Burn Bags, Disney, Pizza and Plastic 01/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism, Media, Policy.add a comment
TO TRANSPORT the huge heaps of “burn bags” crammed with discarded secrets, N.S.A. turned appropriately enough to Florida’s Disney World. In Fantasyland and the rest of the Magic Kingdom, accumulated trash is transported automatically by underground conveyor belt to a central disposal waste facility. Similarly, burn bags from N.S.A., the intelligence community’s Fantasyland, are sent down a Rube Goldberg-like-chute-and-conveyor-belt-contraption known as the Automatic Material Collection System. The 6 1/2-foot wide conveyor then dumps the bags into a giant blenderlike vat that combines water, steam and chemicals to break the paper down into pulp. The pulped paper is processed, dried, funneled through a fluffer, and finally, fifteen minutes later, baled. Within a few weeks the documents that once held the nation’s most precious secrets hold steaming pepperoni pizzas. In 1998, the agency took in $58, 953 in profit from the sale of its declassified pizza boxes.
Problems arise, however, when thick magnetic tapes, computer diskettes, and a variety of other non-water soluble items are thrown into the burn bags. Once a week, destruction officers assigned to Crypto City’s Classified Material’s Conversion Plant have to use rakes, shovels, and hacksaws to break up the “tail,” the clumps of hard, tangled debris that clog up the room-sized Diposall. Among the stray items that have found their way into the plant are a washing machine motor, a woman’s slip, and an assortment of .22-caliber bullets. Because this residue, totaling more than fifty-two tons a year, still may contain some identifiable scrap bearing an N.S.A. secret, it is left to drain for about five days and then put in boxes to be burned in a special incinerator.
N.S.A. was able to turn an additional thirty tons of old newspapers, magazines, and computer manuals into pizza boxes as a result of spring cleaning dubbed the “Paper Chase,” in 1999. But paper is not the only thing N.S.A. recycles. It also converts metal from the tiny chips and circuit boards in the agency’s obsolete computers into reusable scrap. So many computers hit the junk pile every year that the agency is able to recycle more than 438 tons of metal annually from the small components.
- James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Read an excerpt from Body of Secrets at Random House [Here]
The Meaning of McChrystal 07/11/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.add a comment
THE national security adviser of the world’s greatest superpower is a ‘clown,’ its vice-president a nobody and its president ‘uncomfortable and intimidated.’ With those words the officers around General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan, engulfed America in a storm as damaging to its war effort as any Taliban raid. America rightly sets great store by civilian control of its armed forces and on June 23rd a distinctly unintimidated President Barack Obama made General McChrystal pay for his insubordination with his job. But presidential decisiveness cannot conceal a deeper truth. America and its allies are losing in Afghanistan.
“After McChrystal,” The Economist
WHEN General Stanley McChrystal, President Obama’s own appointed top soldier in Afghanistan, and the new face of the “good war” that we were knee-deep in losing — after we’d essentially won it almost nine years ago — talked brashly and undiplomatically in the company of a Rolling Stone reporter, embedded with the general and his staff, something was very wrong. McChrystal, a veteran of the American special operations community, and a beloved leader because of his successful service in that rarefied realm, certainly wasn’t a lightweight; either politically nor mentally.
It is unlikely then, that he was unaware of the effect that his actions would have and the consequences they would carry with his new boss back in Washington. (And just a short time before his civilian-leadership-be-damned interview, he may have also created a stir when his anticipated report on Afghanistan, meant only for the president, leaked to the press, and more specifically, Bob Woodward. It is something that still remains unanswered: Who leaked the report?) What the general’s out-and-out disregard implies is that we’re not only losing, but the military brass and the civilian leadership of this country do not see the war in anywhere close to the same way. McChrystal’s actions implied that he had lost all faith in his higher-ups.
General McChrystal oversaw Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.) — home of the military’s most specialized, most secretive elements — prior to his appointment to the head of International Security Forces Afghanistan (I.S.A.F.). Under his watch as J.S.O.C. commander, his teams were credited with the killing of the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Masab al-Zarqawi. McChrystal’s methods are unorthodox. He is a supporter of counter-insurgency strategy (known as “COIN” to insiders), it is the war fighting philosophy that he’d ultimately look to institute in Afghanistan, before his recent dismissal, which promotes the protection of the civilian population, and a longterm building of trust between it and the military.
