National Security

A Retired Admiral’s Take on Benghazi

Retired Spook5 Comments

The following is a letter that was re-printed in a military newsletter I get from a retired navy admiral to Bill O’Reilly regarding the entire Benghazi affair.  I originally posted this at the end of the recent Benghazi thread.

Mr. O’Reilly,

I am mad as hell because the truth about how combatant commanders and the department of state can and should protect embassies is not being clearly explained. The fact is that there are policies, precedent, resources and procedures that could and should have prevented the embassy in Benghazi from coming under attack, or defended it if it did come under attack, or vacated it if the threat was too high. The ongoing discussion on your show and elsewhere that centers on the video and subsequent cover up is necessary as is the discussion about whether or not we should have responded during the attack. But those discussions have not brought to light the fact that none of this should have happened in the first place.

Fact: The combatant commanders, in this case AFRICOM, have access to our national inventory of intelligence community resources as well as international resources in order to thoroughly understand the risks and threats in any part of their Area of Responsibility (AOR). The complete picture of what was happening in Libya should have been known by AFRICOM leaders and this should have been briefed up the chain daily.

Fact: The first two cornerstones of AFRICOM’s mission are (1) Deter and defeat transnational threats posed by al-Qa’ida and other extremist organizations and (2) Protect U.S. security interests by ensuring the safety of Americans and American interests from transnational threats… In other words it is the mission of AFRICOM to prevent exactly what happened at the embassy in Benghazi.

Fact: The policy is for AFRICOM leaders to work in-conjunction with the state department’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) to establish the threat and then work with the Joint Staff and inter-agency to quickly provide plans and resources to deny that threat.

Fact: There are units specifically designed to bolster security in embassies. The USMC has three companies of Fleet Antiterrorism Security Teams (FAST) and one of these companies (or units from it) could have been deployed to FASTEUR in Rota, Spain, as the risk materialized. Each company has six platoons of 50 men each.

Fact: In July 2003 when I was the J3 at European command (AFRICOM had not been created yet) we had a similar situation develop in Liberia whereby two warring factions were threatening the embassy in Monrovia. The EUCOM team began planning for embassy support PRIOR to Ambassador Blaney’s request. When he did ask for help, we responded immediately, worked with his staff and received SECDEF approval to deploy a single FAST team platoon from Rota to the embassy to provide security. We worked with the Joint Staff and created the mission and structure for Joint Task Force Liberia, an anti-terrorism force based upon USS Iwo Jima and the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU).

Fact: Elements from the MEU arrived and relieved the FAST platoon. The warring parties signed a cease fire, the embassy in Monrovia was secured, no Americans were hurt.

So, the questions are:

1. What was the assessed level of threat in Libya prior to the September attack?

2. If it was not considered high then what were the intelligence failures that lead to that wrong conclusion?

3. If the threat was considered high then why wasn’t a FAST team or other resource deployed?

4. What did Ambassador Stephen’s see as his threat and what did he ask for? If he asked for help and was not provided it, that is inconceivable to me. My two bosses at EUCOM, General Chuck Wald (USAF) and General James L. Jones (USMC) would have bent over backwards to provide anything the ambassador asked for and more. They would have leaned on the Joint Staff to provide the authority to deploy and, in fact, during the Liberian situation described above, they were pushing me every day to provide solutions for the Joint Staff to approve. And should anyone forget, this was July of 2003. We were already in Afghanistan and had invaded Iraq just four months before. We were busy but not preoccupied.

Very Respectfully,
Hamlin Tallent
RADM, USN, retired

The admiral raises a lot of good points.  I guess we’ll see where this goes.  At least the right guy is chairing the select committee.  If Congressman Goudy doesn’t have the cajones to get to the whole truth in this matter, then I doubt that anyone can.

 

 

 

Leading From Behind – The “What Difference Does It Make” Version

Cluster7 Comments

Leave it to the foreign press to actually do the heavy lifting of investigative journalism in regards to this current Administration. A Citizens Commission on Benghazi comprised of top military officers and CIA insiders has recently released a report on their findings that are strangely absent from our MSM, and their findings are interesting to say the least:

‘The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,’ Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.

