INTELLIGENCE BEING MANIPULATED

The Daily Beast is reporting that fifty intelligence analysts are saying the Obama administration is tinkering with their reports. . .a very serious charge. The Obama administration has been trying to paint a rosy picture, but the intelligence may not support this rosy view.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Arthur L. Herman in the National Review gives a conservative critique of this report.

Is anyone really surprised by this? Remember all the complaints Democrats made about how the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in order to get us into war with Iraq over non-existent WMD’s? Official investigation after investigation showed they didn’t, but the false claim that “Bush lied and people died’ still haunts the memory of that war–and the sacrifice Americans made fighting and dying in it. 

Now we know why Democrats were so insistent somebody had to be cooking the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s. It’s because that’s what they would have done themselves to fit their policy line. And, the Daily Beast suggests, that’s what they’re doing now, so they can avoid having to make the kind of military commitment we need, in order to eradicate the ISIS plague once and for all.

Update:  9/17/15.  John R. Schindler.  Observer.  "Obama's Messy Iraq Intelligence Scandal."

It’s happening again. A White House fumbling with the violent mess of Iraq finds itself surrounded by mounting accusations that it’s played dirty games with intelligence. A Pentagon facing charges that its analysts have skewed assessments on Iraq to tell top policymakers what they want to hear, rather than what is really happening in that troubled country.

If this sounds terribly familiar, it should. Only a dozen years after the George W. Bush White House was buffeted by allegations that it had “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Barack Obama is facing similar accusations. Intelligence Community analysts alleged that, in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, they were pressured to exaggerate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, analysts claim that they have been pushed to present Obama’s war against the Islamic State as more successful than it really is.

Only the most optimistic Obama backers still portray that year-long air campaign (its proper name is Operation Inherent Resolve) as adequate, and most security experts agree that the Islamic State is winning the war on the ground, thanks in part to an American-led air war that is bombing too little and too cautiously. There is no indication that Western airpower is anywhere near inflicting decisive pain on the Islamic State, while our Iraqi partners, who serve as the ground anvil for the U.S. airborne hammer, increasingly feel left in the lurch by Obama.

BUMBLING IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Headline from Politico;  "Team of Bumblers?  Are Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel equal to today’s new national-security challenges."

This is pretty tough criticism coming from the more liberal Politico.  The response to the ISIS threat was clearly muddled.

Unfortunately, the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon—which would be doing most of the rolling back—on the timing or details of the announcement.

According to multiple sources, behind the scenes a few things went badly awry in the launch of Obama’s new policy.  First, the Pentagon was surprised by the president’s timing, according to a senior defense official. “We didn’t know it was going to be in the speech,” he said, referring to Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation. Second, the White House neglected to give Pentagon lawyers a chance to revise and approve the proposed legislative language before it went to the Hill, which is considered standard practice. Staffers working for Rep. Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they were appalled by what they saw: language so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by trainees on American troops, and effectively left the Defense Department liable for funding the mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—even though the president was telling members of Congress he didn’t need money for this new mission, since the Saudis were putting it up. “What came over would have not have been a mission the DoD could have executed,” says a senior Republican committee staffer.

And as the article continues, the story gets even worse.  The Obama administration is all about politics and not solving problems.

WAR AGAINST ISIS

According to the left-wing Independent Obama's ISIS bombing policy is not working.

The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama's plan to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

THE PENTAGON AS SCAPEGOAT

A pretty strong indictment of President Obama by Charles Krauthammer regarding Obama's leadership and decision-making process.

ISIS IN IRAQ

VICE video of ISIS on spreading the Caliphate.

VICE video on Kurds as they face ISIS.

National Journal:  "The World Will Blame President Obama if Iraq Falls."

Biden calling Iraq "one of the greatest achievements of this administration."  What Democrats were saying about Iraq since the late 1990s.

NBC News.  Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

Ann Althouse believes Obama is trapped by his rhetoric.  She "pictures the enemy laughing" at Obama's speech on August 7, 2014.

A.B. Stoddard in The Hill calls Obama an "impotent president."

Obama promises never to allow genocide to go unpunished.

Michael Crowley at Time:  "How Obama Evolved on the Issue of 'Genocide' in Iraq."

HAMAS BATTLE STRATEGY

From the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) web site.