Hopes were high for McChyrstal and the potential for him to bring in his expertise in unconventional wars and an experience dealing with a similarly insurgent conflict in Iraq, with a record of success behind him. (Though, as J.S.O.C.’s top man, most of that record is highly classified.) But being from the special operations world, McChrystal’s personality wasn’t as purposefully polished as those Pentagon generals who say the right thing all the time; the vanilla thing, perhaps, rarely rankling feathers. Even, though, McChrystal is well-known as a warrior-scholar who can be as comfortable with politicians and academics, as he is with his own soldiers. But his time was spent on the ground, and not in an air-conditioned rooms back stateside, and so perhaps those more amiable traits had ceded a bit to his current reality; a man entrenched in a war, every day.
McChrystal is typically what a soldier would want and a what politician would want: a general who is connected to the struggles of his men and women. While those are on-paper positives, McChrystal’s approach is undeniably new school, but not always in the positive way; from his strategy to fight this version of the Afghan War (a positive), that could have been considered a “hippie approach” by those on the right — if they had no idea of the man’s background or the ground truths of the conflict — to more importantly, his not-as-apparent respect for the civilian rule of the armed services (a negative). These are two tremendously “new school” positions that diverge from mainline military thinking.
It has long been a standing internal military practice to discourage officers, especially, those generals who are prosecuting the war and are working-hand-in-hand with the policymakers (and even enlisted men), from publicly voicing their dissent. That is left to the private communications between them and their bosses. And as a graduate of West Point, the apotheosis of a finishing school for many military leaders, and a man who has also held a post with the Council on Foreign Relations and at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, McChrystal knows that such displays of public dissent by military personnel implies a disunion between the executive branch and its military apparatus.
So this practice wasn’t ever lost on McChrystal, unless he wanted it to be. The policy of serving members in the armed services not speaking out against the politicians that make decisions on how to use the military and when, is further to ensure the preeminence of the civilian leadership in the political system over that of the military’s, as well as to discourage the idea of potential political coup’detats. (Though, that is a far-fetched point from here, that is the very principle involved: If soldiers routinely speak out against their civilian leaders, publicly, we are essentially halfway there.)
But insubordination, especially this kind of public insubordination, even if it is not premeditated, and especially because it is not tolerated in the least, says something about an effort like the one ongoing in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s actions hold meaning and imply that the top soldiers in charge do not believe that the politicians they work for are willing to do what it takes to win. (And could you blame Obama if he feels this way, after inheriting the helm of a country that was eight years in and losing?) It may also mean that there is a disconnect between the military, with McChrystal representative of it, and the policy-makers and the president. While tensions are somewhat to be expected, as it would be in any working situation, the egregious disregard shown by the general is startling.
McChrystal’s distaste seems to touch everyone directly involved with the Afghanistan War on the civilian side. In the Rolling Stone profile that led to his dismissal, reporter Michael Hastings’s version of McChrystal’s tough-guy, “spec-ops-warrior” personality shone through quite visibly. The war’s top general arrogantly sized-up guys in a room for no good reason, bragging about his ability to apply physical force, according to Hastings, who was recounting the time of a N.A.T.O. dinner function that McChrystal did not in the slightest want to attend:
‘I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,’ McChrystal says. He pauses a beat. Unfortunately, he adds, ‘no one in this room could do it.’
While that quote wasn’t so bad, and it is particularly representative of the kind of attitude you’d want and expect from a soldier, it was unbecoming for the commander of America’s most crucial war-front, and the world’s foremost military. But it was McChrystal’s undermining of Vice President, Joe Biden, and others who are intregal to the Afghan mission — though judging from his actions, he would debate their importance — that made his dismissal from his post, all but a fait accompli. The standout situation occurred when an aide asked the general during his prep period for his speaking engagement at that same N.A.T.O. dinner he was reticent to attend, what he’d say about Biden if he were asked by the dinner’s attendees, to which McChrystal responded by saying:
Who’s that?