So our government knowingly allowed arm shipments to come in to the country and instead going to the Gaddafi government as intended, they were allowed to fall into the hands of the Islamist opposition. And now these weapons have found their way to Syria. Has anyone ever read this account before? In addition, Gaddafi was reportedly willing to broker a peace deal and abdicate power, but evidently our “Nobel Peace Prize” winning President chose not to pursue any deal. Again, has that ever been reported by our press?

The report goes on to state that military help for our Ambassador was just an hour away in Italy  – another account that I don’t remember reading in our press. The failure at Benghazi is epic, it needs to be more responsibly investigated, and it should preclude Hillary from ever being POTUS. When that 3 am call came in, she was AWOL.

 

Quick, While the LIVs Are Distracted…..

tiredoflibbs4 Comments

While the LIV’s focus is on obamacare, Putin, Gwenyth Paltro’s split, the missing flight and other nonsense, CIA’s Libyan station chief put’s to rest that the Obama administration’s talking point that the whole thing started as a protest.

The chief stated at hearings there was no protest and a result of terrorist attacks on the embassy.

What difference does it make at this point in time? -thanks Hillary.

http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/31/cia-ignored-station-chief-in-libya-when-creating-t/

UPDATE:

While the LIVs are distracted Democrats scramble for damage control. Pro Gun Control Democrat State Senator Leland Yee Arrested for GUN TRAFFICKING among other corrupt acts, for campaign contributions.

Charges include:

  • Clandestine meetings with an undercover agent to secure as much as $2 million in high-power weaponry in exchange for payments to Yee and his political campaign. In one of those meetings, Yee assures the agent, who holds himself out to be East Coast Mafia, “Do I think we can make some money? I think we can make some money.”
  • Deals with an agent posing as an Atlanta businessman backing a fictitious software company called Well-Tech, seeking Yee’s help, including an attempt to secure a contract with the state Department of Public Health in exchange for a $10,000 check for the secretary of state campaign,
  • Offering to help an agent posing as an Arizona medical marijuana industry insider looking to expand into California. Yee, again in exchange for campaign contributions, introduced the undercover agent to unidentified legislators and promised political support, particularly if elected to statewide office.
  • An agreement, at the urging of the undercover agent through Jackson, for Yee to honor the Ghee Kung Tong, the organization of suspected Chinese crime kingpin Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, with a proclamation, despite the senator’s worries about Chow being a “gangster.” Yee signed the proclamation in exchange for a campaign check from the agent.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25453464/leland-yee-corruption-case-state-senator-faces-uphill

Little mention in the media.  Meanwhile, HE STILL GETS PAID WHILE SUSPENDED.  It is interesting to note that his bail was HALF that of the so-called creator of the video that “caused the protests in Benghazi”…. only in California.

Putin Lives in the Real World

Mark Noonan3 Comments

By the time Japan ran up the white flag in August of 1945, the United States had produced nearly 61,000 tanks, 285,000 air craft, 147 capital ships, 41,000 cannon and more than 12 million rifles.  Using this material, we had killed or captured more than a million enemy soldiers and dropped well more than two million tons of explosives on Germany and Japan (not counting the atomic bombs) and killed somewhere in the range of two million German and Japanese civilians.  Our enemies were cratered wastelands entirely at our mercy.  Peering up from the rubble, the world drew a very vital lesson:  you don’t want to fight the United States of America.

This lesson was tested, of course.  First in Korea – where potential enemies learned that you could draw the United States into a war and not suffer complete destruction – but you had to be willing to absorb immense casualties at the hands of American forces disposing of more firepower than anyone could possibly imagine (in return for the privilege of killing at bit more than 33,000 Americans, the North Koreans and Chinese exchanged at least 400,000 military deaths and 1.5 million civilian deaths).  It was re-tested in Vietnam and finally confirmed – as long as you were willing to lose your people at a fantastic rate, eventually the Americans will get tired and leave, as long as the United States, itself, wasn’t at risk.  But, still,  those piles of smoking rubble in Germany and Japan kept the world entirely unwilling to tangle with the United States in a fight to the death.  And, so, no general wars since 1945.

