the focus has moved to shelters of last resort and hasty shelters. The main effort is getting people off the roads and getting them food and water. Hopefully, these shelters will fair well in the storm. If you’re down with Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Tom Landry, or Elvis now might be this time for some praying.

There are no more cots in the State of Texas.

Search and Rescue (SAR) resources are pre-positioned in Houston and other areas outside the strike zone. FEMA is going to position other assets such as mobile hospitals into Houston as well. Once again, H-town makes it happen for God and Country.

The USS Iwo Jima and USS Shreveport are steaming in behind the storm with SAR and other military assets.

Fuel remains a major problem. The state is continuing to work the issue. Not only will fuel impact current operations, it will impact the return of evacuees in the zones that faired well in the storm. People may be stuck in the shelters for a while.

The next few hours:

Now the waiting begins. There is not way to tell what will happen as the storm comes ashore. The nightly state conference call ended with a “Good Luck and God Speed” moment from the state coordinator. The hard work begins when the sun comes up.

The next 24 hours:

Re-entry planning is the next priority. We will need to get people back into their homes as soon as possible, especially those from the zones that aren’t impacted like Corpus Christi and Matagorda Bay area. Fuel and traffic will slow this down. But, as a general rule of thumb, shelters can be sustained for 72 hours before tempers, supplies, and volunteer staff wears thin. Also, the focus will need to shift to long-term sheltering for those who loose their homes.

Friction Points:

Media Coverage: I don’t waste a lot of time bashing the media. It is what it is. But, what I’d like to see is “embeds” in the response effort. Hurricane coverage is a blonde on a beach. Iraq coverage is Rick Atkinson with the 101st. Who do you think has a better perspective? I’d like to see embeds in EOCs, SAR teams, and on the navy ships. The problem with the media coverage as it stands is that it shapes people’s perceptions in the wrong way. People decided not to leave because they believed that trying to get out was hopeless. A reporter on the ground with the Herculean effort that the State undertook last night would have helped the public gain and maintain perspective.

Information Technology: Sucks. I can set up a better web-based communications and information hub on Yahoo than Texas currently has at the state level. I have some very specific ideas that I’ll be putting together on this. Bottom line: We might as well being wearing pastel suits with two-day old beards because our IT is stuck in the 80’s. Maybe we can get Glen Fry to do the soundtrack.

Some personal notes: Our little shelter is going well in the Casa-de-Alexander. Zane is getting seriously doted on, but the one bathroom situation is getting old. I went for a run after my shift this morning, and I actually felt the breeze shift as Rita got close enough to impact the weather in Austin. Weird.

H+11: Evacuation Questions

2005-09-23T21:17:00.000-05:00

I think the biggest friction point so far has been the evacuation. I think its clear that the plan needs to be refined.

I’ve received several emails and comments today about the plan.

Why weren’t the highways counter-flowed earlier? This was probably done too late, but it’s a tough call. Once you counter-flow the highways you can assume that you won’t be able to get much down them. This is especially true on US-290, which is not a very big road. I think the decision to counter-flow should probably be driven by two things: are the critical needs evacuations complete? Are you through moving assets back into the strike zone?

Fuel? Another problem. Both the private and public sector need to surge fuel into the evacuation zone. Gas stations should have tanker trucks standing by to fill their tanks. Mobile teams should sweep the evac zone from behind with buses and fuel trucks to clear out stragglers.

Why were smaller roads blocked? There aren’t enough responders to cover smaller roads in case of an emergency. Also, many of the smaller rural roads are flood prone. They were blocked deliberately so that they didn’t become traps once its started raining. Also, rural roads are easier to jam. One breakdown on a narrow country road could trap hundreds.

I think the plan needs to be refined. Here’s some death by PowerPoint, evacuation style.

Refining the Plan.

The evacuation should be phased by risk. I think the biggest mistake was telling everyone to get on the roads at once, regardless of actual risk. Galveston leaned forward early in the week because they knew what was coming. But, the suburbs of Houston that are more inland started moving out at the same time as the areas closer to the coast resulting in one big ass traffic jam (that’s the doctrinal term for it).

Another thing the state and locals can do is set up mobile aid stations along the route. Lots of reports of no-bathrooms and no supplies available. Rest stops were overwhelms. Dropping caches of supplies and porta-johns on the route would help.

I’m headed to the EOC here in a few minutes. I’ll work overnight and post when I can. I talked to my boss earlier in the day, and he said that Austin/Travis County had ~15,000 evacuees in our shelters and they were filling up fast. We planned on 40,000. Looks like we’re going to use every space.

More to follow…

H+3: Warriors Want to Fight

2005-09-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

I’m still off shift, and I’m about to take a nap before I go back into the EOC this evening. Tonight I’ll be motivated and caffeinated for landfall. I’ll blog when I can.

Here are a few points that I want to make before I rack out. This post borders on a slight rant.

Warriors Want to Fight: Throughout the last few days, I’ve been on the phones with all my buddies in the emergency business or in the guard. The conversation is always the same. “Are you going?” “Any word on whether or not they’ll need help?” “You sending anyone? Can I sign up?” Why? Because warriors want to fight. I’m having a serious “always a bridesmaid moment” right now. Got stuck at CENTCOM during the war. Didn’t get to go to Katrina. And now I’m safe and sound away from the coast. I’d rather be in the fray, and I’ll jump on the first chance I get to go down to the coast. I think that there are too many “America haters” out there, on the right and the left, that think our country is creeping towards a catastrophic decline. I’m not so sure. I think they’re still enough members of the warrior tribe to sustain this country’s greatness. It's a matter of will.
County Judges: Most people don’t realize how much power a county judge has in Texas. They make things happen in the state, and, in some rural jurisdictions, they are the alpha and omega of local government. By law, county judges are responsible for emergency management in their jurisdictions. In Texas there are plenty of warrior judges, and it does my heart good to hear them in the state conference calls making things happen, often forcefully. Texan have a “git her done” attitude, and we’ve got some “git her done” judges. Kudos to Judge Robert Eckels in Harris County.

Ditto on mayors. Mayor Bill White of Houston and Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas of Galveston are doing great work.

Local vs. National and State Politicians: There are always congressional staffers on the various conference calls, and sometimes they can be irritating. Local politicians make it happen in disasters. State and National ones sometimes try to insert themselves where they don’t belong. But there is one staffer in Kay Bailey Hutchinson's Abilene office who’s okay in my book. She got on the conference call last night to let us know that there were fifty hospital beds available in her area and she was looking for more. Hospital beds are gold right now. She wasn’t covering her boss’s ass. She was making things happen. Kay why aren’t you running for governor, again? This democrat might just vote for you.

Kinky Friedman: I’m no big fan of Rick Perry, but do we really think that “Governor Kinky” is remotely a good idea? Government counts and governing well is hard. How about we start asking Kinky some tough questions to see if he’s really the guy who we want running things the next time a CAT5 is rumbling towards us? Anyone on Kinky’s “staff” reading?

I'll be back on tonight.

H-Hour

2005-09-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

I'm off shift right now so I don't have all the latest and greatest. Looks like the winds still haven't hit the strike zone, but they are picking up.

There still appears to be lots of scrambling on the special needs evacuation. The bus fire made my stomach churn.

The state surged lots of resources into the evac zone last night. Commercial fuelers, national guard truck pumping units, Texas Department of Transportation fuelers were all launched down the highways to fuel stranded motorists. We even had the Coast Guard flying in fuel blivets. (I think the Coast Guard is one of the most under-rated organizations in this country. What a great bunch of folks.)

DPS troopers were leading bus "strike teams" into the zone to pull out motorists.

Air evacuation was being surged into the strike zone.

Shelters are opening throughout the state as far away as Amarillo and Abilene.

The shelters in Bryan/College Station filled up so evacuees were diverted to Austin. As of midnight last night we had several thousand in shelters. Not sure where we stand now.

I'll be on shift overnight as the storm makes landfall. More to follow...

H-12: Friction

2005-09-22T20:27:00.000-05:00

We're roughly thirteen hours away from tropical force winds hitting the coast. That's "H" hour at which point evacuations are supposed to be over. I'm not sure if we're going to get there or not. We're being overcome by friction.

Army guys are fond of quoting old dead Germans. Here is what Clausewitz has to say about friction:

Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war...

Friction is the only conception which, in a general way, corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper. The military machine, the army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple; and appears, on this account, easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions...

This enormous friction, which is not concentrated, as in mechanics, at a few points, is therefore everywhere brought into contact with chance, and thus facts take place upon which it was impossible to calculate, their chief origin being chance, As an instance of one such chance, take the weather...

That's why I've been labeling problems friction points. You get lots of stuff and people moving in lots of directions, and things begin to heat up. The cumulative effect is what you are seeing on the Texas highways today. If no military plan survives contact with the enemy, then no emergency management plan survives a CAT4-5 hurricane.

Here's what I'm seeing.

Friction Points:

The Katrina Effect: People are afraid, and they're taking the evacuation seriously. This has created the largest evac in Texas history. The problem is that people who aren't in the surge zone, and were probably inland enough to weather the storm, are leaving as well. They are intermixed with the people who need to leave in order to survive. Everyone is afraid that they'll be the next NOLA when circumstances are different here in Texas.
Storm Modeling: The weather guys are telling us that because Rita was so strong that it was hard to model. The track that we thought the storm was going to follow 36 hours ago is nothing like the actual track. This has driven evacuations in areas that aren't going to get hit as hard as we thought, and left people scrambling in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area scrambling.
Situational Awareness: In a state this big, it's hard to know exactly what is going on. The fog of war. How "big" is "big" and how "bad" is "bad"? The military spends billions on intelligence systems so commanders and decision makers can visualize the battlefield. Billions more are spend on robust communications architecture. The primary means of communications and coordination within the state is the three times a day Texas Division of Emergency Management conference call. We need better systems. There has been reporting that the state was slow to make all the highways one-way to facilitate the evacuation. This is a big decision because it means that you might not be able to get things like ambulances back into the evacuation zone. Relying on CNN and phone calls from the field saying thousands are stranded doesn't give you enough info to make good decisions. I think DHS has a role to play in this. I'll be writing more on this later.
Special Needs: Lots of resources are being pumped into getting special needs people out. The state is focusing most of its assets on nursing homes. There have been reports of inadequate planning in lots of these facilities. I think our lawmakers need to look at how these facilities are regulated.
Fuel: Gas stations all along the evacuation route are out of gas. There are reports of "thousands" of cars out of gas on the highways. This might be a fault line in state and local planning. We need to surge fuel to the evacuation routes or maybe cache it along the way.
Infrastructure: The evacuation highways don't have enough lanes. I think we need to invest in making these roads more robust. There just isn't enough roadway to support the traffic. Katrina and now Rita show us the folly of neglecting our infrastructure.

What's going to happen between now and H-hour?

The state has been scrambling to get supplies, buses, and fuel trucks to the evacuation routes. We've still got time, but the last thing anyone wants is citizens stuck on the highway when the winds hit.

Here in Austin, the shelter population is growing, but we've got lots of room left. I think we've done a great job of executing our part of the state's evac plan.

I still think the state had a good plan, and I think we've saved lots of lives with what we've done. There is already a lot of finger pointing in the media and blogosphere. Some of it is right on the money, and some of it is just politically motivated bullshit. There are non-political truths, but too many of us can't see them.

My assessment: The next twelve hours is make or break. The state and local governments are doing all they can. I'm not sure how its going to work out.

Just one point of clarification: I'm getting some traffic from some bigger sites (thanks Noah). I keep getting listed as a Texas Homeland Security guy. I used to be a "State of Texas" homeland security guy. A few months ago, I took a job as a "local" homeland security/emergency management guy in the Austin area. I worked for the state for years and am pretty wired into how they do business. I was in on a lot of the planning for state operations. Now, I'm working this disaster from a local level, but I have visibility of what is happening at the state level. Plus, I stayed at a holiday in express last night...

I just don't want anyone to be confused. Also, my view are mine alone. They don't reflect any official position, even if I'm right.

H-18: Feeling the Katrina Effect

2005-09-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

You've seen the news. The highways are a mess.

The storm track has shifted significantly over the last 24 hours. The weather guys say that its strength made it hard to model. The shift in the track has left Texas playing catch-up as Beaumont and the areas North of Houston are targeted.

The conventional wisdom in the emergency business is that people won't take the first hurricane evacuation seriously. The send one is when everyone panics. And that's where we stand right now. There is an unprecedented number of people on the roads. Katrina has put fear in people.

Now Texas is scrambling to solve the problems. The state is moving fuel trucks to the highways to refuel cars that are out of gas. Buses are also pulling out stranded motorists. The guard will be dropping food and water as well as pulling people out. We've got time, but not much. The clock is working against us.