Did you say: Bite Me?
What is especially surprising and telling is that McChrystal opted to show this level of open insubordination to a writer he granted permission to allow follow him, and who he possibly became oblivious of; a reporter whose job it was to report such things for a magazine known for stirring political controversy. It seems that the general was very blase about his decorum and his staff’s decorum throughout the embedded reporter’s, Michael Hastings, trailing of him for the story. And McChrystal apparently expressed no objections to the article when it was sent to him for vetting prior to its publishing, according to Politico‘s Andy Barr:
Eric Bates, the magazine’s editor, said during an interview on M.S.N.B.C.’s Morning Joe that McChrystal was informed of the quotes prior to its publication as part of Rolling Stone‘s standard fact-checking process — and that the general did not object to or dispute any of the reporting.
While we can’t ever know if McChrystal’s poor attitude towards the civilian leadership may have been influenced by his first meeting with Obama and his impressions of the commander-in-chief one-on-one, or if it was just a coping mechanism for him and his men handling an ever increasingly dire war, unless he says so, Obama had to take the Rolling Stone profile and what it displayed at face value.
In the profile, one gets to see that the general’s attitude may have been shaped (although, perhaps, wrongly) by the first meeting between he and the the president, as according to sources close to him, McChrystal sensed that Obama was “intimidated” in the first meeting between the president and his top generals, at the Pentagon, just following his inauguration. McChrystal’s opinion about his boss only continued to dip after that, when he and President Obama met face-to-face alone for the first time. The nail in the coffin in McChrystal’s mind was most likely that moment — note: this is conjecture, based on the article — where McChrystal believed that the president was quote: “unprepared,” for their meeting on the war, four months into his role as commander-in-chief.
[In Obama's defense, "unprepared" is a tough metric to gauge, particularly since this is according to sources who are unnamed, but are reportedly close to McChrystal. And we have no way to divine what "prepared" versus "unprepared" would mean, even if the standard were reasonable, especially when comparing it to a man like General McChrystal, who reportedly holds an encyclopedic knowledge of al-Qaeda and whose sole focus is the war that he has served in, and is the now the commander of. This inability to measure what is meant by "unprepared" is particularly even more true, when McChrystal's knowledge is compared to a civilian president who is just a couple of months into a job that left him with myriad domestic issues and international issues, that nearly produced a second Great Depression, globally. Perhaps, Obama's plate was so full that he couldn't retain all of the Afghanistan briefing information, in light of everything else. There are only, after all, so many hours in the day for him to be briefed on all matters.] Here is the exact reporting from Rolling Stone concerning the two crucial meetings that may have injured the Obama-McChrystal partnership:
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked ‘uncomfortable and intimidated’ by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. ‘It was a 10-minute photo op,’ says an adviser to McChrystal. ‘Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his [expletive] war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.’
With this cascade of evidence implying a losing American enterprise in the Afghan war, and a visible disjunction between the military’s top-general (formerly) handling it, what does this mean for the war? Well, with the appointment of General David Patreus, it could turn out a bit more positive, for one. While it is likely that it won’t end in an all-out, hands-down victory, it may now end sooner by way of negotiations, because we are all rightfully losing our stomach to go on any longer, and counter-insurgent strategy takes far too much time to develop a winning result. Patreus will be keeping the plan laid out by his predecessor, however.
And McChrystal’s plan is one that is believed to be a good one: since it clears up the prior murky policy goal in Afghanistan, to secure the entire nation, and it truly looks to place a stop on our giving the enemy fodder, through the production of more and more anti-Americanism, in the region, by way of obviously unintended civilian casualties.
Because McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy would take much longer than anyone would like to spend now and cost more soldiers, it was perhaps better for McChrystal to step-down or, unfortunately, be dismissed. And while McChrystal was loved in Afghanistan among his troops, Patreus is more universally respected and more powerful in Washington, and the policy circles, than McChrystal, most likely because of his ability to connect with the civilian leadership. This means a once-again united front, and possibly a clear end on the horizon to this nearing-decade-long saga.