But such a state of affairs only lasts as long as the world is convinced that fighting the United States is something to take into consideration.  Small scale = can be done, at enormous cost.  Large scale = national suicide.  But what if it comes to pass that you don’t have to worry either about large scale or small scale war with the United States?  Then you get the invasion of Crimea.

The problem Obama has – and its common throughout the leadership elite  of the Western World – is that they have convinced themselves that it wasn’t American power which kept the peace.  Indeed, they have convinced themselves that more than anything else, American power has been the threat to peace (and they use things like Korea, Vietnam and Iraq as proof – never mind that in none of these cases did the United States just blindly go in for aggressive action…right or wrong, in all of these cases a threat was perceived prior to American action). To an Obama, the world is kept at peace by international law; by the United Nations; by NGO’s; by conferences at swank, European resorts.  Everyone agrees to be nice – and see how well it works!  But, here’s the thing, it only worked because at the back of it all were the smoking piles of rubble in Germany and Japan circa 1945 and a worry that really challenging the post-war settlement would mean a new World War with the United States.  But Obama and his like don’t see it like that.  Putin, however, does.

With the decline of American power and the global perception that the United States simply lacks the grit to carry out a long, grinding fight to a victorious finish we have returned to the world of 1938 – precisely when the world held American power at a discount figuring that we probably wouldn’t fight, to begin with, and that if we did, we wouldn’t stick it out (it really cannot be stressed enough that the leaders of both Germany and Japan figured the American people simply lacked guts…that we were too soft to fight it out like men in desperate battle).  Putin isn’t doing anything but living in the real world – and the real world of 2014 is the international anarchy of 1914, prior to the application of overwhelming American power to the globe 1941-45.  In this real world, you grab what you think you can get away with – you know you won’t have to fight even a small, expensive (but ultimately victorious) war against an America which just gets tired and neither will you risk a World War which would bring all of America’s might to bear until your country is reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.

It is an open question as to whether this will work out badly for the world – we simply don’t know.  Perhaps if we hadn’t intervened in World War One things would have been better in the long run?  Maybe if we had dodged the World War Two bullet then having the Japanese Empire run Asia would not be as bad as China attempting to run Asia?  A revived Russian Empire might put a definite check on Turkish and Iranian ambitions, after all.  But while we don’t know how this will come out, there’s no sense getting mad a Putin or acting like he’s not behaving rationally.  He’s doing what he thinks is best – that we think it wrong is immaterial.  Unless we want to declare war on Russia, there’s not much we can do, after all.

But here is the risk – without fear of America’s overwhelming power (and it still is overwhelming – it still could take on, for instance, Russia and China at the same time and beat them into the ground), things could get a bit dangerous out in the world.  It could be that as nations take the lid off and start competing for territory, resources and prestige that one or more of them decides to challenge us directly, thinking that we can be cowed – or, if not cowed, then easily beaten.  It would be much better, I think, that once having won overwhelming global dominance that we had maintained it – we have let the scepter slip from our hands, however, and there’s no getting it back without war.  The world is now at genuine risk of World War Three.

This is not just Obama’s fault – though he has put the final touches on it.  This stretches back to the immediate post-WWII era, when we didn’t firmly put Russia in her place…and when we failed to pick up the real challenge in Korea and take out China and Russia.  It is the result of thinking that the world is governed by something other than force; that sweet reasonableness and treaties make the world safe.  They don’t.  Power and the willingness to apply it is what makes the world safe – or, as safe as it can be.  Putin is living in the real world.  So is China.  So is Iran.  The sooner we join them there the sooner we can start to rationally think about what we want – and where we’ll draw a line and tell them, “thus far and no further”.

Spying, What is it Good For?

