John Robb's Weblog

Iraqi Infrastructure

Recent congressional testimony on Iraq's infrastructure woes paint a dire picture (well known to GG readers). NPR's OnPoint has an "in depth" program on the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure. Unfortunately, it only asked a generic set of reporters to spin the topic (the political spin meister didn't show up). The NYTimes wrote about it too. Pretty sad coverage given the potential to really cover this topic with depth and intelligence.

Paramilitaries Everywhere!

Bruce Schneier picks up on how even in the US, the police are militarizing.

Nigeria Continues to Slip

Thisday. Contractors refuse to repair severed pipelines feeding the Wari refinery. Too dangerous. Is Nigeria headed towards an internal fuels crisis? Will this set off the descent to primary loyalties? If so, ethnic cleansing is right around the corner (with 120 million participants).

Fabius Maximus on Israel's Fate

DNI: To plan a successful grand strategy the strategist must know if he has a weak or strong position. Failure almost certainly results if he gets this fundamental fact wrong. Realist or idealist, this is the starting point for developing a grand strategy. Unfortunately, history shows the difficulty of correctly determining weak from strong during times of rapid change. For example, which looks stronger: a stateless people with no modern government, economy, or army—or a developed state with its vast superiority in ideas and hardware? You know my answer...

Lind on Long Wars

DNI. Long wars are usually strategic disasters for winners as well as losers, because they leave all parties exhausted. If they work to anyone’s advantage, it tends to be the weaker party’s, because its alternative is rapid defeat. The Rumsfeld Pentagon certainly does not see the United States as the weaker party in its “Global War on Terrorism.” So why has it adopted a long war strategy, or more accurately lack of strategy, unless one sees national exhaustion as a plus?

A Zeta Hitman's Last Day

Good story: Read the whole thing.

Vizcarra´s revelations to Norma came after he complained out loud about his "security detail," saying they were taking too many risks. Norma asked him what he was talking about, according to her sworn statement. "He told me that he was a member of the ´Zetas´ and that they were an armed group of drug traffickers. "I asked Juan Miguel what he did. He said: ´What I do is take people away, and we are here in Acapulco looking for people from [another] cartel; we are looking for some guys who went to our territory and killed members of a Zeta family. And my mission is to take those responsible with me,´" Norma told authorities.

Vizcarra warned that he could very well be on a suicide mission, she said, given the Sinaloa cartel´s level of police protection in the port city, especially from corrupt Federal Investigative Agency agents, called AFIs for the agency´s Spanish-language initials. If the Zetas succeeded in their kidnapping plan, he added, it was likely to touch off "the big party" - a bloody cartel clash.

"He said that we were in the wolf´s mouth since the [state] police, the AFIs, and the municipal police would not take us to the authorities if we were caught, that we would be taken to the bosses of the other organization," Norma testified. And so it was

Paramilitary Forces have become the Poor Country's PMC

Another example of their use beyond the borders of the host country:

VOA. India says it is sending paramilitary troops to Afghanistan to provide security for Indian civilians working on various development projects in the war-torn country.

Cartoon set

Here's the complete cartoon set on Cryptome's site.

GodZilla: The DoD Eats the Federal Budget

This speaks volumes: Washington Post

In the White House budget for the fiscal year ending in October 2007, Pentagon funding would increase by nearly 7 percent and, for the first time in Bush's presidency, claim more than half the government's expenditure on discretionary programs, those that get set each year. The $439.3 billion that the plan devotes to the military is 45 percent greater than the Pentagon budget when Bush took office five years ago.

Here's the skinny. The Federal government is quickly becoming the DoD plus entitlement programs. Everything else is getting squeezed out. These entitlement programs (social security and healthcare) are still the third rail of American politics and will stay that way. The problem is that once the DoD is shown to be ineffective at defending the US (and it will be once the next attacks occur), confidence in the only remaining function of the Federal system will be completely undermined. Reminder: The attackers on 9/11 IGNORED the DoD and future attackers will do the same.

The Next Global System Perturbation

Bill Lind is hearing alarm bells too (and his scenarios fit those that I have considered likely). The next couple of months are going to be very interesting.