Read The Economist‘s “After McChrystal” [Here]
Read The Economist‘s “More Than a One-man Problem [Here]
The Once-Future Front; Now Actual 04/15/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics, Technology, Web.comments closed
WHEN the cult hit WarGames was released in 1983, a film about a high school hacker and his friend using their idle time to play with N.O.R.A.D.‘s networks, the future of unconventional war was on display, before anyone truly knew it. I suspect that many at the Pentagon did, as any omen in a movie would have already been dreamed up in their analysts’ forecasts, particularly since it is well-known that any communication network that transmits information is especially vulnerable to the outside, by virtue of its architecture; but still, they couldn’t have seen all of this, and certainly not to this degree: with the increasing dominance of robotic, remote combat, the rise of virtual wars in cyberspace that take place every minute of every day, between nation-states, non-state actors, and plain, old, curious individuals.
Just 20 years ago, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, combat, both future and present, in military circles, still seemed to be centered around big, swirling battles on multiple fronts, like that of W.W.II. The idea then was that war would still be largely conventional, and the defense industry was to prepare for it. What is known as low intensity operations — or low intensity conflict, the kind of conflicts we tend to see now, that are smaller in scale — were still viewed as an exception to the established doctrine, as opposed to the norm it seems likely to be for some time, due to the interconnections of a global market economy making war of any other kind very dicey without alliances for trade goods. But since Vietnam, the old doctrine doesn’t appear to hold water at all, and it seems every major war since then involving nation-states has been what is known as “asymmetric.” (And Vietnam was actually asymmetric.) The term refers to the balance of power in a conflict. Typically, in asymmetric warfare one actor is a powerful nation — both in treasure and military might — and the other isn’t, and so the lesser powered nation (or combatant) is forced to use a strategy that levels the playing field through methods such as decentralization of its forces, guerrilla tactics, surprise attacks and terror.
With the dawn of the Internet Age in the early ’90s to mid ’90s, it became alluring to those with know-how but little resources, to begin to experiment with and penetrate the connectivity of the world’s dominant powers. Because in the virtual world, decentralization is the prevailing norm, it was further to their advantage. There isn’t just one network, there are several networks; to jump in and out of, to hide in, to use as a mask and conduct similar operations as that of traditional, real-world asymmetric wars, except now there is (maybe) less blood and an almost limitless impact, because everything about our lives and our governments, is online, mostly.
Recently National Public Radio (N.P.R.) aired a segment on the new battlefield existing at the tip of the fingers and on nothing more than our laptops and airwaves and server rooms. The threat is very real, and it seems many governments including ours are vastly preparing for it, somewhat. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser for Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush No.43, spoke of the threat on N.P.R.’s Fresh Air program, promoting his new book Cyber War. In Clarke’s analysis, while the American government is leaving no stone unturned to protect itself and its critical defense infrastructure, there is just not enough of a priority as of right now, on the private sector; who are as vital as government related operations. Clarke’s findings as told to N.P.R.:
“A cyberattack could disable trains all over the country,” he tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross. “It could blow up pipelines. It could cause blackouts and damage electrical power grids so that the blackouts would go on for a long time. It could wipe out and confuse financial records, so that we would not know who owned what, and the financial system would be badly damaged. It could do things like disrupt traffic in urban areas by knocking out control computers. It could, in nefarious ways, do things like wipe out medical records.”
[...]
“The Pentagon is all over this,” he says. “The Pentagon has created a four-star general command called Cyber Command, which is a military organization with thousands of people in it to go to war using these [cyber]weapons. And also, Cyber Command’s job is to defend the Pentagon. Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and the railroads and the banks? The Obama administration’s answer is pretty much, ‘You’re on your own,’ that Cyber Command will defend our military, Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today — but everybody else will have to do their own defense. That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.”
Listen to Clarke’s full interview (along with a book excerpt) [Here]
The Unveil of the ‘Beast of Khandahar’ 02/24/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Aviation, Defense, Global.comments closed
Photo Credit: Air & Cosmos
IT has been months now. Several months, in fact, since a grainy photo appeared in the defense news’ blogosphere, that invoked the time of the infamous “donuts-on-a-rope” picture which implied the first operational use of a pulse jet power-plant and a still-fabled project named “Aurora.” And which also backtracked to the the first credible, reported, but never documented, sighting of the rumored TR-3B above an oil rig in the North Sea in the mid-1990s; by a man who once was a spotter for the Royal Observer Corps. All of which have become a part of an internal mythology of the defense world, I follow. But those moments are unlike this one for two reasons: (1) a government admonition, and (2) the long interval of time that has passed between those episodes, with nary an acknowledgment, which is unlike this more recent one.