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Mostly absolutely nothing.  In light of recent revelations that we have spied on the leaders of friendly foreign States, I’d like to put my two cents in:

We should never spy on anyone except when vital, national security interests of the United States or our allies are at stake.  Given this, we should never spy on any friendly nation as they never threaten our vital interests.  And we should be wary of spying on any nation unless we really have to.  We have, right now, a vital interest in spying in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, China and a few other nations – either the nations, themselves, threaten us or what is going on in them threatens to become a serious problem for the United States.  We need to know what is going on behind the scenes.  But, Germany?  What could Germany possibly be hiding from us that is a threat to our existence?   Germany is a United States ally.  If they wish to keep something secret from us, then simple decency should compel us to respect that.  Do you pry in to your friend’s affairs uninvited?  No, you don’t – because that is indecent.  Well, morality applies to States as well as individuals.

Aside from the morality of it all, spying doesn’t really work very often.  To be sure, there have been a few intelligence coups which have been put to good use – the British breaking of the German naval codes in WWII is the prime example of this.  On the other hand, there wasn’t too much use in our breaking the Japanese codes pre-WWII as we still got caught with our pants down at Pearl Harbor (to be sure, that capability was put to good use at Midway in 1942 – but, think about it, the boneheads in charge only started properly using it after we had been wiped out in the most well-advertised “surprise” attack in human history).  Knowing the enemy’s plan ahead of time can be useful – but far more useful is for you to just be prepared for all contingencies.  If you’ve reviewed the possible threats and deployed your forces properly, then it doesn’t fundamentally matter what the enemy is going to do.  One need but consider McClellan and Grant in the Civil War.  McClellan at one point pretty much had Lee’s battle plan and still couldn’t beat him…because Lee was deployed for all contingencies.  Grant didn’t have Lee’s plan and, indeed, was put in a bad position by one of Lee’s adroit battlefield gambits…but he still beat Lee because Grant was ready for all contingencies.

To me, there is something nauseating in this whole spying business.  Cloak and dagger and dirty deals to get the goods.  I’d rather we had very little to do with it – and best of all, nothing to do with it.  If we are prepared for all contingencies and have let potential enemies know in advance that we’ll destroy them as soon as they look crossways at us, that would be better than all the spies in the world…especially all the peeping-Tom sorts of spying we do with electronic surveillance. I don’t necessarily want to know what nastiness the Mullahs of Iran are planning – I just want us to have the capability of putting Iran’s leaders six feet under at need and their clear understanding that this is precisely what we’ll do, if they challenge us, anywhere.

Leave off spying.  Build the right military force and be prepared to use it against all comers in all possible circumstances – that is the path to security and peace; not routing through someone’s private telephone conversations or picking through their trash for dirt.

Navy Yard Shooting

Mark Noonan11 Comments

We don’t really know anything about it other than someone started shooting.  We’ll let the MSM tie themselves up in knots getting it wrong for a while and then see what the full details are.  But here’s my first take on it:

One or maybe two or three shooters shut down an entire US Navy base.  That is disgraceful regardless of whatever facts relate to this case.  Our enemies are now taking note:  if you want to go to war with the United States, you start with a few three-man commando teams attacking major US military bases – it will paralyze our military for hours, at least.

We need to change this – our bases have to be fully armed with people who know how to shoot to kill in an instant.  No US base should be shut down because of an attack – and no one should flee their post, nor should a “shelter in place” (translation: cower in fear) order be issued.  The strength of any military force is expressed by its instant readiness for war.  There are no rear areas for the military and there is no peace time.  Violent enemies are always out there, always seeking to kill…the military must always be ready.

UPDATE:  Seems that the killer is going to fall in to the “nut” category.  Here’s the bit of news which caught my eye this morning over at The Telegraph:

Exclusive: The Washington Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis played violent video games including Call of Duty for up to 16 hours at a time and friends believe it could have pushed him towards becoming a mass murderer.

