Wampum

I wrote about the current BRAC round, and since Walter Reed has finally made the news, it might be useful to rethink the following:

Walter Reed is going to steal the sunlight from all the beds in Christendom, since care to vets actually has no military value, and Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake, San Francisco and Los Angeles were obviously poor choices to site a hospital.

Is centralization of military medical services really apolitical? Is it just efficiency in action? Just who is left standing who actually is advocating that men and women who've been wasted in the regime's ghastly mistakes not see the light of day in civilian and military medical facilities in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake, San Francisco and Los Angeles?

Posted by EBW at 11:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Donald Rumsfeld is pitching a novel idea to Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov -- making it impossible to know if a trident missile launches from one of 14 Ohio class SSBNs is conventionally armed with eight W88 (475 kt) warheads (Mark 5), or eight W76 (100 kt) warheads, or unconventionally armed with an as yet undisclosed munition (or MIRVed munition) equivalent to two, or three, MK84 (2,000) bombs, or half a BLU-82 ("daisy cutter").

Unit costs;
Submarine launched ballistic missile: $29.100,000 (6,000 lb payload)
Submarine launched cruise missile: $500,000 (1,000 lb payload)
Air delivered MK-84 with additional guidance: $25,000 (2,000 lb payload)

If the Red Player can induce the Blue Player to shed strategic assets, and acquire tactical assets that (a) can not be used against, or near, Red Player due to their indistinguishability at launch from strategic assets, and (b) increase the cost to Blue Player to engage tactical targets by three orders of magnitude, that's a win for Red Player.

Of course, where could 3 ton conventional explosive, with or without dense metal and case hardening penetration enhancements, be ballistically delivered without being identified as a strategic risk to Red Player? South America, Antactica, Africa, and of course, North America, but not Europe and Asia.

Its a god-send to Lockhead-Martin, for the Trident Program Life Extension.

It is also a tacit admission that some of the existing SSBN inventory should have been on the BRAC list last year. Here's a prior note: hit or miss.

Posted by EBW at 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In this moring's NYTimes has an amusing piece by Scott Shane. The reason that Donald Rumsfeld is right, and the handful of O6+ who've come out of the closet, but only after they are safely retired, are wrong, is because Rumsfeld is a civilian, and the O6+ covey are not.

The idea that civilian leaders, as representatives of the people, should have the ultimate say in how the country's military power is wielded dates to colonial resentment of British rule and is embedded in the Constitution.

Does the Constitution really say that? No.

Art. I, § 1 is:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Art. 1, § 8 is:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

And the War Powers themselves, enumerated in Art. 1, § 8, clauses 11, 12, 13, and 14 are:

11. To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

12. To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

13. To provide and maintain a Navy;

14. To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Those are the textual War Powers. It gets more complicated, but the NYT is using paper to unhang Donald, so I won't give up time that should be spent making brunch for the kids to discuss the inherent doctrine or the implied doctrine, and the Times isn't trying to make the case that McAurther should have relieved Truman, rather than the reverse, so nothing after the National Defense Act of 1916 exists in the Gray Lady's ConLaw universe this Sunday.

Art. II, § 2, reads in part:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Mr. Rumsfield has a constitutional duty to provide his opinion. His execution of that duty is unexceptional, even though his opinons are exceptional -- replace the Navy with gun boats, replace the institutional Army with situational forces, retaining the 1950 -- 1960 bomber/missile forces, and squeezing the standard armor force unit down to the 19 ton limit of the C-130, eliminating allied pre-conditions upon, and RoRo dependencies for, the articulation of force at a distance.

He's an idiot, but that presents no Constitional issue.

No, the Consitutional issue is that he is not a completely adequate substitute for the Senate and House of Representatives.

This is the point of my series on the current BRAC round. The problem of pork in the Defense portion of the Federal budget isn't really solved by transfering the Art. I, § 8, clause 11 appropriation authority to the SecDef. It is Congress, not the Executive, that decides if there are more carriers in the fleet, or less, if there are fewer MIRV'd launchers and packages to go on the launchers, or more, if the Army is funded to remain in Europe and Korea, or is funded to move to Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Persian Gulf. If service pay and veterans benefits are increassed, or the money dumped into the boardrooms of the Iron Triangle, in the CA-50 and its cognates -- the DefTek PAC plantations.

Donald Rumsfeld is a civilian, but he's the head of a department of the Executive Branch, a sucessor to the office created by George Washington, and first held by Sec. of War Knox. He's not the "civilian leaders" who "represents the people" and who "should have the ultimate say" on anything, outside the execution of his department. He's a government employee.

Now the Rubber Stamp Congress does, for the most part, with some exceptions in the current BRAC round recommendations for base closures and realignments, do just what they're told, but Congress has the right to be as credulous as a three year old impatiently waiting on brunch.

And that is who is "right" because they are civilians, when in disagreement a covey of O6+, or the head of the military department, who is a civilian employee of the Executive Branch, because they are "military".

And if your eye runs down past the fourteenth clause of the eight section of the first article of the document the NYTimes writer cited to defend Donald Rumsfeld from a covey of disarmed quail, the fifteenth could poke your eye out. It is the sharpest stick in the bundle. Absent riot, insurrection or invasion, any State may recall its Guard from Donald Rumsfeld's grand adventure.

Which is why I'm working my ass off to get Chris Miller competitive with John Baldacci in the June primary in Maine. I'd like just one State to have an executive underwhelmed by the Beltway's badly dated theory of global uber-importance, and the DeLay Riot co-conspirators and the Patriotic Cult. Then we could work on a second.

Now off to the kitchen.

Posted by EBW at 07:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Reposted from April 22, 2005, BRAC background.]

Everyone who reads political blogs on the left hand side of the dial has some idea that Paul Wolfowitz was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. Who Gordon England is and what job he's currently doing is more a trivial pursuits, sailor edition, than part of the generic journo-blogo repitoire of political literacy.

But he is interesting and he is the nominee for Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. From his biobraphy at SECNAV

Prior to joining the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. England served as executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation from 1997 until 2001. In that position he was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation: Information Systems and International. Previously, he served as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company (later Lockheed), president of General Dynamics Land Systems Company and as the principal of a mergers and acquisition consulting company.