The big friction point here is special needs facilities. Lots of nursing home have inadequate or non-existent plans. This sucking up all the state's resources to pull people out. The special needs facilities remain the state's number one priority. I'll talk more about nursing homes later, but I hope that I won't have to back of my pledge that no-one would die in a nursing home.

I was wrong about the ACL fest, but it was their luck that the storm track shifted. Austin will escape major effect. The shelter operations in Austin/Travis County is fully operational as well shelter thousands of people. We're expecting more.

The good news is that Houston and Galveston may avoid a direct hit. The bad news is that there are numerous refineries and petrochemical facilities threatened in the strike zone.

I'll post more tonight after my shift.

H-36: This is Going to Hurt

2005-09-21T21:34:00.000-05:00

We're at H-36.

Evacuations are still underway. As of 1630CST, most of the hospitals in the strike zone were almost complete with their evacuations. This has filled up many of the hospitals in the reception zone so we're having to make some adjustments.

The feds are staging assets into Texas including urban search and rescue and swift water rescue teams. The USS Iwo Jima is moving into place to be ready with airlift and other military responses. FEMA is moving in a large mobile hospital to take the strain of area hospitals.

Friction Points:

ACL Fest in Austin:

From their website:

"Update on Hurricane Rita and ACL Just like you, we are keeping a very close watch on the weather and are being advised by meteorologists. We do expect some rain on Saturday, so be sure to bring an umbrella and wear your rain gear.

If weather conditions appear to present any kind of danger to fans, musicians or crew, we are prepared to make the necessary adjustments to maintain safety. Until then, the Festival is on, rain or shine. Look here for updates."

We're expecting Tropical Storm gusts in Austin on Saturday. If Rita, shifts it could get worse. I think an outdoor festival with thousands of people outside while a CAT5 tears up the coast might be a bad idea at this point.

Transportation: The focus is still special needs facilities, especially nursing homes. Ambulances are in short supply. There are ample buses but many drivers are evacuating. A driver shortage was blamed in NOLA as well. Local governments are asking for more drivers that they might not get. I say take some people and give them a crash course on bus driving and make it happen. The state has made this legal. It might not be pretty, but ugly gets the job done sometimes. I think this exposes a fault line in emergency planning. Perhaps every cop, firefighter, and national guard soldier ought to have a bus familiarization course. This also might be a good job for volunteers and community emergency response teams (CERT). I think we'll pull it off, but it could be smoother.

Spontaneous Shelters: Texans are generous to a fault. There is Southern hospitality (overrated) and Texas hospitality. When we say "howdy, how are you?", we actually expect an answer. I'm always shocked when I'm up north at how curt people are. In every disaster, there are always generous Texans (okay its not just in Texas) that open their doors to those in need. The problem is that they don't do it in accordance with any plan.

Churches are often big players in this. People are often sheltered through informal church connections. Baptists move themselves to the generous Baptist church a couple counties down the road. The problem is that the church down the road might not actually be a suitable shelter. Can it withstand the winds? Back-up power? Adequate sanitation? Medical assistance? Plus, if you open a shelter that is not part of the system, then you can't get reimbursed for your expenses. Meanwhile, space is available at pre-planned shelters that have all the necessary life support systems in place.

Spontaneous shelters are not a good idea. If you want to help, call the Red Cross or some other group. Trust me, they'll put you to work.

Pets: That's the x-factor is this evacuation. The rule-book got thrown out the window. How many people do you know who actually own a carrier for their pets? I'm waiting for the report that some old lady shows up with fifty cats at a shelter. But, I guess as long as she's safe, then we'll deal with it.

Resources stretched thin: Some of the things that we were planning on getting from the feds are already committed. We've adjusted fire. Texas has also committed resources to Katrina that we've had to pull back. Some of the volunteer types are exhausted. We're managing.

The Industrialized Texas Coast near Freeport, South of Houston

HazMat: Much of the Texas coast is heavily industrialized, especially with the oil and gas industry. The picture above is out of the area that will be hit worst, but it represents a lot of what is on the coast. There might be large environment and economic impacts.

Analysis: This is a bad storm, but its going to be different from Katrina. Geography is working in our favor. The closest city that Texas has to New Orleans is Galveston, which, given its history, takes hurricanes very seriously. The mayor of Galveston leaned forward in the foxhole and started getting people out early. It Rita swings north and hits there, it won't be as bad as NOLA.

And even if Houston takes a direct hit, there is not the same type of levee situation as in NOLA. Tropical Storm Allison created an epic flood in Houston. Lots of damage, but few deaths.

Tonight will be key. I'm off shift right now so I'll have to wait until morning to see how it goes. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and we've had some problems. These are getting sorted out tonight. The key is to get people out by H-12.

On a personal note, Case de Alexander will be its own little spontaneous shelter. The in-laws are shagging ass out of Houston as I type. Our little 1200 sq ft. house will host four of the Seymour clan plus me, Julie, and Zane.

I'm a little concerned about the winds and loosing power with a five month old baby so I went to price generators. There is not a generator to be had in Austin. They've all been shipped to Katrina so I loaded up on flashlights and batteries. I even bought a little flashlight for my niece so she's comfortable. She's seen enough Katrina news to be scared. I probably won't need the generator, but it would have been a fun new toy. If all else fails, Julie and the baby can hang out in my office. We've got lots of generator power, and there are twenty cases of diet coke stacked in the hall. We're ready for anything.

I also filled up my truck tonight. There were also a lot of people getting gas. I talked with a couple folks as I filled up the Bronco. Everyone is worried about shortages and big oil price gouging...er...I mean storm related price fluctuations.

Coverage Notes: KRISTV, Channel 6 in Corpus Christi has some good info.

And the Texas Division of Emergency Management's SITREP page always has good info.

H-48: It's The Big One

2005-09-21T11:20:00.000-05:00

Update: Looks like its a CAT5 now. Fun.

As of 1000 CST, we were at about H-48 from Hurricane Rita. H-hour is when tropical storm force winds begin impacting the coast of Texas. At that time, evacuations halt and people button up and bunker down to ride out the storm. So, according to the latest forecast date, between 1000-1400 CST on Friday, Rita makes her debut. In the next 10-15 hours, the final decision on evacuations have to be made or people will not have enough time to get out.

My agency will begin 24hr operations today as we prepare to receive up to 40,000 evacuees from the coast. There is a long weekend ahead for yours truly.

Here is some key info as of 1000 CST:

The storm center is 755 miles East/Southeast of Corpus Christie and moving West at 13mph. Currently winds are sustained at 140mph. Rita is a CAT4 right now but may reach CAT5. Tropical wind bands extend 140 miles from the center of the storm. This band will expand throughout the day to 200 miles from the center. Landfall is expected early Saturday morning.
The models predict land fall near the Matagorda Bay area, but this can change as the storm head West.
Mandatory evacuations are underway in Galveston, Brazoria, and Harris (Houston) Counties. The governor has recommended that the coastal areas ranging from Jefferson County down to Nueces County evacuate. Weather will be good for the evacuation. Traffic management plans are being implemented to facilitate the evacuation.
The University of Texas Medical Branch , a big hospital, on Galveston Island is being evacuated by air and land. Patients are being distributed throughout the state.
All threatened special needs facilities both public and private (nursing homes, hospitals, jails, state schools, etc.) are being evacuated today. The goal for the state is to have all these facilities evacuated today. This is the major focus today. This is big logistical task involving the entire state.
Shelters are opening up throughout the state as the reception jurisdictions prepare to take evacuees. Shelter hubs are opening up throughout the state.
The State of Texas is prepositioning resources for entry into the strike zone. Search and rescue teams are being staged throughout the day. The state's goal is to have all of its support elements in place tomorrow afternoon.
Apparently, the governor has eased the restrictions on bus driver licenses so that all available buses can be used for evacuations. I'm not sure on all the details on this one, but the goal is that every resource be used. No idle buses like in NOLA.

Friction Points:

We still have 375,000 Katrina evacuees in the state either in hotels or shelters. This may impact our operations.
Pets. People died in Katrina because they wouldn't leave their pets. Policy has always been that pets are not allowed in shelters. The state has changed that policy and said pets are welcome as long as they are in containers. That's a new wrinkle on the plan, and we're having to make some changes. Fortunately, there are enough animals groups out there to help.
Resources. Many of the resources that we planned on getting from the state and federal government have been committed for Katrina. We can probably manage, but we have to make adjustments.
All the hotels in the Austin area are full because of the Austin City Limits music festival. Normally most evacuees seek sheters in hotels, but this may cause our shelters to fill up more rapidly.

Analysis: All of this is happening without one bit of federal resources being committed. FEMA is at the state operations center, but its a state and local show right now. We never planned on FEMA saving our bacon. And no this plan didn't happen overnight. It has taken years of detailed planning to reach this point. Will there be screw-ups? Yes. Will we do better than LA and NOLA? Probably.

This isn't meant as hubris. I feel that too many people, especially in the left side of the blogosphere, have rushed to defend the LA state and local governments. I disagree. I think they screwed up regardless of whether or not FEMA/DHS was slow on the draw. I don't think, knock on wood, that anyone is going to drown and die in a nursing home on the Texas Coast.

Elected officials bear the burden of emergency preparedness. The emergency plans all have their signatures.

More info: The Houston Chronicle has an excellent Rita section. Good article from there: Houston's hard-won lessons coming into play.

Here we go again...(Updated)

2005-09-20T13:19:00.000-05:00

Hurricane Rita. On track for a direct hit
on the Texas Coast.

Update: The Houston Chronicle has excellent Rita coverage. And what's better is that they don't require and annoying registration.

From the National Hurricane Center:

HURRICANE RITA SPECIAL DISCUSSION NUMBER 12
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
2 PM EDT TUE SEP 20 2005

HURRICANE RITA SPECIAL DISCUSSION NUMBER 12NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL2 PM EDT TUE SEP 20 2005DATA FROM NOAA AND AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE PLANES INDICATE THATRITA HAS REACHED 100 MPH WINDS. RITA IS NOW A CATEGORY TWO ON THESAFFIR/SIMPSON HURRICANE SCALE. THIS SPECIAL ADVISORY IS TO REFLECTA CHANGE IN BOTH INITIAL AND FORECAST INTENSITY. THERE IS NO CHANGEIN THE FORECAST TRACK.

I was going to blog about the AFG parliamentary elections today, but I'm busy with Hurricane preparations. My jurisdiction is a reception jurisdiction which means that we will receive up to 40,0000 evacuees from the coast. The coastal jurisdictions are spinning up to get people out. Galveston began voluntary evacuations today. As of 1000 CST today we were at H-72 before tropical winds began impacting the Texas coast so evacuations will probably begin in earnest soon.

The entire State of Texas is mobilizing resources for this. We have an good statewide plan, and we're all on board. Locally, we're moving things into place. Today I sat in meetings discussing traffic routing and shelter security. We also had a statewide conference call with the Texas Division of Emergency Management. We are all taking this very seriously, and although I don't like pointing fingers, I think our local and state response will be better than the response to Katrina.

There are some key things to pay attention to as you watch this. One will be the competence and professionalism of the Emergency Management types along the Texas Gulf Coast. They don't screw around when it comes to planning this stuff. I think much of the NOLA gov't was asleep at the wheel with the Katrina evacuation. Not so here.

Next, watch how Texas coordinates the state response. Anyone who has ever met the state emergency management coordinator here in Texas know that COL (ret.) Jack Colley is large and in charge. He makes things happen whether or not FEMA is slow on the draw.

Will there be problems? Of course. We already have one friction point here in Austin. The Austin City Limits Music Festival is going on this weekend. There will be 50-60,000 people in town for it over the weekend. Every hotel is booked, and we can expect heavy traffic on the routes that evacuees are moving along. No word yet if Rita will impact the festival.

Stay tuned....

Help For My Soldier

2005-09-18T20:53:00.000-05:00

I've blogged about my soldier who lost everything in Katrina here and here.

I still have intermittent communications with him. He and his family are safe, but there lives have been tossed around. They have literally lost everything. House is total loss. Possessions are a total loss. They have received $2,000 from FEMA, but no other assistance. I am hooking him up with other groups, but I want to do more. The best way to help is with money.

We worked with USAA to set him up a seperate account which only he and his family have access to. You can wire money into it, but only they can take it out. This is the primary means by which I am going to get my unit to donate funds. Most of us are in Texas. He is in Mississippi so money travels best.

Here is the info:

SSG Keith Blalock
Account #: 28719387
USAA Federal Savings Bank

If you have any questions, you can call the good folks at USAA at this number which USAA has set up for Hurricane victims: (800) 531-8222

Two notes: If you want to wire money, but aren't sure if you can trust me, email me and I can put you in contact with SSG Blalock. If you still aren't comfortable, then donate to another charity. Your help will find its way to the Blalocks one way or another.

