re: "Exactly Backwards"

The late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex (" The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy! ") cut to the heart of what repealing DADT was really all about.

Money quote(s):

"The national debate over gay marriage is not “spilling over” into the military – this is no accident. The repeal of DADT had much less to do with any open right to serve than it did with federalizing the national debate over gay marriage, thereby taking it out of the hands of state legislatures. The military will, by logical steps and measures, be required to treat all formalized partnerships as equal under military law. Military law is federal law, and it will be used as controlling federal precedent in civil law.

Paeans to the patriotism of those who would serve if only they could chat about their private proclivities in the workplace was never anything much more than smoke and mirrors. The real prize has always been the tax code, shared benefits, etc." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

That being said, CAA was taken by surprise at several of the "coming outs" that occured among servicemembers of his acquaintance once DADT was repealed. Folks about whom CAA had never so much as wondered "Is he/she....?"

It's resulted in some considerable rumination.

"To pretend otherwise was a momentary tactical necessity for the gay rights movement, but for the news media to portray this as anything other than an ultimate, even if incrementalist destination is mere puffery.

The barricades of the culture wars were not battered down. They were bypassed." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

2/2

re: "Really?"

The late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex (" The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy! ") described a peculiar signing statement.

Money quote(s):

"Good ideas represent opportunities that fleetingly come and go. Bad ideas, on the other hand, never seem to have expiration dates"

&

"On the plus side, there’s every chance that Vladimir Putin would like us more.

So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.

(For those not a part of the system, the definition of “top secret” information is data which, if revealed, could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.)"

1/5

re: "The Long Term"

The late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex (" The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy! ") remarked on a U.S. diplomatic "win" out in the far reaches of the Pacific Rim (i.e., in China's front yard).

Money quote(s):

"(T)here’s always a but in diplomacy – one move, even a series of well choreographed and expertly timed moves – does not a match make"

The point being, I think, that the "match" is rarely ever fully over, except in such exceptional circumstances such as the end of a major war, the collapse of a dynasty or empire, or some sort of mass extinction event.

(And then a new match will start, and some of the "new" players will look awfully familiar.)

"First comes the political succession, then the internal struggle for power and the coalescence of a national strategy. That is, of course, if the Peoples’ Liberation Army has the patience for it.

In the really long term, we’re all dead. The state within a state represented by the PLA gets to ponder its over-reaching, rebuke and subsequent loss of face and decide how long “long” is." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

The PLA isn't going anywhere, absent a really cataclysmic (for China) turn of events.

"For US diplomats, it’s all pats on the back, champagne toasts and Washington fêtes, for now. A chance to celebrate a coup. An opportunity, even, to treasure an adversary worth tilting against, after a decade of squashing irrational bugs, and making uncomfortable alliances.

Let’s hope we haven’t forgotten how to play this game."

Kudos to all involved, but don't get cocky.

p.s. For friends and fans of Lex, be sure to drop by The Lexicans.

11/20

re: "Commodifying the Force"

The recently-departed, late, great Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") cautioned about the ripple effects of military retirement "reform."

Money quote(s):

"Career-minded active duty military members are no doubt watching the ongoing discussions about military retirement compensation with avid interest. This interest is due to the recommendations of the Defense Business Board, made up of 20 exquisitely educated, very successful and highly paid consultants, CEOs and entrepreneurs. Fully twenty percent of the board’s membership – according to their bios – have actual military experience, and one among them served long enough to be eligible for a military pension. They may not know that much about life in the uniformed services, but they know loads about profit and loss, cutting costs and quarterly shareholder returns.

This makes them experts.

Basically, the board recommends junking the military’s defined pension benefit plan as anachronistic, recommending that DoD instead move to an industry standard 401k style contribution. The 401K system would allow the services to permit first tour enlistees to receive certain benefits after leaving the services – they get none today – and save loads of money on out-year obligations to grizzled warriors far into the future."

Because a military career is just like working at Dunder Mifflin.

"(H)hundreds of thousands of other peoples’ sons and daughters, each of whom will make their own career calculus in their own way, the effect of which will doubtless ripple across the force and at least potentially affect war fighting readiness in ways that are not easy to calculate.

But we’ll save a lot of money."

Wars cost more than money. The precise term is "blood and treasure."

"(E)ventually the worm may turn, as it almost always does. And when it does, we may find that re-writing service retirement regulations and commodifying the force has unintended second and third order consequences which will manifest themselves long after the current crop of four stars have gone on to serve on their own corporate boards."