Yesterday's piece on the Base Closure and Reallignment Commission made the point that at least two of the uniformed services -- the Air Force and the Navy, are institutions lacking strategic missions. The problem for the Air Force goes even deeper than the end of parity with the Soviets, but I haven't yet written the piece on strategic bombing of electrical infrastructure (which I expect only VJ will read anyway, but writing is for writing), so I'll leave the strategic (non-nuclear) bombing value proposition as an assumed truth.

He made news recently by putting his mark on a bit of procurement policy paper approving the closure of General Dynamics' yard in Maine, making the economic vaporware arguement that the Navy would save $300 mil per unit if all future Destroyers were built at the Litton Industry's yard in Mississippi. The DD(X) procurements are currently split, one hull in three at the Maine yard (Bath Iron Works), two hulls in three at the Mississippi yard (Ingalls at Pascagoula). Fortunately for the Republican majority in the Senate, and several thousand Mainers, and possibly most tax payers if single-source and non-competitive government contracts is a bigger failure of process than 300 million hypothetical "economies of scale and efficiency saved" green stamps in a system that loses billions of dollars on well-known bogosities every year, someone at the OSD, or more likely, someone in politics who cares about the Republican majority in the Senate, scotched Gordon England's clever plan.

But that's ordinary administrative venality, playing with pretend money and sacking an entire town somewhere "out there" in fly-over land. There's worse.

As Secretary of the Navy England should have been figuring how to de-couple the Navy from an obsoleted or vastly down-scaled mission -- being the third leg of America's Strategic Nuclear Deterrence. There's not a lot left to deter, whether what's being "deterred" is run out of Moscow or Beijing. Getting at least half of the SSBN fleet off the operational budget and onto a lower cost maintenance and life-extended budget, and getting more than two crew shifts per boat to maintain manpower should have been his first priority. Instead, like several SECNAVs before him, he's left the SSN and SSBN fleets drift downward with few accelerated retirements. In effect, the only "signal" from the Navy's portion of the "deterence trident" that the Soviet Union, and China, no longer present a credible threat of initiating an intercontinental nuclear exchange, is the fact that no new SSBNs are entering the fleet. Everything is riding down its 30 year plus or minus life-time operating cost curve, mostly undisturbed by policy oversight.

It is the SECNAV's job to notice things like that.

However, if the SECDEF is keen to transform the Army from a stable institution composed of stable commands in Europe and Korea, into an unstable institution composed of ad hoc situational commands, anywhere on a moment's notice, the "agile spear", and the SECNAV's loyalties are ... not to the Navy's permanent mission of bi-coastal blue water defense, then the SECNAV's job is replacing the blue water navy with a brown water navy -- one Rumsfeld can take with him into the littoral combat sphere of operations.

There are some real problems with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. First, it assumes that the unfortunate recipients of the brown water navy's attentions lack the means to pot shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats shooting up their shores. Its 100 kg of commodity explosives, a commodity rocket moter, and a guidance system of choice, from joy-stick and wireline to active sensors and integrated, or standoff illuminators. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of surface-to-surface artillary capability in the littoral combat zone as an article of faith is not the only problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. Not only must the natives be passive recipients of the attentions of the brown water navy, but they must lack the means deny use of the littoral zone to vessels other than those shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats. Its 1,000 kg of commodity explosives or a dozen commodity RPGs, a commodity fast boat, from Zodiac inflatables to Cigarette boats, and a guidance system of choice, from hand-on-wheel to auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of water-born denial capability in the littoral zone of the area of operations, the inability to repeat the War of the Tankers as an article of faith, is not the last problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. These two articles of faith posit littoral combat operations without cause. I'm getting tired of beating around the bush. The "brown water" isn't the Orinocco or the Amazon, its the coast of West Asia, the Persian and Arab and Omani Gulfs.

The littoral combat was for the control of indefensible oil embarcation points, and associated sealift landings for the logistical tail of the on-shore portion of the operation, and the unrestricted transit to and from those indefensible oil embarcation points and sealift landings, and the "reach back" to the ports where forces were "surged out" from, and where tankers and containerships go to and come from to sustain the purpose of the original US vs Other State military conflict.

The last article of faith of the littoral combat sphere of operations theory is that no other blue water navy, either regional or global in nature, will engage the brown water navy in blue water, or otherwise compromise the strategic exercise of sea power confined to brown waters.

With those three articles of faith, the Litorial Combat Ship (LCS) program at the expense off the Next Generation Destroyer (DD(X)) program isn't criminally insane, If those articles of faith are just someone's wishful thinking, and there is a lot of that in the current crop of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet political appointees in the Pentagon, then its a trillion-dollar fiasco, as if it was the Wasp, Hornet and Lexington that went down on December 7th, 1941, leaving the US to fight out the rest of the Pacific naval war with the Arizona, the Idaho, and the California -- ships of the line circa 1914.

That's why Rumsfeld wants England bumped up from SECNAV to DSECDEF. Rumsfeld has a lot more "modernizing" to do. He's got the whole dump-the-armor-for-Intel for the Army program to sell to Congress, That's "Intel" as in "Intelligence" and "Intel" as in laptops-as-a-substitute-for-armor. He needs someone who has the "agile spear" vision, and England appears to have that, and not a lot else. Except for one little detail.

The top three corporations in the defense industry account for 25 cents out of every defense budget dollar, and as MB pointed out last December 7th, is lobbying to both drive the defense budget up to 4% of GNP, and to capture as much of the Defense budget as it can for high margin "missile defense" and exotic and/or space-based or space-expoloiting products, where those top three capture much more than 25 cents on every dollar.

Gordon England is both from GD, one of the big three, he's also from the zoomie / exotics / tech side of GD. SECNAV and stepping on the toes of the black shoes in the fleets was just a step up to the big-time -- SECDEF after SECDEF.

Not my choice for a senior staffer at the OSD, but then again, I count how many attack boats India's got or is buying off the Russians, and how many attack boats the PRC is on-schedule for, all of these are blue water sea-denial assets, and tastes vary.

Posted by EBW at 10:42 PM | Permalink

Duke Cunningham resigned yesterday after pleading guilty to income tax evasion and conspiracy charges. His committee assignments were Appropriations and Permanent Select on Intelligence. He's held the district since 1990, and planned to retire at the end of the 109th Congress.