And for all you assholes out there. All you internet scammers and spammers, you know who you are. Mister South African Lawyer and Nigerian Business Owner. You, the guy who keeps trying to sell me discounted Viagra. Listen up. We've put control measures in place to keep you out of the account. Plus, you'd have to be pretty damn dumb to screw with one of America's finest. You've been warned.

Wraith Hurricane Update

2005-09-10T21:21:00.000-05:00

SSG B's house.

another look

SEPT 14th Update: We're still working out the details. SSG B is leaning towards setting up a bank account that we can donate into. I talked to him on the phone last night. He lost everything. They were thinking about not evacuating, but when the storm got stronger, they left. But, they left everything behind. His sister's house was destroyed too, and he and his wife are out of work. They got the initial $2,000 from FEMA, but other relief is slow. They might get a FEMA trailer, but they aren't sure.

I can't imagine not having anything to my name, but SSG B is hanging tough. They are all alive and well. Things can be replaced, family can't.

Once SSG B and I decide on the best course of action, I'll post more info.

Original Post: I've been in contact with my soldier SSG B. He and his family are safe. Here are some pics of his house that he sent me. They have lost everything. We're working out the details on how we're going to help him.

Thanks to everyone for all their suggestions and support. I never fail to be impressed by the wisdom and generosity of my fellow Americans. More to follow on how we're going to execute our own little hurricane relief operation.

Wrong Priorities

2005-09-08T13:17:00.000-05:00

Finally a good piece of analysis. From Newsweek:

In the weeks before Hurricane Katrina, state emergency-planning directors repeatedly warned that the Bush administration’s post-September 11 focus on terrorism was seriously undercutting the federal government’s ability to respond to catastrophic hurricanes and other natural disasters.

In a tough letter to Congress last July and in a private meeting with top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Aug. 21, a group of state emergency-planning directors complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s traditional role of preparing for natural disasters “has been forgotten” under a DHS almost entirely devoted to the terror threat.

***

Internal Homeland Security documents obtained by NEWSWEEK lend support to the state directors’ complaints. Out of 15 “all hazards” disaster-planning scenarios approved by DHS and the White House Homeland Security Council last May, only three involved natural disasters, one document shows.

***

They also have fueled a push in Congress to undo at least part of the major federal government overhaul that created the Department of Homeland Security in the first place. Democratic Rep. John Dingell of Michigan said this week he was introducing legislation to take FEMA out of DHS and restore it as an independent agency whose director would have direct access to the president.

***

The concerns about the direction of FEMA have been building for some time, according to Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Planning Association, a group that represents state emergency planners. Some of it revolves around funding. While grants to states and local governments for counterterrorism emergency planning have soared to more than $1.1 billion a year, funding under FEMA’s Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) program—which is specifically for natural disasters—was cut back $10 million by the White House this year to only $170 million, she noted.

***

Baughman said the disparities for Alabama are especially sharp. In his state, between $30 million to $40 million in federal funds are available to plan and train for hypothetical terror attacks while only $1.8 million is available for natural disasters. Although Alabama hasn’t suffered any terror attacks in recent years, it has had 24 natural-disaster declarations over the past decade, including three in the last year or so, Baughman said.

***

The internal FEMA documents underscore the point even further. Even before Homeland Security officials published their set of theoretical disaster scenarios last spring—which involved planning for such calamities as an “aerosol anthrax” attack and the unleashing of a “10-Kiloton Improved Nuclear Device”—an earlier February 2004 “National All-Hazards Exercise Schedule” prepared by Homeland Security showed the same imbalance. The schedule, marked “for Official Use Only,” included planning for more than 100 disaster scenarios, almost all of them terror incidents. In fact, only seven involved natural disasters—two earthquakes and four hurricanes, although two of the hurricanes were described as incidents in which relief and recovery efforts would be practiced “in context of a credible WMD threat during a natural disaster.”

My take: Based on my own personal experience, this is right on the money. I never thought placing FEMA under DHS made much sense, and I’ve thought that DHS’s priorities have been wrong-headed from the start.

FEMA understands disasters, and many of its programs have been in place and effective for years. Since its inception, DHS has been chasing its tail looking under every rock for the next 9/11 while ignoring the nuts and bolts issues that face our countries. Hurricane season comes every year. Long after you and I are dead, and 9/11 is a distant memory that our grandkids re-live on the history channel, Hurricane season will come. People are fleeting, Mother Nature endures.

The EMPG grant program cited in the article is an excellent example of DHS’s skewed priorities. The cuts cited by the article were originally going to be much deeper and there were going to be much tighter restrictions on how the money was spent. These restrictions were based on DHS’s view of the world, and not the reality on the ground.

This is some info from a NEMA report on how last year proposed changes to the EMPG grant program would have impacted state and local responders:

The President’s FY05 budget includes a proposal for a 25 percent cap on use of Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) funding to support state and local personnel. A recent NEMA survey revealed that approximately 1,565 state level positions are supported through EMPG dollars. At the local level, approximately 2,170 full time positions and 1,184 part-time positions are supported through EMPG. Listed below is a sampling of the number or percentage of state and local emergency management positions funded in part by the EMPG program and the impact the proposal would have on state and local programs.

Here is how the survey assessed the potential impact on two key states in this disaster:

Alabama would have lost 10.5 Full time employees at the state level, and fifty at the local level. They assessed that emergency management preparedness and response capability would suffer statewide. Many county Emergency Management Agencies would have probably closed.

Louisiana would have lost 34 full time employees at the state level, 40 full time employees at the local level, and 65 part time employees at the local level. It would have had a severe impact on state and local programs.

States and local government depend on this money for their emergency management programs to survive. If these changes had been allowed to stand, the result would have been devastating. DHS was going to use this money as a bill payer for other projects. Luckily, congress intervened and the budget was not cut as deeply.

DHS’s list of 100 disaster scenarios is also another great example of an agency that just doesn’t get it. Back when I worked for the State of Texas doing homeland security stuff, we were asked to comment on this list of scenarios. It had everything short of a Martian invasion. I’m not kidding. It was ridiculous and unrealistic, and seemed more like the product of too many bad techothrillers and not an honest assessment of what actually faces our country. I don’t recall a NOLA levy breech being on the list.

So what should we do? First, cut FEMA out of DHS. Next, we need to seriously evaluate what, exactly, DHS is for. In my assessment much of the heat that FEMA is taking over Katrina is the product of the extra layer of bureaucracy that DHS has added to the federal response.

Note: Crossposted at Intel-dump.

Viva Mexico

2005-09-07T22:27:00.000-05:00

Mexico sends first aid convoy ever to U.S.

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - Mexican army convoys and a navy ship laden with food, supplies and specialists traveled to the United States on Wednesday to help in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort — a highly symbolic journey marking the first time Mexico’s military has aided its powerful northern neighbor.

A convoy of 45 vehicles and 196 soldiers arrived at the border city of Nuevo Laredo Wednesday evening. It was to cross into U.S. territory early Thursday, Gen. Francisco Ortiz Valadez told reporters as his men refueled at a local gas station.

Analysis: Insert Mexico joke here. However, I think that this is pretty cool. I grew up on the border, and I've always had a special place in my heart for Mexico and its culture. I'm glad to see that they are sending help. I'm especially glad that they are coming to Texas. If they are still here when my unit has its next drill in San Antonio, maybe we can pay them a visit.

Wraith Down! And You Can Help

2005-09-06T20:56:00.000-05:00

There is a program for intelligence reservists...err...I mean Army Reserve Soldiers. We're not supposed to call ourselves reservists anymore especially at drill...err...I mean Battle Assembly. Anyway, there is a program for intelligence reservists called MIAD. Basically, because most MI specialties are very low density and MI units are scattered, this program pays for soldiers to come TDY to MI units all over the country. I have soldiers from all over the country assigned to my unit. Okay so why is that important?

One of my soldiers, SSG B, is from Biloxi, MS. We got word from his today that he and his family are okay. However, their house was completely destroyed. SSG B is a great guy. He's an OIF vet, and a professional all the way. He's one of the "go to" guys in my company--the Wraiths.

So, I'm going to do something to help him out. I figure the best way is with money.

I'm looking for ideas about how to work donations for him and his family. I want something that would be easy for him to access, easy for my unit to donate to, and easy for the world at large to contribute to.

So I'm looking for ideas. I'm going to call Army Emergency Relief and my bank and USAA tommorow. If anyone knows of a set up that works, let me know. I'll lay the foundations, and once SSG B greenlights my help, I'll execute. Of course, he's kind of stoic guy so he might not take a hand out. But, if its a donation from the unit, and all the military types who read my blog, then its not really a hand out, is it? Its just comrades in arms helping another comrade in arms.

Post your ideas in the comments or shoot me and email.

Thanks.

Self-deployment Into a Disaster

2005-09-05T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'm reading a lot of posts in the blogosphere about how fucked up FEMA and other agencies are. A common thread seems to be that FEMA is screwed up because resources are being turned away. Most of these resources seem to be good-meaning people who self-deployed to the disaster. If you do this, you will be turned away...for good reason.

- Who the hell are you? Are you qualified to work in a disaster? Who is liable for you? Are resources going to be consumed rescueing your ass because you got into a situation where you didn't belong?

- How do you know you're needed? How do you know where you're needed? So your bus got turned away from the Superdome. I guess the multiple turns of military transportation aircraft out of NOLA airport weren't enough. But, you might have been needed in Miss.

If you want to go, then contact you local emergency management organization or a volunteer group. If you're not qualified, join a volunteer organization and get some training for next time. If you're a qualified responder, check with your department, they'll know what to do.

Self-deployment is usually a bad idea. There is a system in place for a reason.

FEMA Summary

2005-09-05T10:32:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting brief that I saw yesterday. Its a good summary of what the Federal response to Katrina. All this info is available in open source, but this is a good roll-up. This info is 24 hours old, but still pretty good.

Hopefully, I won't irritate my FEMA brothers by posting this, but I don't think they'll mind a little good press.

So here is some death by powerpoint, FEMA style. Enjoy.

Don't Bring Your "Crap"

2005-09-04T21:47:00.000-05:00

Does anyone think that refugees need an old typewriter? That's one of the things that I saw someone trying to donate yesterday to the relief effort here in Austin.

If you are going to donate things, donate what your city asks for. Right now, in Austin, we need basic things like sheets and cots. Nobody needs furniture. Too often donations efforts become the excuse to get rid of shit that you don't want. This just slows down the process. Volunteers have to sort through a mountain of crap to get what people really need. If you're not sure, then give cash. Think of it like Christmas as a little kid. If you didn't get the GI Joe with the Kung-fu grip, then cash was the next best thing.

I had a busy day today in the EOC. I'm proud of my state and my city. But, I'm leery of the long-term. We have aprox 3,500 refugees now, and we'll probably get more. We might even get a couple thousand more. I'm not worried about the short term, but the long term may be hard. How do you shelter an extra 6-7,000 thousand people who don't have anything? We're up to the challenge, but its going to take some work.

One thing that is helping is that Texas has been incorporated into the disaster declaration so we'll get re-imbursed by the feds for our expenses. That's a good thing because we can spend without worrying about who foots the bill. City and County budgets are always and iffy thing so now we're set.

I've got some more interesting things to post tommorow. We'll get a little death by powerpoint, FEMA style. I'm also back in the EOC tommorow so I'll post some more from my limited perspective.

BTW, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Texas Baptist Men, and many other groups are spending money like privates on payday. If you have some cash to spare, donate it now. Noah over at Defensetech is leading the way with a donation of $1,000. Julie and I have donated. Dig deep. Your country needs you.

"God Bless Texas."

2005-09-03T21:12:00.000-05:00

That's what one evacuee said with tears in her eyes as she reached Austin. Hot meal. Shower. And a safe place to stay. That's overwhealming to someone who someone who has been through hell and back.

So far, Texas has about 250K evacuees, and has aprox. 250 shelters open state-wide. We're just about at capacity, and Gov. Perry has asked the feds to start sending people elsewhere.

Planes have been arriving in Austin all day today. We're going to accept 5,000 people. Houston is stepping up to the plate in a big way, and will end up with over 30,000 evacuees. My wife is from Houston, and she's proud. Heaven, hell, or Houston? Not today.

Donations are flowing in at record pace, but there will be the need for more. We are going end up housing these people for a long time, and we're going to have to rebuild their lives from stratch. More donations are needed. Dig deep. Your country needs you.

Today was a good day to be a Texan. Not many states can instantly generate shelter for a quarter of a million people. Hell, not many countries can do that. It illustrates what good planning can do, and I feel good about our own hurricane plans.

God bless Texas, indeed.