8/22

re: "Worst Kept Secret"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") harbors his suspicions about "Fast and Furious."

Money quote(s):

"(A)nti-gun activism is a proven political loser. It turns off the constitutionalists who look at the 2nd amendment and say, well: That’s rather clear. It turns off the folks living in neighborhoods edgy and otherwise, who’d like the option to defend their lives and property when the bad man comes. Knowing, as they do, that when the bad man comes and seconds count, the police are only minutes away. It turns off the working class that the liberal left pretends to care for, in a paternalistic way. And of course it turns off gun owners and enthusiasts across the political spectrum, who believe – among other things – that the last defense against tyranny of whatever flavor is an armed populace."

Naturally, ideologies or political movements which act to promote an unarmed (or disarmed) populace should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

"Heretofore I was willing to apply Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Now I believe we have to consider both malice and stupidity." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

UPDATE: As most within the milblogging community will already be aware, longtime and well-respected milblogger Lex passed away earlier this week, the sole casualty of an aircraft crash in California.

We only met the oncet, briefly, at a milblogging convention a few years ago when I was between overseas assignments. Nearly all our interaction was "virtual." So I have little in the way of adding to or polishing his legacy.

A glance at my sidebar tag list of "Labels" shows more than 30 incidences of Lex and Neptunus Lex. That essentially means I excerpted from and commented on at least that many of his thoughtful and well-expressed posts.

As an old "spook," let me assure readers that while my online reading is wide-ranging and somewhat eclectic, if I'm linking to you or mining your blog that many times then you just may be on to doing something right. When I "stole" from Lex, I was stealing from the best. His surviving wife and family have my sincere condolences.

Fair winds and smooth sailing, Captain Carroll LeFon, USN (Retired).

12/8

re: "Pardon Him, Theodotus: Neptunus Lex: Carroll LeFon"

Very sad news indeed.

The milblogging community has lost a member, a family has lost a husband and father, and the nation has lost a patriot.

Rest in peace, Lex.

re: "In Lieu of Rough Handling"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") posed some questions of lawfulness and Constitutionality.

Money quote(s):

"(S)econd thoughts on the killing of an American citizen abroad by agents of the US government"

Naturally, as a consular officer the notion of killing an Amcit is so far outside the pale that it mega-boggles the mind.

From a more soldierly, laws of land warfare-minded, perspective it's certainly possible to envision such as thing in terms of inadvertently killing an Amcit in the course of combat operations, either as an adversarial combatant (i.e., the enemy) or as a collateral (unintended) casualty.

After all, stopping to examine one's opponents passports or citizenship status prior to engaging by fire and maneuver just doesn't come up in any standard format for an operations order that CAA has ever encountered.

Nonetheless, when standoff weapons (such as drone-launched missiles) are so accurate as to constitute sharpshooting and to (finally) give some semantic substance to the term "surgical strike," we must take a pause and consideration in cases where the U.S. citizenship status of an enemy belligerent is known (and, indeed, is a substantial component of the danger he presents to us).

"From a constitutional perspective, we’ve definitely crossed a line here. We sidestepped up to it over the years, little by little. And then vaulted over it in the dark, while no one was looking. It’d be nice if one of the aforementioned, named gentlemen explained to us where the new line has been drawn, if it has been. And if it has not, it would also be useful for a people of laws, governed by express consent, to know who will have a hand in drawing it."

10/11

re: "Dangerous Game"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") described a strategic downside to China's EMP weapon strategy.

Money quote(s):

"Planning to toss around nukes in the event of a local conflict – even low-yield nukes – would be a hilariously bad idea, were it not for the fact that it lacks any trace of hilarity. The risk of miscalculation in proportionate response is significant.

Strategic weapons, as the Chinese ought to know, are designed to guarantee national survival, and the distinction between a tactical nuke and a strategic weapon is chiefly one of perspective: If yours lands on him, it’s tactical. When his reply lands on you, it’s strategic."

Also bear in mind China's published strategies for waging multi-dimensional warfare, to overwhelm or paralyze response by major allied powers. The risk of strategic overreach is stunning.

7/22

re: "The Latest Outrage"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") offers a historical parallel.

Money quote(s):

"(M)en – good men- can descend into a kind of inhumanity when faced with a truly hated, fanatical foe."