In the 2004 race he raised $832,173. Francine Busby raised $235,925 and picked up 37% of the vote.
In the 2002 race he raised $796,250. Del Stewart raised $16,093 and picked up 32% of the vote.
In the 2000 race he raised $607,657. Jorge Luis Barraza raised $5,810 and picked up 30% of the vote.
In the 1998 race he raised $609,086, Daniel Kripke raised $103,462 and picked up 35% of the vote.

In the '04 race, just 20 contributors to the incumbent matched the challenger's total contributions (some rounding):

1. Lockheed Martin, Titan Corp and Peregrine Semiconductor Corp $15,000 each


2. Cubic Corp, MZM Inc, General Dynamics $11,500 each


3. Qualcomm, Aircraft Owners & Pilots Assn, American Maritime Officers, General Atomics, National Assn of Realtors, National Beer Wholesalers Assn, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SBC Communications, Science Applications International Corp, L-3 Communications, United Defense $10,000 each


4. Alliant Techsystems, Digital Systems Resources $8,500 each

Why is this important?

Democrats have to find ways to run against testosterone. They have to find ways to message effectively that women, as well as men, can think correctly about modern warfare, from its industrial base to its warfighting face. They have to find ways to message that Republicans have not been thinking correctly about modern warfare, and that Republicans have not been thinking correctly about the relationship of the Congress and the military. Modulo the half-million dollars that Francine has to raise to be competitive, and the campaign that her CM has to execute to be competitive, and the paid and unpaid workers that need to volunteer and be coordinated effectively to be competitive, Francine's campaign is an opportunity to run a Women and Democrats campaign for a military that is not a high-tech boondoggle, and isn't fragile, unstable, shallow, exhausted, and stuck in Iraq.

Voters vote against their material interests all the time for ideological reasons. Given a choice between defense of the Constitution, the Republic, and the Military, or defense of the bottom lines of ten to twenty San Diego area defense contractors, the incumbant contributions may not buy mindshare.

Here are the two testosterone-related points from Francine's current position papers.

Honesty About Iraq
Francine believes it is the responsibility of the President and Congress to develop a clear exit strategy that works to restore basic security and subsequently remove our troops. She believes that the Iraq War was a distraction from the very serious threat of terrorism. She also believes that honoring soldiers and veterans is the moral obligation of Congress.

Defeating Terrorism
Francine Busby believes that terrorism is the most serious threat to the security of American citizens and in Congress she is committed to eliminating terrorists wherever they are. She believes that the War on Terrorism has been hindered by too many Washington politicians and not enough military experts involved in the decision-making process. She also supports de-politicizing homeland security so that areas at the greatest risk for attack are receiving the most funding.

"Higher pay" is an alternative for "honoring", and given a fixed budgetary pie, leads to a direct attack on the contributions she is running against. Wes Clark articulated this theme in his run between Oct. '03 and March '04, and it was effective, in so far as Clark messaged on military reform.

"Trafficing in weapons" is an alternative to "terrorism" as "the most serious threat", and again, given a fixed budgetary pie, leads to a direct attack on the contributions she is running against. Al Gore worked the issue as Vice President, working out the agreement with Vladimir Putin to end arms, and reactor sales to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and John Kerry messaged on "loose nukes" during the '04 general election debates. Kerry did better than Bush in the debates, and in the key demographics (see MB's posts on women and votes), "loose nukes" did much better than "terrorism".

"Arresting" is an alternative to "eliminating" as the policy towards non-state actors pursuing criminal conspiracies. Law enforcement also funds high-tech, and leads to better long-term results than arbitrary summary executions. The point of killing people after all is to weaken or end criminal conspiracies, so it matters if the key conspirators are missed. Over 500 al Qaeda cadres were bagged by Iran in the Winter of 2001-2002, and another group of senior al Qaeda cadres, up to the General Staff equivalents in that organization, were bagged by Iran in the Spring of 2002. Working the InterPol system, working with Iran, with Europe, with Russia, with China, interrogating before execution, again, given a fixed budgetary pie, leads to a direct attack on the contributions she is running against. Al Gore messaged on this after 9/11. Birchers message against treaties, and Republicans message on instant gratification, but OBL is still a free man, and in all the corpses produced since military operations began, we know very, very little about the inner structure of this enemy, even with torture.

"Military policy" is a broader policy framework alternative to the narrow and dubious "War on Terrorism", and giving the retirement door to the defense industry for very senior officers, and the revolving door between the defense industry and the Special Executive Service civilian jobs in the Pentagon, "Congressional oversight" is an alternative to "too many Washington politicians and not enough military experts involved in the decision-making process".

I'm not going to repeat all my Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) posts, but Duncan Hunter, who represents the eastern San Diego metro area, went to bat to keep the Atlantic submarine fleet intact, objecting to the proposed closures of the Groton base and Portsmouth yard. Running with the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee on the issues of base closure and future force structure leads to a direct attack on the contributions she is running against.

At present Francine is running a non-confrontational message on the core issues of the contributions she is running against. She's not going to get them to reform just by asking, she has to beat them, or find some means to get to 51 leaving the male gender split unengaged. I'm in my pajamas, so I guess I can send her a link to this post.

Posted by EBW at 08:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm looking at the Force Structure Plan and there are some sentences that would do well in a creative writing class, but don't have a lot to do with rational defense policy.

It isn't a long document, and it is the policy document that any critic, Congressional or otherwise, of any element of the current round of proposed closures and realignments, must point to one way or another. In the spirit of Juan Cole's one-sided debates with George Bush, I'll pull on these wayward ... er ... threads.

Strategy and Force Development (verbiage about resolve and commitment, allies and dangerous capabilities, and the President) ... forces must have the ability to defeat any adversary at the time, place, and in the manner of US choosing.

That "any adversary", without recourse to alliances and alllies is over the top. Gulf II, Gulf I, Vietnam, Korea, Europe and the Pacific (1941-1945), and Europe (1917-1918), were all conflicts in which the US did not risk war without alliances and alllies. Once those national military experiences are subtracted from the 20th century, what is left is Panama, Grenada, the Spanish American War and ... not a lot else. We'll have to come back to this, so on to the next quotable quote.

Transformation to a Capabilities-Based Approach: The purpose of transformation is to extend key advantages and reduce vulnerabilites. We are now in a long-term struggle against persistent, adaptive adversaries, and must transform to prevail.