I'll be in the city/county EOC again tommorow so I'll post more updates. No word on whether or not I'm going to the disaster zone. My boss is tired of me asking...so I'll ask some more.

Attention Texas Mil Bloggers and Readers

2005-09-02T21:52:00.000-05:00

Austin/Travis County is setting up shelters right now. There is a huge need for donations to make this work. The City of Austin is begining its efforts tommorow:

The City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department will staff a Contribution Center at Motorola, 3501 Ed Bluestein Blvd. (Map) The Center will be open for donations from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 3, through Friday, Sept. 9. Donation requests include monetary donations, cots, air matresses, sleeping bags, sheets, blankets, towels and wash cloths.

There is also a need for volunteers. Spread the word.

Who is to blame?

2005-09-02T20:44:00.000-05:00

From the Times:

Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's "low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people.

At disaster planning meetings, he said, "the answer was often silence."

So far, my assessment of the response to Katrina has been mixed. We done some good things and some bad. But, I think the above quote indicates what the real problem is. The Federal government is not responsible for evacuation. State and local governments are.

The State of Texas has its evacuation plan worked out down to the gnat's ass. TS Allison forced us to be better. We have excercised our plans, and I think we're ready. Apparently New Orleans was not.

The Superdome was intended to be a "shelter of last resort"--an Alamo in the storm. Nobody in their right mind should accept the idea of thousands of people in a shelter like this, especially given NOLA's unique geography.

Planner's also know that the federal government cannot instantly mobilized resources. The same goes for the Guard. It takes a couple days to get all the pieces in place to respond once the disaster strikes. I think we've been a little slow, but the response is there.

So the question that we ought to be asking is why did the government of LA and NOLA accept so much risk in allowing so many people to stay? I think the answer will be a mix of incompotence, apathy, and wishful thinking. It won't happen here, right?

But, that's not the important thing right now. We've got to get through this and then figure out what went wrong.

On a personal note, I'm back from doing Army stuff. My boss gave me a heads up that the Austin/Travis County EOC would probably go to 24 hour operations this weekend so I'll be back at work tommorow. We're probably going to be receiving several thousand refugees. I'll keep you posted.

I've also volunteered to go into the disaster zone if needed. An interesting note is that responders deploying into the zone are advised to have all their shots up to date. The required shot list looks like something you'd get before deploying to war.

Other Notes: My old agency, the Texas Divison of Emergency Management , has a page where you can read the SITREPs on the response that our state is providing to LA.

My wife's company Applied Materials is doing a 1 to 1 donations match for any employess giving to disaster relief funds. We've given some money.

Hurricane Update

2005-09-01T17:48:00.000-05:00

From MSNBC:

“This is a national disgrace,” said Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans’
emergency operations. “FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command
and control,” Ebbert said. “We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami
victims but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans."

"We have got a mayor who has been pushing and asking but we’re not
getting supplies,” he said. He said the evacuation was almost entirely a
Louisiana operation. “This is not a FEMA operation. I haven’t seen a single FEMA
guy.”

I'm not buying this. I just talked to my boss. We are currently opening shelters in Central Texas to receive evacuees. Dallas has a couple thousand people in Renuion Arena. Houston is currently recieving medical evacuess via C-130 from New Orleans in addition to the people being moved to the Astrodome. Texas is sending or has sent search and rescue teams, EMTs, and command and control personell into LA. The Texas Forest Service (the incident command specialists in our state) is running a logistical hub.

All of this happens through FEMA coordination. But, none of this happens instantly. We're talking about moving tons of material and thousands of people. It takes time to build momentum.

I will be returning from Army stuff this weekend. I'll probably roll right into support operations for this. More blogging to follow.

Good Blog out of the disaster zone: http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

Hurricane

2005-08-31T20:06:00.000-05:00

I'm doing Army stuff so I haven't been blogging much lately. I'd like to encourage all my readers to dig deep into their pockets for hurricane relief donations. The president is right it will take years to recover from this. Houston is still recovering from Tropical Storm Allison.

The volunteer community is a large part of this recovery effort. During TS Allison, the volunteer community prepared and distributed over a million meals to folks impacted by the disaster. Anyone who has ever worked in logistics knows that this is no small task.

So dig deep and donate to organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army. And I'd also encourage you to get involved with your local Red Cross or Salvation Army chapters. Volunteers from all over the country are now converging on the SE US. There is always a demand for trained volunteers to go to the hard work in disaster areas. All us rough and tough military types make good candidates.

Chuck Wagons, War Wagons, and Force Protection Training

2005-08-19T21:58:00.000-05:00

Yours truly, Wraith Six. Blog Warrior.

When I was company XO of Delta, 311th MI BN (a battalion which no longer exists under Army transformation) in the 101st ABN DIV (ASSLT), I was lucky enough to have a great commander who took the time to mentor me. He was a vet of the 90's 10th Mountain Division World Tour. He used to say if you look like a "chuck wagon", you'll get treated like one by the enemy. The key was to look like a "war wagon" so nobody would screw with you. So, even though we were an MI Company, we spent a lot of time preparing to be war wagons. We did live fires and battle drills. We shot as much a we could. I became an ammo pimp and left no stone unturned looking for a few more rounds to shoot. We kicked a lot of ass for MI weenies.

When I first joined the reserves, one of my great frustrations was that we didn't spend any time training for force protection. We never had any ammo. Even after we got mobilized and sent to Fort Hood, that attitude still prevailed. The active-duty Brigade we were assigned to did not take force protection seriously, and the active component feuded with the reserve component over who would pay for our ammo. Needless to say, we only shot once the entire year we were stuck at Fort Hood. I even got chewed out by the BDE CSM for allowing my NCOs to do convoy security training during SGT's time. "We're MI," she said. "We don't do that." And I was supposed to by the pogue reservist.

Of course, we have to strike a fine balance between training our intelligence specialties and warrior tasks. I try to do one weekend of combat focused training at least once a quarter. The ambush of Jessica Lynch and the 507th Maintenance Company and the nature of the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed the attitudes of support units so I no longer have to fight for the training time. There is more emphasis on force protection. Of course that emphasis has not translated into proper support.

I'm supposed to shoot twice a year, and spend time in the field doing convoy security training and other tasks. But, ammo is always and issue. And we never get blanks. So, I have to get creative.

In July's drill....er...battle assembly...I did convoy security lane training with paintball guns and gas powered arty and machine gun simulators. Were we war wagons? Nope. No armor. No gun turrets. And no blanks. It's hard to have great training without great equipment, but it was a start.

Here are some pics.

Arty simulator.

MG simulator.

The ever-present IED.

Meet the insurgents.

More insurgents. Getting paid to play paintball is fun.

Wait for it.

AMBUSH!

Why armor is important.

More reasons why armor is important.

Last weekend, we had a three day BN FTX for AUG drill...er...battle assembly. We were lucky and got plenty of ammo. We also did more lanes training. I was assigned the first aid lanes. I did it war wagon style, and incorporated an ambush in the lanes training.

It was a good FTX. My company did very well, and I shot gansta-style on the M-9. But, a few days of training doesn't make us ready for combat.

Here are some pics of the training:

Medic! We try to make our training realistic with mulage kits. We used about a gallon of fake blood. The guys at the training support center hide when they see my supply SGT coming. He cleans them out.

It hurts.

Evacuating the casualties. Still a little too "chuck wagon."

Lets shoot some shit. See the guy in DCUs? That's SGT R just back from Iraq and over two years of mobilization. He was excused from this drill, but came anyway. When he decribed how a soldier died in his arms in Iraq, it helped my guys and gals stay focussed in a way that my pep talks and lectures never could.

Ammo, for once. My supply SGT is a former Marine and started talking shit to his commander. He even wanted to make it interesting with a little bet. Dumb ass. I was born and raised in a state with three times and many guns as people. You do the math.

Steely eyed killaz! SGT R on the front row. Yes he is wearing IBA. No, I don't want to know how he "aquired" it.

SPC C, steely eyed killer with the M-203. She shot a perfect score despite what she characterized as my bad coaching. What the hell does she know? Julie says she looks about twelve years old.

Victory cigar provided by my XO CPT D.

Conclusion: The reserves still has a long way to go before we train properly. We have to play catch up on our warrior skills once we are mobilized. Too many units are sent to Iraq as chuck wagons.

We need more ammo, and we need to do live fires. Live fires and force on force training are probably too hard to resource with part-time units. There ought to be several regional combat training centers for reservists similar to the Joint Readiness Training Center where you cycle your units through annually.

We're getting better, but we're not there yet.

Lazy Blogging

2005-08-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been fairly busy. It's grant season at the office and we just spent .5 million in Homeland Security money on equipment. Your tax dollars are hard at work. I've been busy acquiring and distributing all kinds of goodies to our various teams.
I've also been in a hazard mitigation class where I learned how to implement hazard mitigation projects. Fun.

And, this last weekend we had a three-day FTX where the battalion did weapons qualification and other lanes training. I don't have all the data yet, but I believe that my company lead the way in qualification rates. (Yours truly shot fairly well on the M-9.) And we certainly ran a bad-ass react to convoy/first aid lane. Not that I'm bragging or anything. I would never do that.

And to top it all off, I'm about to go to Fort Huachuca for two weeks for a school.

So, as my grandfather would say, I'm busier than a two-peckered puppy. I'll have a post up about the some interesting things that I've done with unit training. So stay tuned.

The Afghan Legion

2005-08-10T11:03:00.000-05:00

Bobby of Bobby's World has an interesting post about a paper that he presented at a recent conference at Fort Leavenworth.

Leverage the Afghans: The Case for Building an Afghan Auxiliary Military Force for Expeditionary Operations

My agenda was pretty straightforward: my background (to establish my "credibility" on the topic), the historical experience of the British Gurkhas (who serve as my model), the composition and details of my proposed Afghan Auxiliary Military Force, why I think the US Army would support this idea, and why I think the Government of Afghanistan would support it as well.
***
My background comes as no surprise to friends who have been following me on this blog (or with whom I share regular email correspondence): I spent six months as an embedded advisor under Task Force Phoenix with a Quick Reaction force kandak (battalion) and tolei asleyah (weapons company) of the Afghan National Army (ANA). Following that assignment, the 10th Mountain Division returned to Fort Drum and I was sold to Combined Forces Command - Afghanistan (CFC-A) in Kabul, where I served as the Interagency Strategic Plans Officer and worked under some of the smartest men I have ever met. I don't pretend this qualifies me for "expertise," but at least I do have some practical experience.

Analysis:
The whole post is fairly long, and there is some death by powerpoint "Bobby style", but its worth your time.

This is an interesting idea that I don't think will ever fly. Politically, we just aren't ready for something like this, and plus, I think there is something un-American about essentially using mercenaries to do our dirty work.

But, that's just my opinion. I do agree that we would be better served by somehow integrating Islamic forces into our military operations. GEN (RET) Zinni has stated that we ought to be using officers that we were trained in US schools from countries like Jordan in our operations in Iraq and AFG. So Bobby's paper is a good jumping off point to explore these ideas.

Note: cross-posted on Intel-dump.

Steven Vincent

2005-08-03T11:40:00.000-05:00

Journalist Steven Vincent was murdered in Iraq, and his translator was seriously injured. I have read his work in the CS Monitor, but I had never stopped by his blog until I saw it linked in discusssions about his death. I have been wasting a lot of time this morning reading his posts. What excellent work--great writing that takes you into the heart of Iraqi society. And that's probably what got him killed.

So if you haven't ever stopped by In The Red Zone you should do so. I'm planning on buying the book with the same title as well. It's sad when tragedy exposes you to something new.

My thoughts are with Steven's family and with his translator.

I Am a "Staff Puke"...

2005-08-02T15:34:00.000-05:00

...and I was one during the war. So if this is true, I'm irritated. I normally don't blog too much about politics, but unlike the radio host in question, I volunteered for combat--several times. I ended up on a staff. So I'm a war veteran, but not a close-combat veteran. It is a distinction that means something to warriors, but it is our distinction, not the pundit's. Paul Hackett, regardless of whether you agree with his political stance, deserves better.

Is this what we've come to in this country? Are we happy with this state of affairs?

Iraq Roadmap to Victory: July Update

2005-07-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

This is the second installment of my series where I have created some tracking tools to measure our progress in Iraq. The first post was just a draft where all the metrics were parked in neutral. Now, I've done some analysis and evaluation. I'm not going to link every source that I've used. I read far too much to keep track of it all.

I believe that this evaluation will meet with some controversy. My liberal readers will probably surmise that I'm giving an impression of too much progress. Conservatives might think that I haven't been generous enough. I think my evaluation is fair.