IDF forces in the Gaza Strip found a Hamas manual on “Urban Warfare,” which belonged to the Shuja’iya Brigade of Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. The manual explains how the civilian population can be used against IDF forces and reveals that Hamas knows the IDF is committed to minimizing harm to civilians.

And also at this site it shows how accurate the IDF was in knowing where rockets were being fired from. I suspected something like this.



And this site has maps of Gaza.

The fact that these sparsely populated areas exist in the Gaza Strip raise several important moral questions: First, why don't the media show the relatively open areas of the Gaza Strip? Why do they only show the densely populated cities? There are several possible reasons. There is no fighting going on in the sparsely populated areas, so showing them would be boring. But that's precisely the point—to show areas from which Hamas could be firing rockets and building tunnels but has chosen not to. Or perhaps the reason the media doesn't show these areas is that Hamas won't let them. That too would be a story worth reporting.

Second, why doesn't Hamas use sparsely populated areas from which to launch its rockets and build its tunnels? Were it to do so, Palestinian civilian casualties would decrease dramatically, but the casualty rate among Hamas terrorists would increase dramatically.

HISTORICAL FAUX PAS

A Democrat congresswomen from California posed a young female sailor in uniform in one of her campaign brochures.  The problem was that the model was not in a U.S. navy uniform, but rather a uniform of the German Luftwaffe. Not only is it not an American uniform and it was a uniform on an entirely different branch of the military.  Someone needs a historian to watch for these things or at least someone who has some ability not just to copy something from the internet.

PUTIN'S WAR STRATEGY IN UKRAINE

From RealClearWorld on "Putin's new type of war in the Ukraine and whether it is failing."  A good discussion on Putin's strategy in the Ukraine and the tactics he has used.

According to a report by the  Atlantic Council, Russia has been preparing for this new kind of war for several years, building "very covert but well-structured networks with agents, with pro-Russian organizations, involving in such illegal activity many Ukrainians." Russian special ops officers "are very dangerous, well armed, [and well] prepared to do what they are doing now." Many are veterans of Chechnya or even Afghanistan. A number of them moved to Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; so they can claim to be regular Ukrainians just defending themselves.

RUSSIAN MILITARY

Putin has been upgrading the Russian military.

Elite Russian troops are displaying a new arsenal of body armor, individual weapons, armor-piercing ammunition and collar radios — a menu of essential gear that gives them a big tactical advantage against a lesser-equipped Ukrainian army.

If President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion, the new-generation body armor, in particular, would provide exceptional protection against small arms if Russian troops go street by street to capture Kiev and other cities.

U.S. soldiers have complained that their main rifle and round, the M4 carbine and its 5.56, lacked lethality in Afghanistan against a Taliban enemy that does not often wear body armor. Without a shot to the head, the enemy could take several 5.56 hits and keep going, soldiers said in surveys.

“If the Russians are coming across mechanized, with airborne and infantry units wearing their body armor, it basically means the Ukrainian rifles have no ability to penetrate the body armor worn by the Russian troops, meaning you’re talking about having to shoot somebody six, seven, eight times, in the chest,” Mr. Traudt said. “They’re going to get bumped, but there’s no lethality involved.”

It would appear that the Russians are better prepared for the new non-nuclear warfare than the US is. This raises a lot of ramifications for any future US-Russian confrontation.

RUSSIAN ARMS INDUSTRY

The US government is supporting the Rosoboronexport, a major Russian arms dealer.  So Washington is criticizing Putin for his actions in the Crimea and slapping the wrists of a few Russian billionaires while a billion in tax payer money is going to Russia for weapon systems--only in bureaucratic Washington!

Arms exporter Rosoboronexport has raked in $1,133,783,077 in Defense Department contracts since 2011, according to federal contracting records. Shortly before these contracts began getting the green light, Rosoboronexport had been the subject of U.S. sanctions for assisting Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

Today, senators sent a strong bipartisan message to Obama: cancel all existing contracts with the Russian arms exporter including upcoming deliveries, scrap plans to ink new contracts, and put the company back on the sanctions list where it belongs.

UKRAINE & WASHINGTON DECISION-MAKING

Daily Beast.  U.S. intelligence said Putin would not invade the Ukraine--it sounds like American intelligence is as ignorant as it was before 9/11.  The reason:  the Soviet foreign minister told Secretary of State Kerrey that Russia would honor Ukraine's "territorial integrity". 