If the intent is to refer to Mohammad Atta's gang of 19 suicides, they be dead. Wicked Dead. For everything else, from Bali to London, the adversaries (do note the plural) are neither persistent, nor are they particularly adaptive (compare, Viet Cong, IRA), and no transformation of the force structure, other than articulating police and intelligence forces elements instead of military force elements, is likely to have the slightest non-negative net effect.

Note Well: This transformation from the well-known to "capabilities-based" unknown motivates everything that follows, and presumes, without definition, what "capabilites" are, or aren't. However, it gets better.

Transformational change is not limited to operational forces. We also want to change long-standing business process within the Department to take advantage of information technology.

Which of the following is now obsoleted by this novel idea? The Johnson Subcommittee (1945),
the Department of Defense (1947), the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (1950), the Planning, Programming and Budget System (1962), the Financial Management Service (1974), the Defense Business Operating Fund (1992), the Clinger-Cohen Act (1996), the Defense Working Capital Fund (1997), the Defense Reform Initiative (1997), the Financial Management Modernization Program (7/2001), or any of the post-9/2001 management and procurement exercises?

Is "IT" ever going to make it inside the Pentagon???

IT has been inside the Pentagon since Big Mac introduced the PPBS in 1962. I'm not that surprised that its been overlooked by the current SecDef/OSD, and not at all surprised that "tak[ing] advantage of information technology" is being flogged on Congress critters and the rubes as the novelty that moots all prior knowlege.

The Traditional challenges para in Probable Threats to National Security is well written, and the writer makes the case for "maintenance of sufficient combat overmatch in key areas of traditional military competition". Combat overmatch is a reasonable policy goal (try the inverse, the perpetual sticky Republican Rant that buys the Armed Forces ... zippo), just so long as spending the adversaries into the ground ... just spends the adversaries into the ground, and doesn't cause significant and otherwise untasked and unrecoverable military industrial distortions, Ike's caution is as good or better today as it was January 17th, 1961.

However, if one needs to find "adversaries [] likely to exploit a host of irregular methods [] to erode U.S. influence, power, and national will over time", the Bush/Cheney/Rumsford/Frith/Perl/ clique should not be overlooked, particularly their penchant for torture and violation of the Geneva Convenions (all of them).

If negating "U.S. influence, power, and national will" translates as "ability to obtain and retain wartime allies" the adversaries currently holding Occupied Washington appear to be quite capable.

The War on Terrorism imparts an urgency to defense transformation; we must transform to win the war.

Here we have a domestic political message elevated to the status of doctrine. This is where every intelligent military reader should stop, and take a walk. Past one, or two bars if that helps clear the mind. Transformation, whatever that is, is a change from a doctrine to another. The motivation for a fundamental doctrinal change could be something fundamental like ... a fundamental change in the relationship between fire and maneuver, the changing nature of close air support, the compression of the sensor to shooter loop, or important coalition and jointness issues,

Anything less should not make it past the charm school's thesis adviser's desk.

On to asymetry, Ollie North's other claim to fame.

The Irregular challenges subsection slips "global security" in as an alternate formulation of "national security", and suggests that Che is still operating in Bolivia, or Africa, or Laos. Note 9/11 is described as "innovative". Condi Rice must have written that sentence.

Now I regret that I haven't written the follow-up to Ew! Pew Stinks, but it is worth pointing out that 66% of the so-called "intelligent" and "sophisticated" demographic will buy the next bit of tripe like teen age boys buy Paris Hilton, or DLC Dems bought Kerry's inevitability and electability but ... this really is crap and people who work on the problem know it is ... crap.

The interdependent nature of the [US national] infrastructure crests [sic] more vulnerability because attacks against one sector -- the electrical power grid for instance -- would impact other sectors as well. Parts of the defense-related critical infrastructure are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks, especially those that rely on commercial sector elements with multiple single points of failure.

There is a Democratic response to external threat, and it isn't a brittle egg shell perimeter defense, augmented by lawless, even insane random acting out. Domestic spending on incrementally resillient, modernized, efficient infrastructure, defense in depth, integrated into the civil economy, and support for the international law and treaty system. I'm still looking for a Democratic candidate who wants to run on defense, and peace.

The next para is simply insane:

The continuing illicit proliferation of WMD technology and experties makes contending with catastrophic challenges an enduring necessity. A single catastrophic attack against the United States is an unacceptable prospect. The strategic effect of such an attack transcends the mere economic and social costs. It represents a more fundamental, existential threat to our nation, our institutions, and our free society. Thus, new emphasis must be applied to capabilites that enable us to dissuade acquisition of catastrophic capabilities, deter their use, and finally, when necessary, defeat them prior to the posing direct threats to us and our partners.

The claim here is that one nuke, one package, is end-game. Look back at the photo. Translate that in your mind to manufacture of heavy airlift, to heavy maneuver, to ... all the way down to victory gardens. The claim is obviously false. One package is a tragedy on the scale of ... last week's earthquake in Kashmir, or last Boxing Day's Tsunami, or the Boxing Day before that's earthquake in Bam (Iran), or ...

The possibility of one, or more, or a lot more, packages being exchanged by nuclear-weapons states has been present for five decades. At no point has that greater absolute risk motivated the risk of attempting preemption. And "state actors" present a different profile to the targeteer than nebulous "non-state actors".

On to the coda:

Finally, at the direction of the President, we will defeat adversaries at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing -- setting the conditions for future security.

The unfortunate any adversary language is now fixed, but Congress, the author of the Articles of War, the sole Constitutional entity capable of bringing a State of War into being, and non-being, are conspicuously absent, and failing to mention the Laws of Nations and the Laws of War at this point in the drill is ... simply torture.

Now, where are we going with all this verbal crap? The next BRAC post has the numbers.

Google Key: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 05:54 PM | Permalink

Yesterday's vote by the BRAC Commissioners saved a lot of jobs in New Hampshire/Maine and Connecticut -- the Portsmouth Yard on Seavey Island and the Groton Base adjacent to the Electric Boat Works were on the SecNav/SecDef to-close list -- an important part of converting the Navy from a blue water diplomatic asset into a brown water post-diplomatic asset, in essence, the Saudi Coast Guard.

Rescored, that is 2 US (remember that Country?) bases saved, and 2 NeoCon (yup, that _other_ Country) bases closed. Color that a win for the US that was prior to the infestation of the 9-11 cicadias.