These charts illustrate some progress. Many of my metrics are trending towards the green. But, you should not that most of them are still evaluated as red or yellow. This means that we have a long way to go. Progress is incremental in some areas, glacial in others. It may take years of positive trending to fix some areas like infrastructure.

I will update these slides every month or two. If you don't agree with my assessments, by all means post your comments and your own evaluations. But, be prepared to back it up. If you want to rant, take it somewhere else. I value ideas over ideology.

One note on my analysis: These charts are the product of my own work from available open-source information and the occasional email from friends in Iraq. By no means do they reflect some official product that I've migrated into the blogosphere. Enjoy.

Flypaper, Supply, Demand and the Economics of Jihad

2005-07-19T22:40:00.000-05:00

From the Boston Globe:

Study cites seeds of terror in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank -- both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States -- have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.
***
However, interrogations of nearly 300 Saudis captured while trying to sneak into Iraq and case studies of more than three dozen others who blew themselves up in suicide attacks show that most were heeding the calls from clerics and activists to drive infidels out of Arab land, according to a study by Saudi investigator Nawaf Obaid, a US-trained analyst who was commissioned by the Saudi government and given access to Saudi officials and intelligence.

A separate Israeli analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior Al Qaeda operatives who are organizing the volunteers, ''the vast majority of [non-Iraqi] Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq."
***
But the impact of the foreign fighters has been enormous. They are blamed for the almost daily suicide attacks against US and Iraqi forces and have killed thousands of civilians, mostly members of Iraq's Shia Muslim majority. Their exploits have been responsible for much of the headline-grabbing carnage recently, contributing to the slide in American public support for the war.
***
Other fighters, who are coming to Iraq from across the Middle East and North Africa, are older, in their late 20s or 30s, and have families, according to the two investigations. ''The vast majority of them had nothing to do with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11th and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda today," said Reuven Paz, author of the Israeli study. ''I am not sure the American public is really aware of the enormous influence of the war in Iraq, not just on Islamists but the entire Arab world."
***
For example, while the unprovoked attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were largely condemned by clerics as violations of Muslim law, many religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promulgated fatwas, or religious edicts, saying that waging jihad in Iraq is justified by the Koran because it is defensive in nature. Last October, 26 clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was the duty of every Muslim to go and fight in Iraq.

''These are people who did not get training in Pakistan or Chechnya, [and they] ended up going to Iraq because they considered defending Iraq a must for every Muslim to go and fight," said Rita Katz, director of the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute in Washington and an Iraq native.
***
One indication that a heightened degree of Arab solidarity is a leading factor is that they are almost entirely Arabs and not Muslims from other countries, such as those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. Another motivation, the studies and analysts contend, is the centuries-old struggle between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. All the foreign fighters are Sunnis, according to the analyses, and many of their targets are Iraq's majority Shia Muslims, who have gained political power in Baghdad for the first time in hundreds of years.
***
Intelligence officials worry that some of ''Iraq alumni" will use the relationships they build on the battlefields of Iraq and return to their home countries as hardened Islamic terrorists.
The CIA's National Intelligence Council concluded in a report earlier this year that ''Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills, and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are 'professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself."

Analysis: I’ve never been a big fan of the “flypaper” theory in Iraq and this article points out some of the flaws in that thinking. Afghanistan was flypaper in the 80’s and look where that got us. This article points out some interesting cultural undercurrents at work that I’m not sure we understood before the invasion.

The nature of the Sunni-Shia split was an underestimated factor. Killing infidels has a double meaning for Sunni Jihadis. If you’re a radicalized Sunni, you can go to Iraq and get the chance to kill Americans and Shia, a Jihadi two-fer. Plus, the murder of Shias has a twisted religious legitimacy attached to it. Not only are you attacking the infidel invaders, you’re also defending the “true” faith. It’s not really murder if I blow up a bunch of Shia kids, right?

I never really looked at it this way until it started happening. I knew that that Saddam’s regime had repressed the Shias, but I thought that had more to do with internal politics and the fear of Iran’s influence over the Shia population. I didn’t know how deep the animosity ran throughout the Middle East.

That type of strife is foreign to me. I was raised a Methodist. We might have had ideological differences with the Catholics down the street (too much kneeling and not enough fried chicken), but we weren’t making suicide vests in the church basement either. The Sunni-Shia split is like the troubles in Northern Ireland on crack and speed.

And this means continued problems for Iraq. The insurgents don’t have to kill Americans to win the perceptions management battle. All they have to do is keep murdering Shias to create a climate of instability and illegitimacy for the Iraqi government. A steady flow of foreign fighters insures the continuation of violence. A future-martyr from Saudi Arabia is only concerned about his own heavenly rewards. He doesn’t have to worry about the future Iraq that he is helping to create. A native Iraqi has a better chance at realizing what’s at stake for his and his family’s future. So stopping the flow of foreign fighters is key.

Of course, stopping the flow of foreign fighters is no easy task. You certainly don’t solve it by invading other countries like Syria. That just widens the playing field—and not to our advantage. So how do you stop the flow of Jihadis into Iraq? Border control and operations against recruiter cells in supplier countries certainly helps. But, we spend billions trying to secure our own borders against illegal immigration and drugs, and don’t have much to show for it.

Drugs and Jihad have one thing is common: Demand=Supply. There is a demand for martyrs and willing supply throughout the Arab world. I don’t think the call to Jihad is that much different from our country’s own experience in war. In the Civil War, joining the fight was preached from the pulpit in abolitionist churches. Going to war was God’s work. Later, during WWII, those not in uniform were castigated. Our current war is the first fought largely without that societal pressure so I think that we’ve forgotten how powerful it can be.

The pressures that our society created to fight also lead to the creation of big rewards for veterans. WWII vets are honored with the mantle of “Greatest Generation”. Imagine the power of this label, and witness the bitterness of the Vietnam generation at being robbed of similar glory.

Now imagine what is at work within the Arab world. There is a call to glory and sacrifice. The pressure and rewards within the context of their culture are great. A generation of young men is heeding the call. So how do we get ahead of this? How do influence the Arab world to get beyond the cult of murder?

First, we attack the demand. We must meet our objectives in Iraq and leave as quickly as we can. We can’t cut and run, but we can’t linger either. As long as we are “occupiers” then we’re creating demand for the Jihad.

Next, we address the hopelessness of the Arab world. I would never consider going to a foreign land to commit a murderous suicide. So why does that appeal to so many Arab men? We have to bring all our country’s resources to bear on this problem—economics, diplomacy, education, and whatever else Western culture can muster.

Finally, we need to examine what caused our own lack of understanding of the forces at work in Iraq. In the future, we need to fight smarter.

Thailand Terror

2005-07-14T16:20:00.000-05:00

Well this sucks:

BANGKOK, Thailand - In a show of force, suspected Islamic separatists set off at least four bombs and fired at security personnel in an evening attack Thursday on a provincial capital in southern Thailand, killing at least one person.

Officials at the provincial hospital in Yala, the capital of the province of Yala, said police private Somporn Dulayanit was killed and 19 other people were injured, including three policemen.

***

"The five points where the bombs exploded are places where people go during the night — a hotel, two 7-Elevens, near a restaurant and near the railway station — all of which are usually crowded with people, so we can say that the troublemakers targeted on innocent people," he told Thai TV Channel 5.

***

The commander of the task force for the immediate area, Col. Kitti Intason, said the attackers set off a bomb at the provincial power station to cause a blackout before the other attacks.

After the bombs exploded, the attackers opened fire on crowds of people with automatic weapons, Kwanchart said. He declined to say how many attackers there were but said that one suspect had been arrested with a weapon.

The three weeks that my unit spend in Thailand last year at Cobra Gold were a wonderfully enriching experience. We made friends with many of our Thai counterparts, and I hope none of them were hurt. The Thai soldiers are tough and competent, and I wish them good hunting as they track down the murderers responsible for these attacks.

This is just further proof that we are facing a global insurgency that is gaining competence. Note how this attack was initiated. Knock out the power grid and then start killing. You can bet that this attack template will be disected and disseminated on all the Jihadi (or Arhabi as MAJ K calls them) websites. No doubt the bad guys will add this tactic to their kit bags. How long until something like this hits us here at home?

A Call to Curiosity

2005-07-12T09:05:00.000-05:00

(Cross-posted on Intel-Dump)

Today we have the pleasure of another guest blogger. Tanya is a college student who is well on her way to being an asset to this country. Read and you’ll agree that “the kids are all right”.

Here's Tanya:

“Cultural understanding” is not a topic which comes up often in the United States. We may talk about the “culture wars” when it comes to our own domestic politics, and we may make references to a “clash of civilizations” when we speak about the Global War on Terror, but it wasn’t until recently that cultural understanding began to enter into public discourse. Now, according to Montgomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist and defense policy fellow at the Office of Naval Research, cultural understanding is a matter of national security.

McFate has written an article entitled, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” for the latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly, a magazine published by the National Defense University. She might as well have called it, “Why we should understand the enemy.”

It seems like common sense, really. McFate makes a reference to Sun Tzu’s famous saying, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Considering the centuries between Sun Tzu’s writing and today, you would think that we would have managed to internalize the lesson, but as McFate makes clear in her article, today’s military lacks “the programs, systems, models, personnel, and organizations to deal with either the existing threat or the changing environment.”

I’m not an expert on military matters, but it’s not difficult to see that our lack of investment in cultural education is harming us in Iraq, and is likely to hurt us still more in the future. Everything from differences in body language to a different framework for social connections takes on a new importance when a misunderstanding means that someone gets shot.

We’ve all heard about the lag in translating Arabic language information. I can tell you that the hot language to be studying in college right now is Arabic. Give it three or four years, and we’re going to have a whole slew of International Studies majors with minors in Arabic or Islamic studies. And that’s a very good thing.

But it’s not enough. McFate mentions in her article that the military equivalent of an area studies specialist, the foreign area officer (FAO), has rarely experienced “deep cultural immersion totally outside the military structure, [so] most do not develop real cultural and social expertise.” It’s all very good if we have Arabic speakers who can translate, but translation does not necessarily imply understanding. The kind of immersion that we need in order to achieve understanding, at least in higher education, means that American students should be studying abroad.

And they do. Many colleges are proud of the percentage of their students who venture abroad for a semester or more. The problem is that the top destinations for American students are English-speaking countries (the UK, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand), with Western European countries (France, Italy, and Spain) as second choices. It’s better than nothing, but not by much. The Institute of International Education publishes statistics which show that as of 2003, the Middle East is the last destination of choice for students studying abroad, right behind Canada and significantly behind Africa.

This means that we’re getting Arabic speakers who have never been anywhere in the Arab world. And while you might read about differences in social interaction in a classroom, there’s very little that compares to actually venturing into a marketplace and trying to bargain for your breakfast. Cultural understanding becomes much more imperative when a lack of it means you might not get fed (especially for a college student).

So we need programs to encourage American students to study outside of the Western, English-speaking areas of the world. One such program is the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which blogger Kris Alexander mentioned at one point with a, “Who’s heard of this?” comment. I’m actually involved with NSEP, and it’s a quality program. In exchange for a scholarship to study abroad for a semester or more in a non-traditional destination country (think Egypt, China, Uganda, and Romania), college students are asked to work for the government for one year in the Department of Defense, intelligence community, or Department of Homeland Security. The top destinations for scholarship recipients this year were Egypt and mainland China. The NSEP is an excellent program, a little bit like ROTC for languages, but it’s too small. Before September 11th, it was in danger of getting shut down for lack of funding.

Along the same lines, the National Defense University conducted a study on the feasibility of a Linguist Reserve Corps . The main conclusion reached was that such a program is indeed feasible, and very necessary. But we haven’t got it yet. And what languages are you most likely to study in high school, anyway? Spanish, French, maybe German. You’re probably more likely to study Latin than Arabic. If we’re going to have a Linguist Reserve Corps, we first have to train the linguists.

I attended a conference at Stanford University this past spring called the Forum for American-Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES). It brought together twenty students from the United States and twenty from China to speak on issues ranging from politics and economics to karaoke. What struck me most during the week-long conference was the caliber of the students from China. They didn’t just speak enough English to order food in a restaurant. They spoke enough English to stand up and ask top American scholars, lawyers, and businessmen complicated questions about finance, intellectual property law, and human rights. Did you get that kind of vocabulary from your high school French class? Or are you still stuck asking the direction to la Tour Eiffel?

There’s been quite a bit of alarmist language in the news today about China’s rise. The newspapers tend to focus on their military build-up vis-à-vis Taiwan, but occasionally you’ll hear mention of how many engineering and hard-science majors China, and Asia in general, is turning out in comparison to the U.S.. The National Defense University rolled out a paper on this as well. If there’s a real China threat for the U.S., I think it’s going to come from a new generation of highly educated, multi-lingual, motivated Chinese young people who will do the job better than Americans. And that’s not something we can meet or beat by putting more money into missiles.