The United States policy on above-top-secret “black” aircraft, a term that describes programs which are fully-cloaked and only known to a select few with a need to know, is generally: “Deny, deny, deny…until they stop asking.” Which is what happened to those projects that had been speculated on for years such as the U-2 or the SR-71 — until those programs gradually went “white” to the public — due to the inevitable whisper of those on the inside and the exposure of internal government documents that track funding for all military projects — such as those put out by the Congressional Budget Office — even if only what is there, is just an indication of capital flow for “something.”
That is all thanks to the genius of a semi-transparent government and “little-d’” democratic values and measures such as the Freedom of Information Act, even though requesting classified information through the “F.O.I.A.,” can still be a journey down futility’s road. And after succeeding in such a procurement, those documents can still be highly censored. (Quick aside: Some who believe it is a threat to national security to allow some level of openness, seem to be wrong. Government projects still continue under suspicion of existing, and their “truth” while unacknowledged wholly, is usually readily available and verifiable by defense journalists, by way of alternative (legal) means. Such as watching congressional appropriations.)
However, by now, if you follow defense media coverage and President Obama’s controversial but successful — for American objectives but not necessarily humanitarian ones — U.A.V. war over the AfPak skies, you will most certainly have heard of a rumored delta-like, unmanned “B-2 Spirit, mini-contraption” — my term of art, because of the craft’s resemblance to a former black project, the B-2 Stealth Bomber — that is presumably flying surveillance missions, if not handling a portion of the track-and-kill operations dedicated towards al-Qaeda. Fairly recently, the (once) unidentified air foil was featured in a popular post on Flight Global’s: Distant Early Warning Line blog asking its readers to comment, concerning what exactly the pictured jet was, and what the camel-ish “humps” on its wings possibly housed. Some of the more credible guesses were: advanced electronics packages, and perhaps an electronic warfare systems’ battery.
And this is not to mention the obvious stealth signature of it, that sent many readers wondering what exactly it was being used for, since the on-going known war features an enemy that has very little, to no radar capability. For the uninitiated: aircraft, tanks and ships with low radar signatures and sometimes even smaller infrared signatures, feature highly angular or rounded surfaces that either refract radio waves or absorb them, while also using similar techniques to reduce their heat signatures, for instance burying the engines behind grates and a barrier of actual bricks that cool its “infrared sig.” The rounding of surfaces is used to give more area for absorption of waves by way of a special skin and paint usually, while hard angle-shaped surfaces shoot those radio detection waves haphazardly; only not back to their radar station, thus making it difficult for radar operators to recognize a machine of such engineering. And so it becomes apparent from just a mere glance, whether a ship, tank, or aircraft is designed for a low-visibility footprint. Such was the case here.
I had first heard of what has been called the “Beast of Kandahar,” and which is now identified by everyone, even the government, as the RQ-170 Setninel; when the squadron patches for the project had been revealed in the book on mostly Air Force black-ops: I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Black World. The book’s author, Trevor Paglen, came across the patches and some tertiary information that linked the patches and the Sentinel’s program in his mind, and he was correct, while other defense news and aviation writers and enthusiasts, attempted to link the above first photo of the plane to everything from the well-known Polecat program, to the from-out-of-left-field surmise of an engineer, wondering if it was the BAE Corax. But, Paglen, as far as I know, never weighed in on the image, he just happened to have the right paraphernalia and information; much, much earlier. His talk of the “Desert Prowler” program is exactly what the U.A.V. pictured is linked to, however. Points for him.