I'm pleased with the outcome.

Posted by EBW at 01:08 PM | Permalink

It just came out that the Brunswick NAS is now on the "close" rather than the "realign" part of the 2005 BRAC.

John Baldacci could bring this to a screaching halt by simply ordering the Maine National Guard home, simultaniously making the Portsmouth Yard and Brunswick NAS "no go" areas for the BRAC Commissioners, and making himself the goto candidate for the next primary cycle, while polishing off all his domestic (budget) problems in Augusta for the '06 cycle.

I wonder who's attempting to put together a competitive Green campaign. Johnathan Carter did well above 5% on Single Payer. I suspect running on a "bring the Maine Guard back to Maine" plank would make the 5% bogie.

Google key: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 07:54 PM | Permalink

Just before Memorial Day Peter Daou excitedly sent me mail about a project he'd gotten involved with, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on immediate actions to address high-risk situations involving nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. [It] is co-chaired by CNN founder Ted Turner and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. Warren Buffett serves as Advisor to the Board of Directors. He went on to push a video they'd put together, which is now on quite a few sidebars.

I looked at the scenario in the blurb and sent Peter a note (extended area). My thoughts about this project were encoded in Indian politeness in the last line. I'm glad these folks are interested in the prevention of use of nuclear weapons, but I'd prefer they helped Dr. Helen Caldicott and WISE and the Federation of American Scientists and ... before starting yet another high-profile inside-the-beltway operation. Stopping the Nuclear Nutmen with warm milk, stale grahm crackers and library paste, backed up by simply getting arrested, was wicked hard back during the Reagan/Bush administrations. It would have helped to have had money. Blowing what money there is on suits because the money came from suits and suits are most comfortable when surrounded by suits isn't an interesting proposition -- except for suits and wannasuits.

The US has about 20,000 fission and fission-fusion devices, and Russia has a slightly larger inventory of devices, and both states have large stockpiles of fissiles. Absent Mutual Assured Distruction of symmetric weapons inventoried states, there isn't a lot that can be said in favor of retention of these device inventories, or their primary historic delivery systems. NB that the current BRAC round does not define "military necessity or utility" in a nuclear weapons capacity context, and that the bases identified by the current SecDef (and war criminal) for closure or re-alignment map much more closely to the Red/Blue political division of the United States than to obsoleted nuclear weapons capacities -- the bombers, missile fields and boomers are budgetary untouchables.

One can, like Geo. Bush in a debate during the last cycle, and in rhetoric before and since, define the risk of fission and fission-fusion weapons as the risk that an actor will acquire one device and deploy it in a city, as the US did in Hirshima and Nagasaki, and allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including war against ... Iran.

One can, like John Kerry in the same debate during the last cycle, and in rhetoric before and since, define the risk of fission and fission-fusion weapons as the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament.

Unfortunately, the scenario in the video now in mass distribution by the project Peter is associated with is much, much closer to the first risk model than the second, and as a political message and teaching/motivating vehicle, tends to support the Bush resource allocation plan. Up to and including ...

So, sixty years to the day after Trinity, with weapons inventories of nearly 60,000 devices between the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Isreal, Pakistan and India, and enough weapons-grade fissiles in stockpile to double that on demand, and the NPT itself now junk, destroyed by the Bush regime's insistance upon Iran as a nacent weapons state, rather than upon inventory reduction, and the Nuclear Nutmen now in control (again) of the US and Russian and Chinese and Japanese and French and Indian and ... energy policies, it is Happy Birthday Everybody! There is cake and soda and hats and party favors for everyone!!

Continue reading "Happy Birthday to You and You and You and You" »

Posted by EBW at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman are trying to pry data out of Secretary Rumsford's black bag. Either they think they can derail this BRAC round on procedural grounds -- no data ergo no action, or they think they can deflect the bullet by charm -- turn one of the "military value" variables and some other mole is whacked. They faxed a subpoena over to the SecDef's offices today.

Neither of them are prepared to point out that the Executive Branch does not appropriate. Should the Executive Branch choose to paint everything pink, it may, but it may not choose to double every other line in the appropriations, and zero out those between. The Executive Branch may not tranform the Navy into the Persian Gulf Yacht Club without Congressional consent, nor may it fund the land-based nuclear missile forces, the sea-based nuclear missile forces, and the nuclear bomber forces without Congressional consent, just as it may not send the Army on a snipe hunt without Congressional consent.

To win this one for the New England delegation, they're going to have to stop providing Congressional consent, and Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman both make a point of providing their consent, so its not likely to get down to beanballs and spikes.

Posted by EBW at 09:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 18:50:31 -0000
To:
From: "Cook, Robert, CIV, WSO-BRAC" Robert.Cook@wso.whs.mil
Subject: BRAC Commission

Return-Path: Robert.Cook@wso.whs.mil
Delivery-Date: Thu Jun 2 19:21:40 2005
Return-Path:
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72)

part 2 text/plain 529
Press to show content...

I have received your resume and appreciate your taking the time to send it.

Unfortunately all of our positions are currently filled; however, I am
keeping a list of candidates with skill sets we could use in the event a
position becomes open. Your resume is part of that list.

I'm sorry I couldn't provide a job offer, but do thank you for your interest
in the BRAC process.

Bob Cook
Bob Cook
Deputy Director, Review and Analysis
Base Closure and Realignment Commission
2521 Clark Street, Suite 600
Arlington, VA 22202

Posted by EBW at 10:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Indian Navy is opened a deep-water port at Karwar Binaga Bay, south of Goa. Far from Pakistan, close to the Maldives, and on the Arabian Sea. INS Kadamba will be the biggest naval base east of the Suez. Meanwhile, the US is turning blue water brown ...

D. BRAC Excess Property Environmental Considerations

Pollution is the norm. First procedural step is creating a BRAC Cleanup Team (BCT), consisting of the site's BRAC Environmental Coordinator and reps from the Federal EPA regional office and State(s) environmental agencies. The BCT works up a Base Cleanup Plan (BCP) and implements the BCP for the site, sharing info with the LRA and matching cleanup to planned use. A Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) must be established, composed of agency and community representatives [ebw: clarify] to ensure enviro remediation meets community expectations [ebw: clarify].