Going through the whole article and seeing other things in the news about him, he appears to have been a dog’s breakfast of oddities.  There has emerged so far no hard center for the man – adrift on the tides, grasping some lifelines, but ultimately over the edge in to madness.  Naturally, most people will not blame what he saw and did prior to the attack.  Blame will be assigned in two ways:

1.  Anti-gun nuts will, as always, blame the gun.

2.  Rational people will almost all just blame the killer.

Me?  I blame the entire situation.  As I’ve said again and again and again these things used to never happen.  Now they do.  The dividing line is that school shooting in San Diego back in 1979.

It is everything that went in to the killer which caused him to kill – our broken morality, our glorification of violence, our attacks on masculine virtues (men not taught to be properly manly often wind up as brutes); all of this and more caused this to happen…and, yes, someone who plays violent video games for long periods of time is feeding in to his brain things which can come out in very bad ways.  As always in these situations, I’ll just point out that until we decide to change entirely, we’ll just get more and more of this.

It is Time for a Conservative Anti-War Movement

Mark Noonan38 Comments

As the Ruling Class circles the wagons around Obama and determines upon war in Syria to pull Obama’s bacon out of the fire, the question becomes: what can we do?  My answer:  start an anti-war movement.

To be sure, the anti-war movement in the United States has heretofore been the province of leftists – and very often the most kooky of leftists.  The left’s anti-war activity has tended towards being anti-American in effect – and more commonly anti-GOP, because we see how invisible it is now that a liberal Democrat is proposing war.  But just because leftists kooks have been anti-war that doesn’t mean that being anti-war is wrong, provided your being anti-war for sensible reasons.

War is a terrible, cruel and nasty business and should be avoided if at all possible.  Some times it is, however, necessary.  War will come when it comes – and there may even come times when it is necessary for us to start the war.  But what we have here in Syria is a war that isn’t coming to us and which we have no need to start.  The United States is not threatened.  US allies are not threatened.  The two sides in the Syrian civil war are equally bad – think of it like the Spanish civil war of the 1930’s where communists and fascists battled it out.  What possible good would US intervention have done back then – we’d have either midwifed a communist or fascist dictatorship.  In Syria, we can back Assad’s hideous regime, or back the al-Qaeda-like rebels.  No good.

The problem we have today started a long time ago – when Truman criminally hurled us in to the Korean War without obtaining Congressional approval.  That is when the war-making powers of Congress first began to atrophy.  These days, we have plenty of people – including some who are not at all dumb – saying that the President has authority to launch military action in Syria based upon his powers as Commander in Chief.  That is an absurd reading of the Constitution – but it is entirely in line with practice over the past 63 years.  A conservative anti-war movement must have as its goal the reform of this pernicious doctrine – we must return war-declaring power to the Congress.

While getting 100,000 people in to DC by Monday next might short-circuit this war in Syria, I doubt much that such a crowd can be gathered on such short notice.  Looking for the longer term, we should be seeking a law which will specifically prohibit the expenditure of defense funds on offensive actions not authorized by Congress (it is the power of the purse which gives Congress its actual power).  No money can be drawn from the Treasury without Congressional authorization, so all military expenditures would be covered by a law which says that the money can’t be used for offensive operations until Congress declares war (and it is preferred that it be an actual declaration of war – not an authorization to use force). This would still allow the President to use military force to defend – to defend the United States and our allies.  But it would not allow the Syrian strike (nor would it have allowed the Libyan war…and for you liberals out there if you want a piece of this, it would have prevented Panama in 1989 and Grenada in 1983) unless Obama obtains a declaration of war against Syria, first.

This all fits in with the broader, conservative desire to reform government by re-limiting its powers as intended by the Founders.  Only a limited government is a free government – and if we don’t stop this sort of thing, we will find ourselves living in an unfree nation very shortly.

The Hasan Debacle

Mark Noonan26 Comments

Mark Steyn is cutting, as usual, in his discussion of the Hasan trial – he concludes his piece:

…He’s admirably upfront about who and what he is — a “Soldier of Allah,” as he put on his business card. On Tuesday, he admitted he was a traitor who had crossed over from “the bad side” (America’s) to “the good side” (Islam’s). He has renounced his U.S. citizenship and its effete protections such as workplace-violence disability leave. He professes loyalty to America’s enemies. He says, “I am the shooter.” He helpfully informs us that that’s his gun. In this week’s one-minute statement, he spoke more honestly and made more sense than Obama, Gates, Casey, the Armed Forces Court of Appeals, two judges, the prosecution and defense lawyers, and mountains of bureaucratic reports and media coverage put together.

