Thursday Twofer
The Secret Pentagon Spy Ring – Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic.
Michael Furlong, the long-time Defense Department official who set up and ran network of private intelligence collectors for the military, is being hung out to dry by the very forces that precipitated the network’s formation in the first place. Here’s the skinny: form follows function in the military, and the U.S. Strategic Command, or STRATCOM, has been aggressively moving into territory traditionally occupied by other military elements and the Central Intelligence Agency. They’re doing it under the cover of something called IO — Information Operations — which they’ve adapted as one of their core missions. (The others: cybersecurity, which overlaps with IO, nuclear weapons, and space defense.)
Around 2004 or 2005, STRATCOM set up what it calls the Joint Information Operations Warfare Center in San Antonio, Texas. IO ops are run from here. Most everyone involved in this controversy, from Furlong to his superiors to the contractor intelligence gatherers, went through the JIOWC at some point in their careers. The CIA doesn’t think STRATCOM should play in this lane. But neither does Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, or the State Department, or the National Security Staff. Information Operations involves five fields: deception, psychological operations, computer network operations, electronic warfare and operations security…
More at The Atlantic.
What If COIN Just Doesn’t Work? – Ann Marlowe, World Affairs.
I don’t mean, What if counterinsurgency is too trendy? or What if we shouldn’t neglect preparing for conventional wars in our enthusiasm for COIN? I mean, what if counterinsurgency has never, ever, anywhere actually worked? What if our military has been chasing a chimera for almost four years — or more? These thoughts are prompted by my last couple of trips to Afghanistan where, truth to tell, there doesn’t seem to be any increase in security when our troops do the right stuff (getting out among the people, lots of presence, lots of talking). We’ve got it down to a science now: the shuras, the projects, the provincial development plans, the embedded partners (is it my imagination or does the current military jargon for police mentors sound like a euphemism for a gay relationship?).
COIN makes sense intellectually, especially in the pellucid prose of David Galula, who wrote better in English than Roger Trinquier in French. Part of the reason it makes sense is that COIN is congruent with our culture’s bias toward a perspectival view of reality. As General McChrystal keeps saying, counterinsurgency is a matter of perception. If you feel that the government provides security, that’s reality. If you feel insecure, that’s reality. We think lots of stuff is a matter of perspective, from modern art and music to ethics. But when COIN succeeded, it may well have had nothing to do with the living among the people bit — or the talking bit…
More at World Affairs.