The BEC reviews the base land holdings and determins whether or not parcels are contaminated as part of the base's Environmental Baseline Survey (EBS). The determination of uncontaminated must be complete no later than 18 months after the date of approval of base closure using the Community Environmental Response Facilitation Act (CERFA) criteria to determin whether a property is eligible for a Finding of Suitability to Transfer (FOST). With some exceptions a parcel cannot be conveyed by deed unless the Military Department makes a FOST.

In addition to the site-specific determinations of land contamination, the Military Department is required to prepare NEPA documentation analyzing the environmental consequences of land disposal actions and consideration of alternatives. The NEPA analysis must be completed no later than 12 months after the LRA submits its adopted base redevelopment plan. The NEPA analysis will either result in an Environmental Assessment (EA) and Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) or in an EA that identifies the need for an Evnironmental Impact Statement (EIS) and a corresponding Record of Decision (ROD).

Exception: Federal to Federal (F2F) transfers may take place prior to the completion of remediation required under the Comprehensive Environmental Reposnse, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), but specific reporting of hazardous substances and required remediation and certification of no polychlorinated biphenyl must be part of the NOA. F2F transfers may take place prior to completion of the NEPA process. Indian Tribes acquiring BRAC property through a F2F excess property transfer must be aware of the status of environmental conditions documentation by the transfering Military Department.

II. The Fee-to-Trust Process Should be Revised to Accommodate BRAC Property Transfers.

This section is pretty well known to FIL practitioners. The point is that there is duplication of process steps, and Mescalero Apache should guide the BIA in revising BIA Fee-to-Trust process for real property originating under the BRAC process, and there should be a "Fast-Track BRAC" process under the revised sec. 151 BIA process.

In summary, a "Fast-Track BRAC" process should:

• eliminate a 30 day comment period for consultation with state and local governments as the LRA has been involved already and no issues of tax loss or jurisdictional problems areise because it is a Federal-to-Federal transfer,


• eliminate requirements for potential land use or environmental problem documentation as these issues are considered in the BIA land application, considered by the Military Department and the LRA prior to transfer, and the BRAC environmental documentation should exceed the Level I/NEPA doc req. of 25 C.F.R. sec. 151.10(h),
  
• eliminate the requirement for consideration of "tribal need" for the property because the BIA has already substantiated that need to the Military Department and the OMB in the excess acquisition process,


• eliminate the heightened scrutiny for "business purposes" (25 C.F.R. sec 151.11(c)), since the BRAC policy goal is economic redevelopment and not conditioned upon non-tribal applicats.

This concludes "Fishing in BRACish waters". Tribes, start your typewriters!!!

Google key: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 05:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Lieberman has a piece in the op-ed page of the New York Post. He makes three points, fictional savings being the second. His first and third are "bad military policy" and "cripple an industry and workforce vital to our national defense and manufacturing competitiveness." Unfortunately, at least from my perspective, he didn't dot the eye or cross the tee of "bad military policy". He offered a "fast route to polar ice and the privotal Pacific" as a rational to keep the base, which Guam, Pearl and Bremerton beat, rather than a critique of downsizing the blue water fleet, submarines included, to pay for plusing up the brown water fleet, and abandonment of technical dominance in undersea warfare for lower cost stagnation, and abandonment of the North Atlantic sea lanes and engagement in Europe. Again, from my perspective, he failed to counter-attack, and is giving the Air Force a free ride to play at missile defense, warm holes in the ground, and make over-night runs from the mid-west to the mid-east to drop 18-wheeler-equivalents of drive-by shootings.

The NYTimes has a people-and-process story, which is fairly lame reporting after a week of BRAC hearing. To my non-credit I haven't had time to read the hearing testimony, then again, I'm not making an literal or figurative dime off of the BRAC, and those that are can drink to their success. The NYT piece is here.

I'll continue the Fishing in BRAC-ish Waters installments, then I'll stop bloging about defense policy. Its like bloging on Ashcroft and Ridge, minus an opposition.

Google key: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 11:09 AM | Permalink

3. Rights of Tribes to Acquire Federal Excess Property

The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDEAA) gives tribes the right to assume funds and responsibility for operation and management of programs provided by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to Indians and Alaskan Natives. Tribes can access these funds and responsibilities under two statutory schemes in the Act: self-determination contracting under Title I and self-governance compacting under Titles III and IV.

Both give tribes the right to acquire excess and surplus property from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Indian Health Service (IHS) and the General Services Administration (GSA). The general statutory authority in the ISDEAA is set out in Section 105(f) of Title I, which covers both self-determination and self-governance. Section 105(f)(2) applies if the property at issues is BIA or IHS excess property, and 105(f)(3) if it is excess or surplus government property of other agencies.

A request for BIA or IHS property must state how the property is intended for use in connection with an ISDEAA contract, while a request for other government excess or surplus property need only state how the property is appropriate for use for a purpose for which ISDEAA contracts are authorized. Finally, the secretary (DOI or DHHS) retains the right to unilaterally reacquire BIA or IHS exess property transfered to a tribe in certain circumstances, including contract retrocession, reassumption, termination or expiration, but has no right to reacquire excess or surplus property of other agencies.

4. BIA Policy on BRAC Excess Property Acquisitions

Two guidance documents: "Procedures for Obtaining Department of Defense Properties Including Base Closure and Ralignment Properties (1998)" and "Justification Required for Requesting a Transfer Without Reimbursement". These are "BIA Procedures" and "BIA Justification" hereinafter. [Requested from Olympia Snowe's office, via Cheryl Leaman.] These two BIA guidance docs are in addition to general regulations governing excess and surplus property acquisition (25 C.F.R. part 900, subpart I, sec. 900.85-107).

Step 1: Screening, either of two criteria sufficient: (a) Area Director reviews the NOA to determine if the BIA or a party entering into a self-determination or self-governance contract in the AD's jurisdiction has a requirement for the DOD excess property, or (b) if the excess real property is located with the boundaries of a federally-recognized Indian reservation, there may be authority to acquire the property under 40 U.S.C. sec 483(a)(2) (1998).

Step 2: Assuming either criteria is met, the AD schedules a meeting with the Area Office (AO) deparments (facilities, environment, contracting and grants, budget, realty) and the party or tribe making a self-determination or self-governance contract. The AO then requests pertinent information about the site (maps, environmental docs, etc) from the DOD and conducts a site visit.