&

"The Taliban, with their indiscriminate murders and their cowardly tactics, have probably earned a very great deal of enmity from those who have been grappling with them for going on eleven years now. The danger when good men confront evil is that, over time, they may become what they beheld.

None of the foregoing is meant to excuse.

But it may help to explain."

Despite the ill-judgment evidenced by this lapse of discipline, our marines have some considerable distance (astronomical units? light years? parsecs?) to go before they descend to the abysmally routine depths inhabited by the Taliban.

1/12

re: "Not the Change They Were Looking For"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") delineated his comfort, and discomfort, zones regarding the "Triple-A" killing.

Money quote(s):

"I am, in the main, comfortable with the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-born American citizen who coached Nidal Hasan through his killing spree in Fort Hood, amongst other crimes and misdemeanors. In an ideal world, he would have been isolated, seized, arrested, Mirandized and brought to justice. In the end, the result would very likely have been the same, apart from the vastly greater sums being expended in security, trial, appeals, not to mention care and feeding while on death row. (All of it spent for the opportunity to congratulate ourselves for our moral superiority and more refined social consciousness as contrasted to the terrorists we grapple with, if not the societies which gave them birth. Because that would require the ability to make distinctions between one thing and another, which many of us have lost the ability to do, sing kumbaya.)

But we don’t live in an ideal world." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

You lie down with with terrorists at war with the U.S., and you get up with a Hellfire missile. Or don't get up, as the case may be.

"All that said, I do find myself a little queasy with the process by which candidates are nominated for death by lethal explosion"

Yeah. I can see that. It's one thing to targeteer a bombing raid on an enemy military headquarters, and if there's an American traitor on the premises that just his bad luck.

It's a bit of another thing when the target itself is in fact a himself.

This is a logical consequence of our surgical strike capability achieving such fine granularity that it's now micro-surgery.

"So a “secret panel” of “senior government officials” using no process defined by law “informs the president of its decisions”. That president’s role in approving those decisions is “fuzzy”, but at the output end people – American citizens – get got.

I don’t want to go all slippery slope here, but that just doesn’t quite seem to be in concert with the Constitution that I swore an oath to support and defend."

I wouldn't describe this targeteering scheme as being unConstitutional so much as being perhaps extra-Constitutional, and even that may be a stretch. Presumably the JAG folks have been over this backwards and forwards; it'd be a good deed of some of their advice could be released to the public.

"Now unidentified “government officials” are not just spying on people, but morting them, with no controlling law, no judicial review and “fuzzy” oversight.

I just don’t know."

It seems to me that the president, as commander-in-chief has delegated this targeteering function to certain of his lawfully appointed subordinates. All well and good. After all, most warfighting and commanding is (or should be) delegated by the CinC.

They make a recommendation, and then president, this time in his role as "chief magistrate," gets a chance to over-rule it, or not. Makes a certain amount of sense, but my theoretizing is just CAA spitballing here; what did the in-house JAGs have to say about this? What's the process and who designed it?

10/6

re: "But What if it’s True?"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") exhibited a much higher opinion of Spencer Ackerman than I can suspend my disbelief to stomach.

(Bear in mind, the scalp, i.e. Scooter Libby's indictment, of which he is so proud was not the official actually responsible.)

That being said, Lex addresses the issues Ackerman is blind to.

Money quote(s):

"For my own part, I would like to draw a necessarily blurry line between what Mr. Ackerman and the FBI call “main stream” American Muslims and the “pious and devout.” Because the possibility never occurs to the former at least that to be a pious and devout Muslim necessarily means super-ordinating the will of God, as expressed to his Prophet 14 centuries ago in an inalterable text, and that this potentially places the believer in conflict with the values of modern Western Civilization. Most will find a way to live with that conflict. A notable few, weak-minded or otherwise deficient, have spectacularly failed to do so."

A deeper than bumper sticker slogan knowledge is required of anyone attempting to realistically address the issue of Islamic-based terrorism and jihad.

(Is CAA an expert? Hell no! But I've got a shelf of much-read books which attest to my attempts at defeating my own ignorance of the issues.)

"Steeped in the culture of Western liberalism, he declines to even recognize this possibility: To the degree you are a good Muslim, as defined by rigorously following and promoting the entirety of the Koran (with Islam lacking as it does any centralized institution to contextualize those 7th Century scriptures in a 21st Century world, what other definition could there be?) it becomes increasingly difficult to be a good citizen.