But poor old Hasan can say “Yup, I did it” all he wants; what does he know?

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media. Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot. The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged. Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.

Steyn is right – Hasan is the admirable person in this trial.  He’s quite clear on who he is, what he did and why.  We, on our side, look like a sick and twisted combination of idiot and coward.  I’m not quite sure what is best in dealing with Hasan – shooting him is logical (I’m opposed to the death penalty in principal but traitors during wartime pretty much ask for their own deaths), but there is something to be said in denying him “martyrdom” and growing old and dying, long since forgotten, in prison.  But whatever we do with him, we’ll still look like cowardly idiots.

In spite of the fact that he’s clearly 100% guilty as charged and there is abundant and indisputable evidence to prove this, it has taken years to bring him to trial.  He should have been tried as soon as he got out of the hospital post-shooting.  There was the beard issue which took a lot of time – a dispute as to whether or not Hasan should have to adhere to Army regulations about beards (the are forbidden).  Tie him down and shave him – though, of course, had we tried him in a rational time frame he wouldn’t have been able to grow such a full beard.  The man, in court, is clearly stating he’s guilty – and yet the trial goes on, rather than the sentencing.  Once he is sentenced, there will probably be years of appeals.  With a little luck, we’ll wrap this up a couple years before Hasan dies of old age – unless we exchange him for someone the Islamists kidnap meanwhile.

In the endless post-mortems of France’s defeat in 1940, one thing which rarely came out in the analysis is the actual reason the Germans were able to conquer France in 6 weeks:  the people of France, with a few shining exceptions, were yellow to the bone.  They were simply afraid to fight.  There are a large variety of reasons the heroic France of 1914 turned in to the cowardly France of 1940, but the fact remains that if they’d had some guts in 1940 the war would have gone very differently.  I worry that we have become like that, too – simply afraid to fight…with our fear stemming from a lack of faith in our cause; we don’t believe that we’re any good any longer, that we have to right to be here…that we’ve never done anything worthwhile and so our enemies are right to attack us.  For crying out loud, we’ve got a traitor who joined the other side and massacred our soldiers here on our soil – and we can’t even swiftly and correctly deal with something as cut and dried as that…small wonder we’re at our wits end with what to do about the larger issues.

We’d better get some courage back, and right quick.  The vultures are circling…

Is Going Golfing the Normal Response to a Pending Enemy Attack?

Mark Noonan65 Comments

Ok, so just after we learn the NSA is spying on us, that the Benghazi scandal is worse than we thought and that the IRS scandal is right outside the Oval Office door, we get this story that al-Qaeda is about to launch the biggest attack since 9/11…politicians and talking heads are everywhere saying the threat is specific and credible and so specific that we have to close 21 embassies and consulates for a week…so, “specific” means we’ve narrowed the attack down to 21 possible targets over a 7 day period?  Meanwhile, Obama goes golfing and appears on Leno – just the sort of thing you’d expect from a leader who has specific and credible evidence on an impending enemy attack.

With this Administration, our default position has to be that they are lying unless proven otherwise – right now, I see no actual evidence of any particular pending attack (though, of course, the enemy is out there, getting stronger and does want to attack us) which justifies the story that we’re about to be hit 9/11-style and so 21 facilities have to be closed.  Leaving aside the fact that if this is true then the Administration is leaking operational intelligence (you don’t tell your enemy who is about to attack that you are in on the secret – you lay your plans to thwart and counter-attack and then hit him when he’s not expecting it), this whole thing seems to be cooked up (perhaps out of general intelligence which is likely always out there of possible terrorist attacks) to (a) deflect attention from scandals; (b) make it look like the NSA spying program is vital; (c) make Obama – who’s foreign policy is in shambles – appear that he’s on top of things.