Step 3: The AO provides an acquisition recommendation to the Deputy Commissioner of Indian Affairs (DCIA). If the BIA decides to acquire the real property [ebw: details of decision making and makers absent, see 30 ticktock], the DCIA must send a LOI to the responsible Military Department within the timelines (30 days from the NOA date of issue). Following the issuance of the DCIA's LOI, the AO begins preparing the acquisition application, due no later than 60 days from the NOA date of issue.

Justification criteria:

• AP's purpose for the acquisition,


• Authority and funding source for the acquisition. If the BIA seeks to acquire w/o reimbursement, it must include the congressional authorization for the transfer or a letter requesting exception from the reimbursement requirement to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with an endorsement by the Secretary of the Interior and an explanation of how the exception will further program objectives,


• if a P.L. 93-638 (self-determination or self-governance) contract is the basis for the acquisition, the contract number and how the property will further the contract's objectives,


• Proposed use and zoning, physical properties, and environmental/cultural characteristics of the property,


• Whether significant changes will be made, and if so, whether funding exists to make those changes.

5. IHS Policy on BRAC Excess Property Acquisitions

Follow the BIA policy. HHS will transfer title to the DOI so that the BIA policy applies.

Tomorrow, more Fishing BRAC-ish Waters.

Posted by EBW at 02:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

from The Note:

The Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson wraps the first day of the BRAC hearings, during which members of the commission asked defense officials how the base closings would affect National Guard and reserve recruiting and retention, and whether the plan to close 62 major bases is premature because it comes before the completion of the Pentagon's quadrennial review of strategy and the look at military transportation capabilities. LINK.

John Hendren of the Los Angeles Times writes that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged the panel not to mess with the Pentagon's recommendations. LINK.

Jerry Miller of the Manchester Union Leader describes how Maine and New Hampshire officials banded together yesterday with Portsmouth Naval Shipyard employees, beseeching BRAC to negate the Pentagon's recommendation of closure. LINK.

How they (two congressional delegations) plan to make an effective case without making the case that Rumsfeld's permanent War Against the Rull (see the extended for that detour in sense and sensibilities) is (a) hollowing out the Army (active and reserve components) and (b) turning the Fleet from an instrument of policy into the Saudi coast guard, is a head-into-lamppost. To make that case several of them will have to conspire to strangle the current regime's Monk Ratsputin, or die by the Union Leader.

Continue reading "Brick-a-BRAC" »

Posted by EBW at 10:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Notes from Strommer and Jacobson

BRAC 88, BRAC 91, BRAC 93 and BRAC 95, also BRIM (Base Reuse Implementation Manual (1997)

Authorizing legislation amended several times for social, economic and environmental goals, but not yet for Indian land claims.

Two levels available to tribes seeking to acquire BRAC real property: excess (federal agency) and surplus (general public). Different acquisition regulations and standards apply to each.

Tribes may retain title to BRAC real property in trust or fee simple status. Different regulations and standards apply to each.

Scope of Strommer and Jacobson: excess property transfers and trust land acquisition.
I.   overview of BRAC process
II.  overview of fee-to-trust BIA process
III. interaction of BRAC and BIA processes

Part I. Overview of Base Closure Process
The BRAC process is aimed at achieving tangible economic benefits for local communities.

A. Base Selection
The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 (DBRAC) established a Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission (Commission).

The SecDef forwards recommendations to the Commission, after review the Commission forwards them to the President for approval or disaproval, summarized in a report to Congress. Congress then considers the report under very specific guidelines [ebw: specify] and decides whether to authorize the SecDef, through legislation, to carry out base closure activities at specific sites.

B. Base-Wide Reuse Planning
An on-site Base Transition Coordinator (BTC) is assigned for each selected for closure base.

A Local Redevelopment Authority (LRA) is created through consultation between the military and local government and other interested parties [ebw: specify lg and oip]. The LRA may be funded by the DOD Office of Economic Adjustment (OEA). LRA responsibilities: (primary) create a comprehensive redevelopment plan (plan) and (secondary) identify interested parties in base real property, holding public meetings and identify local needs, examin its own interest in acquiring base property, considering environmental remediation, guiding land use planning. LRA submits the plan to the DOD via Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The plan is a roadmap for the Military Department's disposal decisions. Finally, the Military Department's environmental analysis, including NEPA documentation, takes into account the LRA's plan, which in turn takes into account the environmental condition of the base.

The Military Department, the BTC, and the LRA work closely together during this phase.
Military Department responsibilities: identify and communicate to other federal agencies base property surplus to the DOD's needs, identify  base property surplus to the federal government's needs, inventory personal propertyand consult with the LRA on its reuse, creating a BRAC Cleanup Team (BCT) to conduct all environmental documentation and remediation efforts, conduct NEPA analysi (natural and cultural resource impacts), and an environmental baseline survey (EBS) to identify uncontaminated base property, provide copies of the environmental analyses to the LRA and assist the LRA.

Indian Tribes should be involved in the creation of, and seek to be a part of, the LRA (supported by DOD published policy, Department of Defense Native American Policy, 1998), for surplus property. The LRA largely guides the disposal process, but the Military Department has the ultimate authority for making all disposal decisions.

C. Excess Property Acquisition
Methods available to dispose of BRAC real property

1. federal agency excess property transfers,


2. public purpose benefit conveyances,


3. homeless assistance conveyances,


4. negotiated sales,


5. advertised public sales,


6. Economic Development Conveyances (ECDs),


7. conveyances for the cost of environmental remediation,


8. depository instutition facilities, and


9. leaseback conveyances.

Indian Tribes have the unique ability to step into the shoes of a federal agency and acquire BRAC real property as federal excess property, putting Tribes into a priority position vis a vis all other claims.

1. General Requirements for Tribal Acquisition of BRAC Real Property as Surplus Property

Straightforward. After the Military Department completes all disposal decisions at the excess (federal agency) level, the LRA is primary, modulo the authority of the Military Department to overrule the LRA. The Tribe must respond to the LRA's solicitation of "notices of interest" on the same basis as other parties, and presumably must pay for the property on the same basis as other parties. The LRA would then consider the Tribe's request in its (the LRA's) formulation of the comprehensive redevelopment plan. Following the completion of the plan, the Military Department completes the final EIS, resolves disputes for property and generally disposes of property in line with the LRA's plan.