Because the great monotheistic faiths of the world are fundamentally different, or else Samuel Huntington never would have gotten published (you don’t have to agree with the man’s conclusions to appreciate his command of history)."

Huntington himself knew, and wrote, that (I paraphrase) his "clash of civilizations" theoretical framework didn't explain everything. Modestly (for him), he put it forth as a useful theoretical lense.

(Oh, and to sell books.)

"There are Muslims who are good citizens who point out to us the more radically dangerous among them, and those of Islamic (as opposed to Islamist) traditions who eschew the active “lesser” Jihad to await God’s inevitable ordering of the world under Sharia. But to be a truly pious and devout Muslim – of the Wahabist and Salafist sects in particular – requires the follower to accept as unquestioned the guidance and example of Mohammed, and act on them, straight down the line. It is useful to remember that “Islam” means submission to God’s will, and God wills the believer to act.

(Some well-meaning civil rights activists say that to acknowledge these inconvenient truths is render oneself an “Islamophobe”, subject to the non-rebuttable charge of racism. But Islam is not a race, it is rather a set of beliefs. These beliefs are open to scrutiny and analysis.)" (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

By definition, a "phobia" is an irrational fear. How someone with access to news media over the past decade or so could term a fear of Islam or islamists (or even garden variety muslims) to be wholly irrational, to the point where it merits a clinical-style name, is something CAA couldn't do with a straight face.

"In his Regensburg lecture, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI committed an impolitic gaffe – one in the character of inadvertently blurting out the truth – when he said quoted 14th Century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (thanks, Zane), “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The lecture caused quite a stir, not because it was untrue necessarily but because it was likely to make certain people deeply unhappy. And you know how they get when they’re unhappy." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Clearly His Holiness didn't get the memo about whitewashing European history to fit politically-correct fashions.

9/15

re: "Public Servants"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") asks a legitimate question, disguised as speculation.

Money quote(s):

"Perhaps its different in other parts of the federal bureaucracy, but in the Navy, at least, senior executives take congressional inquiries quite seriously. And you’d never make it to flag rank by committing your actual thoughts about congressmen or senators to an email.

Of course, flag officers are typically selected competitively based on such characteristics as intelligence, integrity and professional performance. US attorneys, being political appointees, may have other selection criteria."

Not having served in every nook and cranny of the Department of State, I suppose that it's possible that, somewhere, there is an office or, Heavens forfend, an actual post or office that doesn't treat a congressional inquiry (or, as they're known, a "Congressional") as if it were a lightning bolt from Mount Olympus.

Immediate attention, rapid turn-around, and management scrutiny to ensure completeness and attention to detail; these are the highlights of how Congressionals are handled by FSOs (and State civil service staff as well).

Apparently this may not be the case in every Executive department within the federal government.

12/3

12/3

re: "Fear and Envy"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") examines the "Occupy" movement.

Money quote(s):

"It’s been too easy, really. Too easy to pillory the paucity of real ideas emanating from the “leaderless” movement that wants, well: Something else. Too easy to point out the venality that re-occurs within every human movement of more than modest size. Too easy to point out the cranks who lie on societies fringes, waiting to latch on to the next procession and beat their bongo drums. Too easy tar the fresh-faced ingenues too easily preyed upon by those who have made their own modest way through life accurately identifying members of the victim classes. Far too easy to compare the kid gloves the “mostly white” Occupy set have been treated by the national media compared to rabid pillorying the “mostly white” tea party middle class received.

Still, something is going on here. Something troubling. I think it’s worth talking about, and for my own part, I believe the heart of it lies in fear, and that fear is turn fed by envy.

Our rising generation was told by their parents, their school teachers, the broader culture that the ticket to success in this country was to work hard in school and get a college degree. Do this, and this alone they were told in an era that preached self-actualization as the highest personal duty, and your success would be assured. Success, it was never quite said out of doors, being measured in various ways.

But with the dumbing down of portions of the academy, and broad access to what ended up being crippling loans, virtually anyone could get a college degree given five to six years. Whether that would be time and money well invested, well: I think we’re watching the result of that experiment play out."

Go back and read all that again.

Okay, now go and read the passages that followed, about hourglasses and inverted pyramids.

Discuss.

"The Occupy crowd doesn’t want to own and operate a gas station in Akron. They want a loft in Tribeca, and lacking any plausible means to buy it, they’d like to take yours. Or have the government give it to them. Envy, we used to be informed back in the old days, is a sin.