Nonetheless, until Friday, no one anticipated a Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory."Nobody thought Putin was going to invade last night,” one Senate aide who works closely on the Ukraine crisis. “He has the G8 summit in Sochi coming up, no one really saw this kind of thing coming." This source also stressed that events are still moving quickly on the ground. “There is still a question about whether this is Russian troops coming across the border or Russian troops moving around the installations in Crimea.”

It seems like a lot of assumptions are being made by Washington.  (And no one seems to remember the 2008 Russian move on Georgia).  And the Obama administration was still "formulating options and hoping for the best."  (Underlining mine)  A dose of realpolitik is needed in the administration.

Michael Barone has come up with an interesting list of 7 options that the administration could use.  He also refers to Walter Russell Mead's comment.

Mead makes the point that the pundits who predicted until Saturday that Russia would not move into Ukraine are solipsists -- they assume that Putin sees the world as they do and will act as they would. That would indeed be nice. But Putin doesn't see the world they way we -- Obama supporters and Obama critics -- do. We are told we should not mourn the transformation of a unipolar world into a multipolar world. It's just selfish to want to see the United States as the world's leading power. But the alternative is between a unipolar world and a zeropolar world, in which aggressive actors like Putin's Russia, the mullahs' Iran and Syria's Assad can inflict tyranny, suffering and death to millions--and no one can stop or (preferably) deter them.

Mead has a very critical assessment of administration foreign policy.

Anthony Codevilla interprets the events in the Ukraine more broadly, noting the weakness of the American military.  And it is not just Russia that is threatening American interests, but China is as well.  Obama has said "there will be costs," but what kind of leverage does he really have?  No one fears America anymore.

And Josh Rogin at the the Daily Beast wonders if any of Obama's plans will work.

But Simon Shuster in Time believes it is Putin who will be backing down. His popularity has slipped in Russia and there will be economic problems.  There is not upside for Putin in this invasion.

RUSSIA SEEKING BASES

From Ria Novosti.  It looks like Putin wants to be a much larger geopolitical player.  Russia is trying to get bases in Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Seychelles, Singapore and several other countries.

Most of those bases are in the western hemisphere. . .he is sending a message to Obama and Washington. 

EVENTS IN THE UKRAINE

John Fund's assessment--television and images played a major role in the events.

Regimes can stay in power in an age of mass media only if they have enough murderers willing to gun down people in the street. Snipers were willing to kill their fellow countrymen in the streets around the Maidan last Thursday, but their superiors reached a breaking point when the shots didn’t achieve the desired level of fear. “The shooting stopped when the security chiefs realized the game was over — not because they didn’t have enough Kalashnikovs, but because they proved ineffective: For one person killed, many more came out on the Maidan,” Maria Semykoz, a Ukrainian economist from Lvov, told me by e-mail.

The activities of Ukrainian protesters are compared to medieval military tactics.

But to understand why the protests succeeded in toppling Yanukovych, it’s worth taking a glance at its strategies and military-style tactics. The protesters not only built a broad and inclusive coalition, but innovated where it mattered most: on the streets.

Really, it turned medieval.

Protesters shot fireworks with makeshift launchers. In combination with throwing stones and using slingshots, they overwhelmed disoriented Berkut special forces units, who were pelted with flying objects as fireworks exploded around them.

US MILITARY STRATEGY

A criticism from Foreign Policy concerning the failure of US military strategy.  The US is still trying to use the strategy which failed in Iraq.

What we should not do is delude ourselves. Strike-based theories are attractive because they offer deceptively easy solutions. They assume away intractable problems and focus on challenges for which we can engineer clean solutions. They make us feel good. They prey on our desire for the cheap miracle cure. Unfortunately, they are really only good for starting wars, not winning or deterring them. If the bankrupt Shock and Awe theory is dressed up as strategy again, someone will call our bluff. Having assumed away hard choices, U.S. leaders will find themselves stuck with two bad choices: accept an intolerable situation or engage in a struggle for which we are unprepared. That is exactly what happened in Iraq. And if we continue to adhere to the same fallacies, we can be sure it will happen again. There are no easy wars. 

EMP WEAPON

Boeing has successfully tested an EMP weapon which knocks out electronic transmissions. Warfare will change drastically.

A recent weapons flight test in the Utah desert may change future warfare after the missile successfully defeated electronic targets with little to no collateral damage.