Some time in January, the Department of Defense had copped to operating the “Beast” and provided its official number designation, “RQ-170.” Yet, we still have no idea what it exactly does for the counter insurgent operation. Its more recent, noted capacity; is to spy however, and the region it’s operating in says that it more than likely is not only performing counterinsurgency surveillance, but also a more conventional cloak-and-dagger aerial reconnaissance operation, that of: tracking weapons’ inventories and nuclear programs of other nation-states. With a near-by (to the Beast’s area of operation) and a soon-nuclear Iran, with a dictator whose Friday casual attire belies his level of crazy, it seems to be the most logical scenario, along with the specter of some Chinese-related operations. However, the range on the Beast is unknown, but similar U.A.V.s in the theater can and have been operated from as far as bases in Nevada.
How Uncle Sam Targets Kids 09/01/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Editorial, Marketing, Politics.comments closed
In the past few years, the military has mounted a virtual invasion into the lives of young Americans. Using data mining, stealth websites, career tests, and sophisticated marketing software, the Pentagon is harvesting and analyzing information on everything from high school students’ GPAs and SAT scores to which video games they play. Before an Army recruiter even picks up the phone to call a prospect like Travers, the soldier may know more about the kid’s habits than do his own parents.
[...]
The military has long struggled to find more effective ways to reach potential enlistees; for every new GI it signed up last year, the Army spent $24,500 on recruitment. (In contrast, four-year colleges spend an average of $2,000 per incoming student.) Recruiters hit pay dirt in 2002, when then-Rep. (now Sen.) David Vitter (R-La.) slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires high schools to give recruiters the names and contact details of all juniors and seniors. Schools that fail to comply risk losing their NCLB funding. This little-known regulation effectively transformed President George W. Bush’s signature education bill into the most aggressive military recruitment tool since the draft. Students may sign an opt-out form — but not all school districts let them know about it.
Yet NCLB is just the tip of the data iceberg. In 2005, privacy advocates discovered that the Pentagon had spent the past two years quietly amassing records from Selective Service, state DMVs, and data brokers to create a database of tens of millions of young adults and teens, some as young as 15. The massive data-mining project is overseen by the Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies program, whose website has described the database, which now holds 34 million names, as “arguably the largest repository of 16-25-year-old youth data in the country.” The JAMRS database is in turn run by Equifax, the credit reporting giant.
THE Armed Services, and the U.S. Army in particular, have a problem: they need bodies for the two wars and the coming ones, in a time when the benefits versus the costs of such duty seem to be dwindling. Nearly 10 years of bad news in the nebulous cloud of uncertainty once called the “Global War on Terror” and now known as the more sterile: “Overseas Counter Insurgency,” have given them this problem of lacking fodder; along with the fact that the U.S. military is an all-volunteer force. And in war times if the fight loses its “good war” image, the military tends to see decreases in their available pool. To remedy, the U.S. Armed Services have gone to culling personal and demographic intelligence on kids all over the nation via a rider on the Bush education bill: No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that requires high schools across the land to provide the names of all their juniors and seniors. (And the only way to avoid such information dispensing is through an obscure opt-out provision.)
And of course, the demographic collection does not stop there, it has to get a bit nefarious: the information is not just sent directly to recruiters, it is also mobilized into youth-oriented or parent-oriented marketing, with the help of the private sector giants like marketing firm Nielsen Claritas analyzing, credit company Equifax performing the data-mining and Mullen Advertising pitching to the parents; the would-be roadblocks to recruitment goals. Also a factor are the schools, themselves, who are negligent in understanding that they can or should opt-out of sharing kids’ vital information. The Los Angeles and Washington D.C. school districts have looked to thwart such mining by only providing this information by request.
There is also the other veritable recruiting wolf in sheep’s clothing, here, in the use of testing companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review through a 1.2 million dollar Pentagon funded Web site, March2success.com, that provides standardized test-taking tips, but also sends its data to recruiters — if the student fails to opt-out — and boasts 17,000 new users each month. Moreover, the Armed Services also have the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (A.S.V.A.B.) which once was expressly used for the purpose of testing the potential strengths of a prospective soldier, and has now been re-branded as a “career exploration test,” which logs youngsters’ career aspirations into a database along with demographic information into the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies program (J.A.M.R.S.).