So what do we need? There’s a certain arrogance in America that says, “I don’t need to learn another language, because everyone else is learning English.” Maybe they are, but don’t believe for a second that it follows that you’ll understand them, or that you’re actually speaking the same language. I think that, as a matter of national security, we need a revival of education in this country. And I don’t mean testing, and I don’t actually mean more money, although programs like NSEP could definitely use it.

We need to teach new languages in our high schools. We need to encourage students to study abroad in countries which don’t speak English. We need to send them where Americans aren’t necessarily welcome. And believe me, a lot of that is going to start with parents considering the possibility. I’ll be studying Mandarin in Beijing next spring on an NSEP scholarship. I know my parents would rather have me home, but all my dad is doing is sending me articles on the avian flu .

Keeping up starts with the realization that, if we believe we’re the center of the world, and that all roads lead to English and western culture, we’re not going to get to be on top for long. Mandarin Chinese is the second most-spoken language on the internet. Does anyone really believe that it’s going to stay second for long? And what language will it be after Mandarin? Let’s get ahead and stop playing catch-up.

We need a call to curiosity.

My Comments: The Closest thing that I got to any kind of exchange program in colllege was Spring Break in Mexico and my month in Korea doing Cadet Troop Leadership Training in ROTC. All my cultural knowledge came from books which is good up until a point--better than nothing but still not good enough.

A good friend of mine was a Middle Eastern Studies major at West Point. He traveled all over the region as a cadet and is a much better officer for it. I think Tanya's right about this issue. If we're going to lead the world, then we ought to get a lot smarter.

Your Homeland Security Tax Dollars at Work

2005-07-08T12:43:00.000-05:00

Now this is an interesting use of your tax dollars.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M.-- Deep inside the cave-like laboratories of the legendary research center that created the atomic bomb, scientists have begun work on a Manhattan Project of a different sort.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, they have been constructing the most elaborate computer models of the United States ever attempted. There are virtual cities inhabited by millions of virtual individuals who go to work, shopping centers, soccer games and anywhere else their real life counterparts go. And there are virtual power grids, oil and gas lines, water pipelines, airplane and train systems, even a virtual Internet.
The scientists build them. And then they destroy them.
***
"We're trying to be the best terrorists we can be," said James P. Smith, who is working on simulations of a smallpox virus released in Portland, Ore. "Sometimes we finish and we're like, 'We're glad we're not terrorists.'

But, some disagree on the value of this program:

Some urban planners have criticized the project for its cost -- each simulation can cost tens of millions of dollars -- and have argued that such modeling can never be precise. A book on public health threats by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, for example, notes that some critics say simulations "cannot provide clear evidence for or against any option." Advocates say the exercise is providing crucial information for protecting the country.

Analysis: The most powerful simulation in the world is not going to be able to account for human behavior. But, I see value in this program especially when I read this:

In one simulation, Smith unleashed the smallpox virus in a university building in downtown Portland, with several students becoming victims. Soon after the 10-day incubation period passed, hospitals throughout Portland began to report cases. Smith's computer chronicled the devastation. Day 1: 1,281 infected, zero dead. Day 35: 23,919 infected, 551 dead. Day 70: 380,582 infected, 12,499 dead.

The toughest variable in disaster planning is people and their behaviors, and a simulation that gives planners more insight into behavior is valuable. One of the artificialities in emergency exercises is always the human factor. It’s hard to “script” things like the Portland smallpox simulation.

Now, I do have one problem with this program. I’m in this business and I never heard of these simulations until I read about it in the Washington Post. Apparently they are classified. But, if they are so secret that responders can’t get access to the information, they are useless. Who is going to respond to a smallpox outbreak in Texas? Not the 100 pound brains in Los Alamos.

This illustrates a deeper problem in our homeland security efforts. Many federal programs are classified to the point that non-federal responders can’t get access to the info. Or if they do, it’s so watered down to the point of uselessness. Clearly some of this information needs to be classified, but we haven’t developed many solutions to getting it into the hands of the right people.

Of course no amount of simulation and planning can save us from this stupidity:

The HazMat threat.

The weakest point in America's defense against terrorism may be an inconspicuous little bridge a few blocks from the Capitol. Rail tanker cars filled with deadly chemicals pass over the bridge, at Second Street and E Street SW, on their journeys up and down the East Coast. The bridge is highly vulnerable to an explosion from below, and if deadly chemicals were released on it, they would endanger every member of Congress and as many as 250,000 other federal employees.
***
When antiterrorism experts try to predict what could happen in the next 9/11 attack, the dispersal of deadly chemicals is at or near the top of their list. An assault on a chemical plant or a rail car filled with chemicals would turn another unremarkable part of the infrastructure into a powerful instrument of death. An attack on a single rail tanker filled with chlorine could kill or seriously harm 100,000 people in less than an hour. Because of its location in the middle of official Washington, a chlorine leak from a rail tanker on the bridge at Second Street could endanger much of the federal government, including Congress and the Supreme Court.
***
Earlier this year, the City Council in Washington passed a law prohibiting the transport of ultrahazardous materials within 2.2 miles of the Capitol. But CSX, the railroad that operates the two main lines running through the district, has gone to court to challenge the law, which would add to its costs. It claims that city governments do not have the power to interfere with interstate rail shipping. A federal court has blocked the law from taking effect, though CSX has temporarily stopped shipping ultrahazardous materials on the rail line closest to the Capitol.
The Bush administration filed a brief supporting CSX in its challenge to Washington's law, and, incredibly, it has made no effort to do the job with federal regulation. When it comes to defending the nation from terrorism, the president and the Republican leadership in Congress have been unwilling to make large corporations, many of them big campaign donors, shoulder their share of the burden. Washington's residents and employees should not have to risk their lives to save CSX the cost of rerouting shipments of ultrahazardous materials.

Analysis: The quoted casualty figures from the chlorine leak in a railcar sounds a little alarmist to me. A lot of things would have to go “right” in order to produce that much devastation from a single rail car. But, make no mistake; there is some BAD stuff out there on the rails. Cities should absolutely have the right to establish hazardous materials routes that restrict the most dangerous cargo from transiting through densely populated areas. Even without terrorism, there are still plenty of transportation accidents that cause spills.

So the bottom line is that we’re spending millions of dollars a year running cool simulations that are so classified that no one can see them. And our nation’s capitol is may continue to be under threat from hazardous materials because re-routing them is bad for business. Like I said, the toughest variable in emergency planning is human behavior.

And In Other News

2005-07-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

Egypt's envoy in Iraq killed

(CNN) -- Egypt on Thursday confirmed that its top envoy to Iraq has been killed.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses its deep sadness at the martyrdom of its ambassador, Dr. Ihab al-Sherif, head of the diplomatic delegation to Iraq," the Egyptian government said.

Analysis: This might be a stretch, but this might be an indicator of lack of coordination amoung the AQ groups. Clearly Dr. al-Sherif's murder is something the bad guys would want to time so in order to dominate the news cycle for a day or two. Now it's competing with the London story. So what does it mean? Another indicator that AQ has morphed into a much looser affiliation based movement than a centrally run organization.

New Post up on Intel Dump

2005-07-06T16:14:00.000-05:00

Here.

Blog Begging

2005-07-06T14:47:00.000-05:00

Okay all you smart guys and gals out there, I need a little help. I'm trying to ramp up the performance of my reserve company, and tackle some tougher subject material in our training. So here are some things that I need:

Anything you've got (briefs, papers, etc) on Effects Based Operations (Hat tip to the "Big D" for his help on this)
A good brief that outlines the current status of "transformation". You know all that UEx and UEy stuff.
Any border patrol guys out there? (SGT L you reading?) Border security is a hot issue in Iraq right now, and I want to get smarter on intelligence support to border security.
Any other professional development material that you've found useful. Any other commanders out there? What worked for you?

Also, I'm moving forward with my assessment slides. I'll probably publish them this week. Now is your last chance for input.

Thanks.

Welcome New Readers

2005-07-04T10:44:00.000-05:00

I'd like to welcome all the Intel Dump readers who have followed the links my way. If you're new, here are some of my best posts for you enjoyment. Welcome aboard.

Transformation, Nation Building, and the Federal Government

Are We There Yet? Creating a Roadmap to Victory in Iraq

Houston, We Have a Problem: Exploring the Impact of Nuclear Terrorism (Part 1)

Houston, We Have a Problem: Exploring the Impact of Nuclear Terrorism (Part 2)

Analysis: Better Spies, Better Intelligence

Bright Future: A Counter-Terrorism Strategy

How Do We Know We’re Winning?

Creating "Intelligent" Intelligence Soldiers

Worried

2005-07-03T23:28:00.000-05:00

Zane’s been having blood in his stool. It’s probably a milk protein allergy. Unless its not. It’s nothing that altering Julie’s diet won’t solve. Unless it doesn’t. The doctors say this is routine. Happens all the time. It’s nothing to worry about. Unless it isn’t.

I worry. It comes naturally to me. Perhaps it’s genetic. My late grandmother would worry when she didn’t have something to worry about. She was a child of the great depression. I’m not talking about the great depression where Renee Zellweger and Richard Gere razzle dazzle it. I’m talking about the Texas oil fields. Rough and hard where good, hardworking folks starve. She never got beyond worrying about the next bad thing that could happen.

I inherited that impending sense of dread. Zane gets this concerned look on his face that reminds me of my grandmother. Reincarnation? Or maybe he knows something’s up with that milk protein.

We found out that Julie was pregnant as my grandmother lay dying in Midland. It was hospice “death with dignity” time and she couldn’t talk. I called from Austin to tell her that Julie was pregnant. She couldn’t say anything back but I’m told that she smiled. One less thing to worry about. She died later that day.

She worried about details and was the busiest dying person that you ever saw. She had the hymns and a poem already picked out for her funeral. She labeled all her possessions divvying up who got what. She had packets of notes and trinkets made up for all the members of the family. I still haven’t had the guts to read the note she wrote to me. I’m guessing that she’ll be hounding me from beyond the grave to do better. She’ll probably be right. I worry about not living up to her expectations.

When I was mobilized in the reserves, my wife’s company went through seven rounds of layoffs. She’s an engineer at a high-tech firm, and the tech bubble hit them hard. I was deployed to Qatar when a couple rounds of layoffs hit. There I am in the middle of a war worried about making the rent. Somehow I’m guessing none of the executives at her company had the same concerns, golden parachutes and all that.

“Are you okay?” is a common line in emails in the sandbox. Except this time I was the one asking. We were going to buy a house and start a family when I got back. A layoff would derail our plans. Good, hardworking folks sometimes starve or at least can’t afford a down payment on that overpriced house in central Austin.

My profession is all about worrying. I am a pager carrying professional worrywart. Fire, floods, tornadoes, terrorism are all in my purview. It’s my job to try and prevent those “oh crap!” moments or at least lessen their impact. I worry about all that stuff so you don’t have to.

Personally I worry too. I worry about Zane. Will he be healthy? Happy? Am I up to this task? Can I set the conditions for his life to be a little better than mine? Every time I turn on the news there is something more to make me doubt it.

But, the biggest thing that I worry about—the thing that keeps me awake at night—is being in the reserves. I think it is becoming clear now that we have a much longer road ahead of us in the war than we anticipated. The vice-president says that the insurgency is in its death throes. I’m not so sure, but, hell, what do I know? Maybe he’s right. But, my grandmother was in her death throes for a year, and she still got a lot done.

I anticipate that I will probably get called up again. Rumor intelligence, RUMINT, has it that the legal groundwork has already been laid to call people up a second time. It is now a political issue. I’ve already done two years so legally I can’t be called back right now. But, how long can that be sustained? Sooner or later, I’ll get the call again. I don’t mind. I’ll do my duty.

But, what I do mind is the uncertainty of it all. The active force has a rotation schedule. Divisions and brigades know when and where they are going months in advance. They can prepare. This isn’t the case in the reserves. So far, we seem to be subject to a system that is completely arbitrary. I may not get called up again, but tomorrow I could have my company completely stripped away from me to fill holes in some other unit. I could go from having a cohesive team to nothing at all. I worry about that.

And I worry about the war itself. Will I die? How much of Zane’s life will I miss? If I go, will he know me when I come back? Of course, these are issues that every soldier wrestles with, but we do our best to plan around them. But, you can’t plan around it in the reserves right now, can you?

So this Fourth of July, I’ll fly the flag. I’ll drink beer and burn beef on the grill. But, in the back of my head I’ll be worried. Will I be around to teach my son what this holiday is all about?

I tell myself everything is going to be okay. Unless it isn’t.