We don’t teach much about sin, anymore.

We are still a great nation, none greater, more wealthy, nor more powerful. Our janitors and farm hands use their smoke breaks to check the FaceBook pages on their iPhones. There is no hunger as the rest of the world understands the term, virtually no real material want outside of those toxic islands of dysfunction which the generous hand of well-intended government first created and now subsidizes. Ours is the land – uniquely, in human history – where the poor are fat.

The fact that the Occupy set are more intrenched at Wall Street than they are outside the White House leads us to the reluctant conclusion that their anger is misplaced, and indeed wrong-headed: They look for rescue to a government that lives in cheerful symbiosis with Wall Street to save them by re-distributing money from the “1%” to, well: Themselves. Which, regardless of who holds the political reins in Washington, will never happen. You don’t kill the golden goose, not if you want to be re-elected."

The facts about where Wall Street sends its campaign contributions are well known to those with the ability or inclination to read. Do the math.

"(B)big government makes for small citizens. They subsidized bad mortgage debt that drove the financial system nearly to destruction, and are in the process of subsidizing educational debt that has done little to improve our store of intellectual capital and global competitiveness but rather stands ready to enslave a generation."

Student loan debt is well on its way to re-introducing what effectively amounts to indentured servitude and, for the first time since Reconstruction, debt-peonage north of the Rio Grande.

11/6

re: "Culture of Conformity"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") remarked upon an article at Defense Policy.

Money quote(s):

"(T)he authors stray into the dual and anti-republican traps of elitism and credentialism: Intelligence is only loosely correlated with socioeconomic attainment. And unrewarded genius, as Calvin Coolidge noted, is almost a proverb. In any case IQ is not a birthright; even among the brightest parents there is a tendency for their descendants’ intelligence to revert towards the mean. Sure, Muffy and Biff may get accepted into all the better prep schools and get preferential admission to the Ivies based upon parental largesse, but this is no guarantee of future success. The stories of scions and heirs who have squandered their parents fortunes upon inheritance are so manifest as to be almost unremarkable. The halls of Congress are full of highly credentialed graduates from Harvard, Yale and Columbia.

And look where that has got us." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

The Army is a solidly middle and working class organization, the American yeomanry, if you will. While the upper-middle and upper socioeconomic quintiles pitch in during a more general panic, er, mobilization, year in and out the membership comes from those unafraid to work with their hands.

8/9

re: "Unfinished Business"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") knows who's been naughty.

Money quote(s):

"Iran is stepping up their nasty little tricks in neighboring Iraq"

Well, why wouldn't they? Is there an imaginable possible downside?

"(W)hile it’s true that the military’s nation building capacity is already stretched to its limits, much of our nation breaking capacity is idling. As an oil exporting country that is hugely reliant on imported processed fuel, Iran is vulnerable at sea and in the air. Just four weeks of the kind of effort undertaken against the strategically meaningless Libyan regime would bring the mullahcracy to its knees and help liberate the creative energies of a rising generation that has no personal memory of the SAVAK, the shah or the revolution.

We have expended enormous sums of blood and treasure rebuilding Iraq, and what happens there as we draw down forces matters. The Iranians simply cannot be trusted to play a useful role. And whether you call it a Global War on Terror, a War Against Violent Extremism or Overseas Contingency Operations, there is little doubt that we have been very much trimming around the edges of the problem rather than digging at its roots. Iran supports terrorists in the Levant who attack a US ally, and the country’s leadership is elbow deep in the blood of US soldiers – it has been for decades."

Iran has been consistent in implementing its policy stance (i.e., implacable hostility) towards the U.S. since the revolution overthrew the Shah's government.

"The bottom line comes down to this: Iran is in a de facto state of war with the United States.

There ought to be a reckoning."

Gotta love those Serenity/Firefly allusions.

re: "Errors Were Made"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") posted as good a recap of why this is important as any I have seen.

Money quote(s):

"In the era of the Soviets, reforms were quietly enacted by bureaucrats with the concession that “errors had been made” by their predecessors. It was a nifty way for current party apparatchiks to distance themselves from policies that had resulted in the death of millions, while attempting to reassure citizens that things were now in good hands.

Of course, the new gang would end up being pretty much the old gang, and errors would continue to be be made by the nomenklatura."

All that studying on the habits and habitats of our onetime enemies is still paying off. Nomenklatura indeed!