The world watches and laughs at the vaunted United States of America…run by fools, crumbling in power and wealth and unable to influence the course of events.

The NSA and America’s Defensive Crouch

Mark Noonan78 Comments

The House narrowly defeated an amendment today which would have ended the NSA’s surveillance program on Americans.  Zero Hedge has the list of those who vote aye and nay, so you can see which side of this your own Congresscritter fell (mine, a liberal Democrat – and long-term political hack here in my State – voted to keep the NSA program…but don’t be fooled, this was bi-partisan both in voting to end and voting to keep). 

Its good to keep in mind why we have this massive intelligence system – because on December 7th, 1941, we were caught with our pants down.  From that day to this, the United States government has been determined not to be surprised – and so a gigantic intelligence bureaucracy has been built up, and like all government bureaucracies, it has become self-perpetuating – and the actual results of the bureaucracy are irrelevant.

Think about it – when you actually review the events leading up to December 7th, it is plain as a pikestaff that the Japanese were going to attack, and as they were going to attack, it is just a simple leap of logic to understand that they would attack the strongest military force the United States possessed in the Pacific – our fleet.  The proper response to all this would have been aggressive patrolling by the entire fleet…seeking out any approaching threat and dealing with it in conventional, naval battle once the aggressive intent was determined (in this case, when the enemy fleet was found a thousand miles away from Japanese waters and heading towards US waters).  But that entails risk – and the risk of failure; two things politicians and most senior military leaders shy away from (honestly, for the most part no one is more craven than a senior admiral or general…having risen to the top, their primary purpose in life is to remain at the top and eventually retire without any mishap…only a very few understand their actual job and are willing to put it all on the line for it).  And, so, we were “surprised” – and the response of our leaders, political and military, was not to change to using foresight and courage, but to crouch down and build up an intelligence system which would, allegedly, prevent a repeat.

It didn’t work, of course.  We still got 9/11 – heck, even earlier, back in 1950 we were caught flat-footed by hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops in Korea.  Think about that!  This was hordes of Chinese troops streaming in to the narrow peninsula of Korea and we missed it!  It didn’t work because intelligence information is only useful if you are determined to act upon it – there were indications of Chinese intervention (just as there were indications of a pending terrorist attack in 2001), but its not like intelligence will ever give you the time and date of the enemy attack, except in the rarest of instances.  In other words, unless you are a person determined to resolve the problem, no amount of intelligence will do you any good – no matter how reliable and comprehensive it is, if you’ve got no guts then you’re not going to do what is necessary to make having the intelligence worthwhile. 

Had we desired to prevent war with Japan, win the war in Korea or prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then certain policies had to be enacted – risky policies which could go very wrong.  We’d have had to been willing to go after the problem – to solve the problem.  But, as I said, doing such risks defeat – and politicians and generals don’t like defeat.  To put it harshly, a politician or general would rather have people and troops massacred in a “surprise” attack than risk their careers by taking actions which might forestall an attack and solve the problem.  We’re in a defensive crouch with a massive, intrusive intelligence system because of this – and not only does it put our liberties at risk, it doesn’t even start to resolve the problems which face us. 

We have to get out of the defensive crouch.  Certainly, we need intelligence on enemy plans – but the intelligence is a means to an end, not an end in itself.  And even without intelligence of enemy plans, we still need to act when a threat is perceived – and act in a decisive manner which will solve the problem, even at the risk of defeat to ourselves.  Better, in the end, to be beaten in battle than to continue to have this continual erosion of our position as we sit crouched behind the NSA, hoping that we can just prevent a major attack until after the next election cycle. 

End the NSA program – end all government data collection attempts which are not specifically directed at enemies.  Build and maintain our military to a point where we can instantly apply American power anywhere in the world – and when a threat emerges, go after it.  Sure, try diplomacy, first, but let all the world know that a threat to the United States will either be completely and finally resolved at the negotiating table or it will be completely and finally resolved on the battlefield…and we won’t be squeamish about attacking first if we believe that diplomacy is getting us nowhere.