Intel Dump

2005-07-03T15:17:00.000-05:00

My first post as part of the new Intel Dump team is up. It's just a little introduction of myself. Funny thing is that I never really did that with this blog so you might want to go check it out. Or not.

I will still be posting here and probably cross-post things back and forth between the two blogs. There are certain subjects that will probably stay here where they belong, some that will stay there, and some that don't "belong" anywhere. But, hell, its a free country.

Transformation, Nation Building, and the Federal Government

2005-06-29T14:44:00.000-05:00

In the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allision, the volunteer community prepared and disturbed over one million meals to people impacted by the disaster. Trained volunteers from throughout the country converged on Houston to render aid in a time of great need. What does that have to do with anything? Keep reading.

I am currently working on a magazine article (that’s my opening salvo of shameless self-promotion, more to follow) that touches on re-construction issues in the GWOT. I’ve done several interviews and a ton of research. I’ve started noticing some patterns and trends in terms of reconstruction. Basically, we’re not very good at it. The political clamoring about “no nation building” wasn’t just rhetoric. It’s a fact. We “don’t do nation building” by design. And that’s a problem if we’re serious about winning the GWOT.

Our government and military is still very much stuck in the Cold War model. Like it or not, the Army is engaged in “transformation”, an attempt to break from the Cold War model and be a force more appropriate for the post-Cold War world. So far, it’s been a mixed bag, but it’s a start.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about the Cold War was that we paid a great deal of attention to defeating Soviet Tank Armies, but not much attention to what happened afterward. You’ve crushed the Russian hordes, what next? It might be too simple to label the apparent inadequacy of Phase IV planning in Iraq as bad political leadership. Instead, it may the culmination point of generations of bad policy. Our government is just not set up to “own” and govern a foreign country of 25 million people. Imperialists we ain’t.

But, we own two large countries right now, and there is the potential for more. Let’s say that we end up in a military show-down with North Korean, and we, along with our allies, now “own” that country. If we can all agree that our reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit or miss. How do we get better for next time? And sooner or later there will be a next time.

In my research, I’ve noticed the recurring theme that reconstruction tasks have not been accomplished because of security. The folks in the government with the knowledge and expertise weren’t willing or able to get into dicey situations that they didn’t sign up for. That’s left unfilled positions in our reconstruction efforts. That’s also caused much of the work to migrate to private firms and private security companies. And again, that’s been a mixed bag.

So how does the government fix the problem? We may already have a model in our emergency management and homeland security communities.

Texas Task Force One is Texas’ Urban Search and Rescue Team. They deployed to ground zero after Sept 11th, and are a state as well as national resource. The team is not a standing team. Folks aren’t waiting around for buildings to collapse. Instead, its members are essentially “reservists” who pull together in a disaster.

Team members come from a variety of backgrounds mostly in Fire and EMS. In order to be on the team you have a certain level of proficiency and training. You also have to keep your skills up-to-date and participate in training and exercises. Team members also have the approval/understanding of their employers that they can be called away for a response. To me it sounds a lot like the military reserves.

There are several other types of teams that follow this model. Ranging from disaster medical, mortuary, and logistics teams these groups of people are trained professionals who skills are only occasionally needed like say when a tornado rips through Jarell, TX …or when you invade a country in serious need of an extreme home make over.

The government should use this model to establish a standing reserve civil affairs task force (RCATF) that is not part of the military, but instead made up of civilians with critical skills and models along the lines of Texas Task Force 1. The RCATF would draw from both government and non-government employees in skill areas such as agriculture, medicine, government, commerce, emergency services, and law enforcement.

Volunteers would receive training in force protection and interaction with the military. They would sign up with the implicit knowledge that they might be put in harm’s way. They would participate in exercises with the military, and get continuous training one a monthly and annual basis. And they’d be paid for their time.

A good example of how to use them is annual Cobra Gold Exercise in Thailand. I went last year and found it an extremely enriching experience. I got to work with soldiers from several countries, and learned a bunch. During the exercise, the Sergeant Majors from the various units got together and took up a collection for a local school. They bought supplies and did some reconstruction work. It was an informal process. Why not make it formal?

Why not bring deploy a package of cops, firefighters, EMTs, veterinarians, and other government-types along with the military element? This group could be sent into the areas near where the exercise was taking place and help train the host nation. They would be practicing the skills of nation building while helping build goodwill to our country. Our Civil Affairs soldiers do this all the time, but there is never enough of them to go around.

Or take for instance a city manger in a medium sized town. He’s forgotten more about governance than you and I will ever know. Maybe he’s a veteran too old for the reserves, but instilled with a burning desire for public service. He won’t quit his job to sign on with Halliburton, and he’s not an Ivy Leaguer so the State Department won’t hire him. So he’s left out, and our country doesn’t tap into a valuable resource.

Right now the bulk of this type of work rests in the hands of the military and agencies like USAID. The problem is that the military and the government only have limited capacity and have problems generating more. You go to war with the government that you have, not the one that you wish you had.

So let’s go back to our volunteer effort in response to Tropical Storm Allison. What does that have to do with this? For me it’s all the proof you need that a program like this will work. The desire to serve the greater good runs deep in our country. I’ve seen it over and over again in my interaction with the volunteer community. But military service isn’t for everyone so why don’t we create another way to contribute while exapanding our capacity to conduct nation building? If you build it, the volunteers will come.

Postscript: There are three categories of professionals that I should have mentioned. First, we should include engineers (my engineer wife as an example of brain power). I've worked with the Army Corps of Engineers on disaster recoveries, and they are second to none. But, they don't have folks like industrial engineers who might help with commmerce.

Second, we should include educators, like my dad. We spend a lot time building schools, but how much effort do we put into helping improve education?

Third, utilty workers. I'm talking about the guys who actually get out and make things like the power and electric work. There is an invisible army at work to make sure that the lights come on when you flip the switch. These folks could probably go a long way to improving the situation in Iraq.

Congrats Noah and God Speed Phil

2005-06-29T14:19:00.000-05:00

There some big news in my circle of blog buddies.

Noah over at Defensetech is engaged. Congrats!

Marriage, like Texas A&M, is a great institution...if you feel like you need to be institutionalized. I kid. I've been married for +7 years, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. The two best things that I ever did were join the Army and marry Julie both of which made me a better, more complete human being. And, of course, marriage led to the third best thing that I ever did: Zane.

And Phil over at Intel Dump has a "rendevous with destiny". He's now officially part of the Human Spackle club. He's getting mobilized to the 101st ABN (ASSLT), the most power division on God's green earth, to deploy to Iraq. Phil have you memorized the Screaming Eagle Fight Song yet?

Phil has asked me to be part of a caretaker team on his blog. I'm going to help keep it going while he's gone. I'll do my best to help continue his excellent work. But, I'm hoping he has time to write because I look forward to hearing what he has to say about Iraq.

Anyway, good luck to both you guys.

--Kris

PS. For those of you who don't get the Texas A&M joke, I went to Texas Tech. Get yer guns up.

Are We There Yet? Creating a Roadmap to Victory in Iraq

2005-06-23T17:01:00.000-05:00

When can we leave?

Recently, in a highly visible move, several politicians have called for the immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq or tried to force the Bush administration to set criteria for withdrawal:

A conservative, a moderate, a liberal and a libertarian teamed up in the House yesterday to prod President Bush to set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq, striking a rare tone of unity on a day when tensions about national security provoked marathon brawling on the floor.

The resolution was sponsored by Reps. Walter B. Jones Jr. (R-N.C.), Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Ron Paul (R-Tex.). It calls for Bush to begin drawing down troops in Iraq by Oct. 1, 2006, but does not set a date for complete withdrawal.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) tried to introduce an amendment to a military spending bill that would have given the president 30 days to show Congress criteria for determining when U.S. forces could withdraw from Iraq -- but GOP leaders blocked it, saying such additions are not allowed to appropriations bills.

Read more here. The resolution is here.

And Senator Biden has been in the news recently with his proclamations on Iraq:

Biden, a Delaware senator who announced on Sunday that he expects to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, rejected proposals by some of his colleagues to pull troops out of Iraq immediately or on a specific timetable, saying such moves would embolden insurgents and ultimately lead to a civil war. Instead, he said the United States needs to enlist the support of allied nations to train Iraqi troops and police, speed up reconstruction work, and help the nascent Iraqi government fight corruption.

Biden also called on President Bush to explain his plans for Iraq to the American people. The administration should report on the situation in Iraq to Congress monthly and in public testimony, the senator said in remarks at the Brookings Institution.

Rumsfeld fired back:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls by some congressional Democrats on Thursday that the Bush administration set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. “That would be a mistake,” he told a Senate panel.

“Timing in war is never predictable. There are never guarantees,” Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Those who say we are losing this war are wrong. We are not.”

The Vice President thinks we’re on the track to victory:

“The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

But, in recent Senate testimony GEN John Abizaid said:

“I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago.”

That clearly isn’t good news, and our own government doesn’t seem “common operating picture” of what’s going on in Iraq much less the media. Plus, none of the talk about defeating the insurgency sheds any light on the other challenges that face victory in Iraq.

So who is right?

Regardless of whether or not you support the war, I agree with Senator Biden’s assessment. It is clear that immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be reckless policy and result in a disaster that might suck the entire region down with it—the Afghanistan failed state model on a grand scale with global repercussions. Remember the “pottery barn rule”. We broke it, we bought it. And I’m going to side with GEN Abizaid. I don’t think the insurgency is in its death throes.

So what they hell is going to happen? As a person with a very personal interest in the apparent open-ended nature of the Iraq conflict, I agree that we need to start setting criteria for “victory” and subsequent withdrawal from Iraq. I respect the members of congress who are force the administration to establish some kind of framework for ending the conflict.

But, this is where things get hard. What does right look like for leaving Iraq? What conditions for success do we need to set for the Iraqis before we begin to leave? And how long does it take?

In April, I posted about effects based operations (EBO) and setting criteria and “metrics” to measure success in Iraq. With this post, I’ll want to take the discussion a step further.
The following slides and notes are my attempt at analyzing the current situation in Iraq and establishing a “roadmap” to Victory that the average citizen can understand. Note that all these slides are labeled as “drafts”. I am hoping that my reader(s) will give me their input in the comments section which will allow me to establish a baseline evaluation of the situation. Then, I’ll post periodic updates.

EBO treats the enemy as a "system of systems". This is the
pre-invasion Iraq system with the Regime being the center of
gravity. The relative importance of a sub-system is mapped by
its size and proximity to the center of gravity.

This is the traditional military model that we are best
prepared to fight. Decapitate the Regime, and destroy the
high value military units.

***Note 1: Civilian Population. In the pre-war planning the
biggest consideration was averting a humanitarian crisis
and minimizing collateral damage. We expected to be greeted
as liberators, but the reality on the ground turned more
complicated.
***Note 2: Religious and Tribal Power. I think we underestimated
the impact and importance of this element and were left
playing catch up.

This is the current system of systems. Note how the center
of gravity is now the Iraqi population itself, an element we
didn't have a clear understanding of going into Iraq.
Note the convoluted nature of the insurgency, and how
convoluted web of sub-systems impacts the civilian population.
The emergence of many of these systems was unexpected or
their impact underestimated.

These are the four key tasks that need to be accomplished in
order to secure "victory" in Iraq. Subsequent slides
expand on the tasks.

This is a break down of Task 1. The "rainbow" slide bars
indicate the status of the task. Red is bad. Green is good.
Below the slide bars are arrows to indicate which directions
the tasks are trending. All of the bars are parked in neutral,
and will be adjusted after the readers assessment.

Task 1 (con't)

Task 2

Task 3

Task 4

Task breakdown by region.

So when can we withdrawal from Iraq? My assessment is that first we have to get all of these tasks and regions are assessed in the “green”. Then they have to stay that way for at least a year, and only then we can start leaving. As things trend towards the “green” we may be able to draw down our troops, but, until all these criteria are met, we will stay in Iraq in one form or another.

I will post the task list in the comments section so you can cut and paste. Feel free to add and subtract. Tell me I’m wrong. In a couple weeks, I’ll republish the slides with the task bars actually measuring an assessment. Then I’ll do periodic updates.

Update: The Brookings Institution has some good metrics in their Iraq Index. Worth a look.

Zarqawi, Media Critic

2005-06-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

DUBAI - Al-Qaida's wing in Iraq slammed Al Jazeera television on Sunday, saying the satellite channel often criticized by Washington was siding with the United States in its reporting on the violence in the Arab country.

Al Jazeera spokesman rejected the criticism of its coverage, saying it was balanced.

“Where are you heading, Jazeera? Why this hostility toward the mujahideen (holy warriors)?” the group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said, according to a statement posted on an Islamist Web site.

More here.