"(T)he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – which many wags have said ought more to be a privately owned convenience chain than a federal office – allowed the sale of AK-47s through known gun runners to Mexico in order to round up the “big fish” south of the border, irrespective of how many “little fish” had to pay with their lives." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

"(T)hings got serious when US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed by a weapon sold to southron drug cartels by agents of the US government.

It’s hard, in modern times, to imagine a policy more deliberately amoral."

As they say, it's all fun and games until somebody (on our side) gets hurt. Of course, if your agents and employees are just pawns, you know, the sort of people who didn't go to the right schools, then eggs and omelets, right?

"(S)enior US officials – including SecState Hillary Clinton – were using the reality of such activity as an ostensible reason to burden the legal purchases of firearms to law abiding US citizens.

Hanlon’s Razor applies: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”"

Hard to believe Sec. Clinton, who is way too smart to be tarred by this brush, would have been stupid enough to become incriminated, er, involved. If you follow the embedded link you find that her statement had much more to do with drugs than with guns.

re: "Out of the Valley of Death"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") offers a professional opinion.

Money quote(s):

"I have often expressed my emerging belief that Afghanistan is not salvageable without the kind of heroic military and economic commitment that we as a nation are no longer politically or fiscally able to underwrite."

The same may be true for Iraq, although (re)construction efforts there mean that the fall will come from a greater altitude.

re: "Call Him John"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") has an interesting snippet from AP.

Money quote(s):

"Intelligence drives operations."

Write that down somewhere. And read the whole thing.

re: "Shoot the Messenger"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") has the measure of our allies.

Money quote(s):

"Unhappy at the way a journalist had portrayed the country’s defense and intelligence establishment, the Pakistani ISI murdered him, according to US intelligence"

Considering all that can be creditably attributed to the ISI over the years, this doesn't exactly stretch the horizons of disbelief.

"He was bludgeoned to death, it appears. Because of his criticism about the professionalism of the country’s security apparatus."

This sends exactly the message, to their intended audience, that they wish to send. Unfortunately for them, messages fall out of channels all the time and are read or heard by audiences unconsidered.

Consider: Saddam Hussein's deception plan, directed against Iran, to convince the Iranians that he had WMD, thus deterring aggression or attacks from Iran.

This wasn't actually stupid of Saddam, just short-sighted. He, sensibly enough, kept his focus on the more immediate threat right next door. And managed to convince a more distant but equally existential threat, leading directly to OIF.

"The gloves are well and truly off now.

I sincerely hope that our diplomatic corps is hard at work seeking transit privileges to – and more importantly from – Afghanistan through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan."

Lex is displaying his professionalism here. As Tom Clancy put it:

"(A)mateurs discuss tactics,.... Professional soldiers study logistics."

I share Lex's hope. Afghanistan is a long ways away to have to execute another anabasis.

re: "A Foolish Consistency"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") takes us into some "inside baseball" at the high end of the intelligence community.

Money quote(s):

"For years, intelligence agencies at home and abroad have watched the nuclear program in Iran with growing concern. In 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided to policy makers by the intelligence community deprecated that threat, saying that Iran had stopped work on its weaponization program in 2003. There were concerns at the time that the NIE had been deliberately shaded by members of the IC to forestall a rumored attack on Iranian nuclear sites by the George W. Bush administration in its waning years."

This was hardly the first NIE whose conclusions seemed policy- (or politics) rather than intelligence-driven, but it's one of the more prominent ones.

"(A) veteran CIA analyst critical of the agency’s 2011 NIE says that the agency has prevented him from revealing the names of outside analysts who reviewed the draft"

Why is that important?

Outside analysts such as academics, think-tankers, and former intelligence officials are used as a form of outside validation. Publicizing those names makes them accountable for that validation.

"Critics have long claimed, with little supporting evidence, that the Bush administration deliberately politicized intelligence in order to justify the Iraq war. At worse, the intelligence community in 2002 was guilty of “confirmation bias”: Told to look for evidence of an Iraqi WMD program, analysts found what they were looking for in the tangled mess of pre-war all-source data and disregarded what didn’t fit the picture. It was a costly, if understandable mistake. Using outside analysts to endorse a position on Iranian nuclear weapons which is clearly at odds with the evidence, and who have evident biases of their own may be just as costly, if not more so."

It's nice to read something outside the specialist literature that touches on the problems of cognitive bias in intelligence analysis. Confirmation bias isn't something you set out to have, although it's something you maybe could have perhaps avoided.