Boeing and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Directed Energy Directorate, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., successfully tested the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) during a flight over the Utah Test and Training Range.

Update:  A collection of videos showing the impact of an attack.

IN SUPPORT OF STUDYING WARFARE

A provocative analysis of the need to study warfare.  Today "peace studies" dominate, but is there more to learn about human nature and how to avoid war from studying warfare itself.

The lesson we should learn from this sorry history is that preemptive war is a necessity when facing a determined aggressor, and that the time and place of a potential conflict, and the capacity to wage war until its successful conclusion, must be carefully considered and prepared for when making treaty commitments and pledging the nation’s blood and treasure. This means that often a nation cannot merely wait to react to aggression, but must anticipate where the blow will fall.

. . .success in war depends on morale, not material superiority. Long before 1938, England and France had lost their nerve, and simply did not have the will to fight. Instead they had bought into the illusions of internationalism and collective security, pacifism and disarmament, which had merely fed the alligator of Nazism, to paraphrase Churchill, in the vain hope that they would be eaten last. And this brings us to the philosophical lessons the study of war teaches. Contrary to our modern therapeutic utopianism, the history of war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of human nature and its irrational passions and interests that will spark state aggression and violence.

IRAN SIMULATES NUCLEAR ATTACK ON ISRAEL

Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama are negotiating a nuclear inspection agreement with Iran, but the Iranian people are seeing pictures like this.

A report on Obama's secret negotiations to bring about detente with Iran.  Will Obama be able to outfox the ayatollahs?

Israel's view. Israel’s most painful lesson from the two-day Geneva conference on Iran’s nuclear program is that the man who guaranteed to defend Israel’s security, President Barack Obama, is now marching hand in hand with Tehran towards a nuclear-armed Iran.

ATTACK SYRIA?

Anthony Cordesman always has thought out his positions and in this column analyzes the military issues involved in attacking Syria. He does not think this is the best time to attack and also raises the issue that more human costs can result from traditional artillery or air strikes than from chemical weapons.

The chances of such negotiations succeeding are now extremely limited, but the U.S. has waited so long that so are the chances of a clear rebel victory based on moderate movements. Moreover, an active, high profile U.S.-led effort towards national conciliation can lay the groundwork for some form of eventual agreed national conciliation even if it cannot end or even pause the fighting in the short-term. Above all, the U.S. needs to focus on collective action, and finding a workable compromise among Syrian factions that has some chance of a long-term solution that offers stability and security to Syrians. There is no point in fighting a war against chemical weapons. There is no point in U.S. military symbolism or massive unilateral military action. There is a point in trying to use force to end the suffering, the fighting, and repression - and serve our national interest while we meet the needs of the Syrian people and our allies.

PJ Media has a variety of different commentators assessing the pros and cons of an attack. One commentator, Victor Davis Hanson concludes:

In short, from what we’ve seen from this administration with its withdrawal dates in Afghanistan, its boasts about getting every single soldier out of Iraq, its deadlines to Iran, its red lines to Syria, its reset with Vladimir Putin, and its euphemistic war on terror, it is simply not up to a sustained air war over Syria, or anything much other than a day or two of lobbying cruise missiles. To think that it is will sorely disappoint present supporters of bombing Assad.

U.S. military officers are less than enthusiastic about an attack on Syria.

Former and current officers, many with the painful lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan on their minds, said the main reservations concern the potential unintended consequences of launching cruise missiles against Syria.

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND US MILITIA LAW

A blog post on how America's founding fathers incorporated Old Testament laws into how militia were to organize.

The American Founders were assiduous students of history. While the well-educated among them read Roman and Greek history in the original languages, some history was well-known by almost everyone, namely the Bible. New Englanders intensely self-identified with ancient Israel—from the first days of settlement in early 17th century (Israel in the wilderness) to the days of the American Revolution, when New England’s “black regiment” of clergymen incited the Revolution as a religious duty, and described the thirteen American colonies as the modern version of the twelve confederate tribes of Israel.[1] Thus, ancient Hebrew militia law is part of the intellectual background of the American militia system, and of the Second Amendment.

CHUCK HAGEL, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

Chuck Hagel never impressed me when Obama appointed him as Secretary of Defense.  Now he is discovered asking an Indian professor if he is a member of the Taliban.