Now that's some funny stuff. Maybe Zarqawi needs to start cross-posting on some of the anti-media blogs out there. Apparently nobody is capable of getting anything right, anywhere, in any language or country. Damn reporters.***

***Note: My tongue is firmly planted in my cheek.

Human Spackle, Part 2

2005-06-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

"Sometimes you have to take the time out of your day to be an asshole."

Those were sage words of wisdom imparted to me by my platoon sergeant, SFC Davis, when I was a young, dumb 2LT back in my 101st days. Now I'm an older, less dumb senior captain, but I still follow his advice. Everything is not sunshine. Or as another wise platoon sergeant in our company, SFC Allison, once told me after pointing out how bad I had screwed something up: "Its called candor. Get used to it." I got used to it, and Davis, Allison, and I got along just fine. Eventually.

So what does this have to do with human spackle? Well, it seems that 2LT B's tasking got cancelled (for now). And this is a good thing. I was happy when I found out the news, but not everything is not sunshine.

2LT B remains a qualified officer who has not been mobilized and deployed. He's on the hook for the next tasking. He has a rendezvous with destiny in either Iraq of Afghanistan. Of this I have no doubt. And this is what I reminded him of when I spoke to him today.

"You're off the hook...for now," I told him. The worst part about these things is that about 25% of the time these taskings get cancelled. The soldier gets all spun up. The get themselves and their families mentally, physically, and spiritually prepared for what is about to happen, and then nothing does. It’s a grand mind-fuck, Army style.

And so I have to be the one who rains on 2LT B's parade reminding him of the reality that he faces. It's called candor. Get used to it.

Light Weekend Reading

2005-06-17T06:54:00.000-05:00

Military Cultural Education
Over the past decade the Army has increasingly engaged in lengthy overseas deployments in which mission performance demanded significant interface with indigenous populations. Such interaction and how it affects military operations is important. In fact, engagement with local populaces has become so crucial that mission success is often significantly affected by soldiers' ability to interact with local individuals and communities. Learning to interact with local populaces presents a major challenge for soldiers, leaders, and civilians.

Comment: I don't think the Army, as a whole, is very culturally literate, and it impacts our operations. One of the big problems is that the quality of the training is so hit or miss. Some units get great training, and their mission readiness exercises include cultural training. Some don't. We had a large slice of our unit mobilized and deployed last year, and they didn't get any formal Iraqi/Muslim cultural training from the Army. It was all stuff that they came up with on their own.

I'm experiencing that in my own unit. I can't really get the type of cultural training that I want. So, I'm looking to outside resources. College professors. Local religious leaders. So far, I haven't been all that successful.

I'm Trying To Learn Arabic
When I walked into Arabic class last week, Karam, my teacher, cheerily asked me how I was doing. I said, "Tamaam, hamdulillah," which means, "Fine, thanks be to God." But I was lying. I'd just spent a full day at work and was sitting down at a desk for two hours of mind-bending grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. I knew it would be a long night.
I am not one of those people who dreads the thought of learning a foreign language. While everyone else was partying in high school, I was learning the Spanish past subjunctive and loving it. I studied German, French, and Portuguese in college. I speak decent Russian and have taught myself some half-decent rudimentary Japanese. Languages are usually fun. But Arabic is really killing me.

Comment: Language and Cultural proficiency is a long term commitment--a multi-generational effort. Why? Because its so damn hard.

Soldier Rap, The Pulse of War
June 13 issue - It took only a few ambushes, roadside bombs and corpses for Neal Saunders to know what he had to do: turn the streets of Baghdad into rap music. So the First Cavalry sergeant, then newly arrived for a year of duty in Sadr City, began hoarding his monthly paychecks and seeking out a U.S. supplier willing to ship a keyboard, digital mixer, cable, microphones and headphones to an overseas military address. He hammered together a plywood shack, tacked up some cheap mattress pads for soundproofing and invited other Task Force 112 members to join him in his jerry-built studio. They call themselves "4th25" --pronounced fourth quarter, like the final do-or-die minutes of a game--and their album is "Live From Iraq." The sound may be raw, even by rap standards, but it expresses things that soldiers usually keep bottled up. "You can't call home and tell your mom your door got blown off by an IED," says Saunders. "No one talks about what we're going through. Sure, there are generals on the TV, but they're not speaking for us. We're venting for everybody."

Comment: I'm an uptight white guy with, as my fellow company commader 1LT K like to point out, a terminal case of "white-itis". Bsscally I'm a honky so I'm sure that can't really understand this completely. But, I find it very interesting. I've asked 1LT K to guest blog on this topic. So more to follow. BTW, 1LT K does not suffer from white-itis.

Far from media focus: steady democratic progress in Iraq
Recent international reporting on Iraq has focused on the wave of violence and the spike in insurgent activity. Yet only a few weeks ago, press reports were trumpeting a lull in attacks as the end of the insurgency.

The political process in Iraq - as covered by the few reports that do not focus exclusively on the number of bombs and shootings - appears similarly erratic: elation over the elections rapidly deteriorated into cynicism and despair over parliamentary wrangling. The press has painted a picture of political chaos in which inflexible politicians are squandering the momentum created by brave Iraqi voters.

Comment: If you don't read the CS Monitor, you should start.

Panel: Interagency confusion hampers intelligence reform
WASHINGTON - Overlapping responsibilities among U.S. intelligence agencies could lead to failures in assessing terrorism threats, experts said Monday in examining changes at the CIA and FBI since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Comment: Its the intelligence, stupid.

Outside Iraq but Deep in the Fight
ALEPPO, Syria -- When the Americans led the invasion of Iraq, the men of Abu Ibrahim's family gathered in the courtyard of their shared home in the far north of Syria. Ten slips of paper were folded into a plastic bag, and they drew lots. The five who opened a paper marked with ink would go to Iraq and fight. The other five would stay behind.

Abu Ibrahim drew a blank. But remaining in Syria did not mean staying clear of the war. For more than two years, by his own detailed account, the slightly built, shabbily dressed 32-year-old father of four has worked diligently to shuttle other young Arab men into Iraq, stocking the insurgency that has killed hundreds of U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis.

Comment: This article was making the rounds last week. Its a good piece of journalism, and I think an important read. How do we get better at this? I think one technique may be use the US Border Patrol to help train our soldiers and intel guys on how cross border smuggling works. I'm putting that on my to-do list for the next training year. Any border patrol agents out there want to help? Former SGT L are you reading this?

Social Commentary:
Leaving the left I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity
Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

Comment: I don't agree with all of what this guy has to say, but it's a good read. Even though I'mleftytie, his thought certainly mirror my own reservations. I'm working on a piece about "National Security Democrats" right now. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but it articulates my thoughts on the left regarding chosensen profession(s).

Flashback Friday:
Afghanistan: Crossroads of Conflict
The Soviets, both in their Afghan encampments and back home in the Kremlin, were surprised by the bitterness they provoked when they marched into Afghanistan last DecemberÂat least as surprised as Jimmy Carter says he was when they did so. Why are the Soviets in Afghanistan and what can the United States do about it?

From all available evidence, the Soviets came to Afghanistan not to conduct a Marxist revolution but to stop one or, more precisely, to postpone it for a number of years. The real Marxist zealots came to power in Kabul in April 1978. The Soviets helped them do it because the opportunity was there and because it is more desirable to have puppets on a nation's border than truly neutral countries. At the time, Afghan Communists represented one or two percent of Afghanistan's population.

Comment: This is a reprint from the May 1980 issue of the Atlantic. Great perspective.

Sad:
Vacancy Announcement: Social Worker - Homeless Program Coordinator
The incumbent in this position functions as the Medical CenterÂs Liaison/Case Manager for VA's Health Care for Homeless Veterans Programs, Homeless Providers Grant and Per Diem Program. The incumbent is responsible for monitoring and coordination of services provided by community-based programs funded under VA's Homeless Providers Grant and Per Diem Program and is supervised by Social Work Service Homeless Program Coordinator.

Comment: I just wish there wasn't a need for this type of position.

It's the Big One

2005-06-16T20:45:00.000-05:00

"Score a direct hit." Exercise Material.
Note my chicken scratch.

It has been a busy couple weeks here in sunny Central Texas, and it shows in my lack of blogging. We've been preparing for an exercise where we practice receiving evacuees from the coast in the event of a "direct hit" hurricane.

Yesterday, we did the exercise. Basically, we had to figure out what to do with 40K-50K people fleeing from a CAT4-5 hurricane named Gregg (that dirty bastard is always headed for our coastline). This is an extremely hard event to plan for because human and weather behaviors are so variable. There are so many unknowns.

How many people will make it to your area?

Will they seek housing in shelters or hotels?

How long will they be in your location?

How do you plan for traffic? Austin's traffic is bad enough without adding fifty thousand lost South Texans into the mix.

How bad will the storm impact us? A CAT 5 on the coast will still retain much of its punch as it heads inland.

Overall, the exercise was a success. I worked the traffic and security piece which isn't usually my gig, but we wear lots of hats in my business. As usual, I was very impressed with what the state and local governments brought to the fight. There are a great many highly competent professionals out there working to keep you safe. And I'm not just talking about cops and firefighters.

I should be able to return to my normal blogging schedule next week.

Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia 2.0?

2005-06-14T15:59:00.000-05:00

Excellent Article from the Christian Science Monitor:

US blocked NATO call for probe of Uzbek 'massacre'?

A report that US defense officials helped block a NATO demand for an international probe into last month's killing of protesters in Uzbekistan is proving an air base there to be one of the more diplomatically costly "lily pads" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's new lean, mean restructuring of the US global military presence.

The Uzbek government has admitted that 173 people were killed on May 13 in Andijan but independent witnesses and human rights organizations put the number of victims at between 500 and 1,000. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has called the incident a "massacre." Karimov has portrayed the killings as a necessary response to a revolt by Islamic extremists.

Comments: Freedom is on the march, right?

There are, of course, no easy solutions to these problems. We need Uzbekistan to fight the GWOT. It's key to our current operations in the region. However, are we sacrificing long term gains in order to achieve short-term goals?

One of the biggest complaints that the Muslims have against us is that we prop up the Saudi regime without demanding much reform. And any actual reforms that have been implemented have moved at glacial speeds. And now we are supporting another repressive regime--Saudi 2.0.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but it seems to me that the Uzbek government needs us as much as we need them. We're there on the ground in a good position to influence things. Are we doing enough to ratchet up the pressure on them? Or do we have blinders on? The Cold War was a multi-generational effort. The GWOT will be the same. Are we laying the groundwork for victory 10 and 20 years from now. Or did the next UBL watch his brother or father die in the massacre while the US stood idly by?

BBQ and Simple Patriotism

2005-06-13T05:02:00.000-05:00

I had drill…err...I mean…. Unit Battle Assembly this weekend. It was 2LT B's last weekend with us before he ships to Iraq so all my officers and warrant officers took him to the original Rudy's on the North side of San Antonio. We usually swing by Rudy’s at least once on drill weekends. They give a nice military discount, and they’ve done lots to support the troops. The original location is by far the best of the chain, but in my opinion, about mid-grade BBQ. (I’m a beer and BBQ snob.)

Anyway, we had an APFT on Sunday morning. I thought I had everyone beat on sit ups at 80, but 2LT B did 84. Bastard. But, we’d earned our monthly BBQ, and we all rolled to Rudy’s at lunch to have some fellowship with 2LT B.

The seven of us get in line. There’s a big lunch crowd so there is a little bit of a wait. I take up the company commander position at the rear, but since we’re not eating out of mermites, there is no chance of getting that burnt piece of shit that used to be chicken. Most of my officers have already been to the sandbox so we’re all pumping 2LT B up with war stories. CPT S, new to my company and a Arab/French linguist, had a funny story about being the only guy who dismounts a Striker in the middle of a bunch of Iraqis. “I get out and those fuckers close the ramp behind me…”

We get through the line and the staff is directing us to one cash register. I figured it was so they could ring up the discount at one register. I reach for my wallet and the cashier says that it’s taken care of.

“Taken care of?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” She replies. “Your bill is paid.”

Now, I know something is up. We’re a bunch of cheap bastards. I’ve witnessed CW3 S haggle over a bar tab in Thailand where the actual difference in price would have been about two bucks so I know damn well that none of my guys is going to pick up the tab on $100 worth of BBQ.

“Who picked up the bill?” I ask.

The cashier points out a older woman standing in the corner.

“You weren’t supposed to tell,” she cries.

Too late. I go thank her, and when my guys see what’s going on, they bum rush her to thank her for lunch. She thanks us for our service, embarrassed that her cover is blown.

We eat lunch and wish 2LT B good luck. The shock has worn off and 2LT B is starting to get mentally ready for what lies ahead. Knowing that he has the love and support of total strangers is going to help.