How the Army and other branches use this information is important, since it gives recruiters a pronounced ability to sell the branch of service to a kid: from knowing their shopping patterns, their frequently visited Web sites, their abilities in the classroom; their ethnicity, socioeconomic situation and so forth. There is even a program that helps recruiters pitch during cold-calls, that can access information about potential recruits in a surrounding area; which includes even their recreational activities.
For a 17-year-old or 18-year-old, this could be a kiss of death. Since it becomes easier for their impressionable minds and limited experiences to be sold on “adventure” and “challenge,” amid the hyper-relevant and personal eliciting methods of an older distinguished soldier armed with information and experience selling military duty. The child, essentially, no matter how smart, is markedly disadvantaged going one-on-one against a sea of companies and interests all embodied in the recruiter in front of them, and since they are young and most likely highly inquisitive about the services, if the youngster is taking a call or meeting with a recruiter, they are now less-likely than ever before to weigh the negatives of service. That is, unless their parents can provide a strong, informed alternate voice that removes the recruiter gloss, and some of them have.
Read “A Few Good Kids?” at Mother Jones [Here]
Insignias from the Black World 04/16/2008
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Editorial, Global.comments closed
THE stories from growing up and the images from being young waiting with my mom for a flight crew truck — to see my father again following a prolonged absence — remain particularly vivid. One of the reasons I grew up drawing, and I am obsessive about certain kinds of imagery, is the result of the patches I saw on my father’s flight suit or his peers’ flight suits. At about 8-years-old, I was at the point of accurately identifying and knowing squadrons and what their insignias meant. Were they combat? Were they supply? Were they a bomber squadron or part of a nuclear response group? Were they special operations? I could tell you.
A story here about why a symbol is on a patch or what an elaborately engraved silver half-dollar sized pewter coin — always carried by members — implies affiliation to, are part of my own personal understanding of that world and my identity. The symbology of the Air Force and even the clandestine worlds in it, have always been strong in my life and at times, shows in my personal history and personality. (I wear my father’s first set of dog tags to this day, and I am mostly very private about all matters, details and relationships; keeping them to those closest in my life.)
And so the ancillary story of the shadowy movers and teams who exist in semi-public on bases and display their affiliations in code, are of general interest to me. As much as I have read, explanations I was given, or as many stories as I have overheard, often just outside of a garage with servicemen as they shot the breeze (and I shot a basketball), there are things that I will never be able to answer or know exactly. That is just the nature of the beast. There is a jargon that is purposefully vague and things that I saw like unmarked aircraft, or things that I came across through small newspaper blurbs about programs that were later declassified in full, but which I heard of through a kind of lore and knew of as “Habu,” or by way of growing up in Southern California in the shadow of Skunk Works, and just an hour from Palmdale, where many a secret plane was housed after test flights all over my region’s skies.
Recently a book by U.C. Berkeley doctoral student Trevor Paglen that was featured in both The New York Times and even The Colbert Report, has piqued my interest in partially deciphering that part of the world that I had such a curiosity for. I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me is a book that sheds light on the patches of the many Air Force “black” programs. While not at all conclusive, nor obviously confirmed by the Pentagon or the Air Force, Paglen’s ability and tenacity to collect these patches and this information through the arduous process of Freedom of Information Act requests is inspiring and a testament to democracy. The patches in the book not only display the seriousness of many of these missions that they are attached to, but also the self-deprecation and humor within the patches, themselves, belying a world of heavy consequences and high risks. The design of the book should also be commended.
Read the N.Y. Times’ article on the book [Here]
Watch a C-SPAN lecture by Trevor Paglen [Here]
Spy Satelite, Shootdown Footage 02/22/2008
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global.add a comment
LATE on the night of the 20th, news that the U.S. Navy shot down one of its obsolete satellites, carrying a tank of nearly 1,000 pounds of toxic, hydrazine propellant was reported. The primary purpose of the satellite’s destruction was the neutralization of the hydrazine tank. According to senior officials close to the mission, it was a complete success. Initially seen on C.N.N. and other news outlets was a computer generated mock-up of the event. Yesterday, actual video of the satellite’s hit and explosion, as it was blasted by an S3 missile just above the atmosphere, was released by the Department of Defense.