2. General Requirements for Tribal Acquisition of BRAC Real Property as Excess Federal Property

The Military Department is required to notice other DOD components and federal agencies that property may be available when the Executive recommends to the Congress a base for closure or realignment. Within a week after Congress approves the closure the Military Department must issue a Notice of Availability (NOA) to other DOD components and federal agencies.

Within 30 days of the NOA, an interested federal agency must provide to the Military Department a written expression of interest in the buildings or property, including its intended use for the property and its corresponding requirements for the property. Within 60 days of the NOA, an interested federal agency must submit an application to the Military Department.

The BRIM sets out the application elements:

• GSA Form 1334 or DD Form 1354


• Statement that the request does not establish a new program (budget neutral),


• Statement that the requestor has reviewed its real property holdings and cannot satisfy its requirements with existing property,


• Statement that the requested property would provide greater long-term economic benefits than acquisition of a new facility or other property,


• Statement that the program for which the property is requested has long-term viability,


• Statement that the design, layout, geographic location, age, state of repair, and expected maintenance costs of the requested property clearly, demonstrate that the transfer will prove more economical over a sustained period of time than acquiring a new facility,


• Statement that the size and location of the property requested is consistent with the actual requirement of the requesting agency,


• Statement that the fair-market-value reimbursement fo the Military Department will be made within two years of the initial request for the property, unless this obligation is waived by the OMB and the SecDef or a statute provides for a non-reimbursable tranfer, and


• Statement that the requestor agrees to accept the care and custody costs for the property on the date the property is available for transfer.

• The requirement upon which the request is based is both valid and appropriate,


• The proposed federal use is consistent with the highest and best use of the property,


• The requested transfer will not have an adverse impact on the transfer of any remaining portion of the base,


• The proposed transfer will not establish a new program of substantially increase the level of an Agency's existing programs,


• The application offers fair market value for the property unless waived (i.e., through the OMB process),


• The proposed transfer address applicable environmental responsibilities to the satisfaction of the Military Department,


• The proposed transfer is in the best interest of the Federal Government.

Tomorrow, more Fishing BRAC-ish Waters.

Posted by EBW at 11:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The ad that People for the American Way made for the Maine (and New Hampshire!) broadcast media market can be seen here (.mov format).

The ad messages around protection of the minority, which polls 3 x MoE above the "extremist judges" message and 4.5 x MoE above the generic preservation message. Details on message and polling data are in Maine Poll on the Filibuster, posted April 14th.

Also coming to the Maine (and therefore New Hampshire broadcast media market) is John Edwards, to help the MDP Senate and House caucuses. Maybe he'll stay out of Portland (city of factions) and just work the media market, and the Kittery-Sanford, Lewiston, Bath-Brunswick, and Augusta-Bangor axii of The Two Maines.

John is also working Oklahoma (third behind Wes Clark by 1,200 votes in the last cycle, and I wish I hadn't been quite so helpful to Clark), as well as Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and South Carolina. He's started a new website, One America Committee, as a "Raising the States" (see list above) initiative. We'll vist the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when we get in Dwight's neck of the woods.

The PPH is quoting John Pike, who linked to us on Tuesday. We've had .8k readers from John's site this week -- www.globalsecurity.org, and about the same number of readers using Google (search key "BRAC list"), and twice that who already knew which article (1953, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1974 and 1976) they wanted to read, or about 3.2k of MIL interested readers, some from "away". I use John's current site and his prior site, www.fas.org (Federation of American Scientists) quite a bit. For comparison, a link from Juan Cole's Informed Comment last month on Iran and Michael Klare was 2.3k readers, and an link from Duncan Black's Eschaton is about 30k readers.

Unfortunately, the PPH then goes on to suggest that because toxics clean up typically runs for years, that the sky won't fall until 2012, or 2102, or 2120 or 2210, and if all the planes leave the Brunswick NAS for the Jacksonville NAS (Florida), that a-bunch-of-random-buildings-with-no-airfield is going to survive the next BRAC (not to mention get up-listed from "realign" to "close" in this BRAC, which is a real possibility).

So far nothing substantive from the Congressional delegation. If either Olympia or Susan come calling I'll make coffee and cut off a slice of pound cake. I'm a compasionate insect.

Posted by EBW at 11:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Across the board cuts are what policy makers do who either suffer from institutional ADD, or institutional MPD, that is, either lack time on task to acquire meaningful clue, or possessed by multiple "voices" which command them to stand and sit, to go left and right, to stop and start, simultaniously. Secretary of Defense Rumsford promised just such a cut, somewhere between 5% and 11% of "excess military infrastructure".

But is the recommendation he sent to the Hill this morning untargeted? Is the best description the across the board bogie of between 5 and 11 percent? Or is there targeting?

8th Air Force, 2nd Bomb Wing (B-52): Hunter AFB GA and Barksdale AFB LA: Not on the list.
8th Air Force, 5th Bomb Wing (B-52): Minot AFB ND: Not on the list.
8th Air Force, 509th Bomb Wing (B-2): Whiteman SFB MO: Not on the list.

12th Air Force, 7th Bomb Wing (B-1B): Dyess AFB TX: Not on the list.
12th Air Force, 28th Bomb Wing (B-1B): Ellsworth AFB SD: On the list. Details forthcoming on the next stop for the 12th AF 28th BW.

In the "War against Terror", most of these assets serve little useful purpose other than hauling tactical munitions strategic distances to deploy in tactical theaters, at rediculous expense, but very photogenically.

20th Air Force, 90th Space Wing (500 Minuteman II and 50 Peacekeeper missiles siloed in Colorado, Montana, Nebrasca, North Dakota and Wyoming): Warren AFB WY, Minot AFB NF, Malstrom AFB MT: Not on the list.

In the "War against Terror", most of these assets serve little purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something.

Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay Georgia is not on the list.

In the "War against Terror", the Atlantic SSBN fleet too serves little present purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something.

As some of the 118 nations in the Non-Alligned Movement managed to point out, via Egypt earlier this week at the 7th NPT RC, these systems are in fact protecting America from something. They are protecting America from the committments it made at the 6th NPT RC in 2000, When Bill Clinton, Bill Cohen, and Madeline Albright held the jobs of POTUS, SecDef and SecState, respectively. Committments to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

That's a hit.

Posted by EBW at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The 10:30 event won't be webcast, and the only detail remotely interesting detail from the briefing will be if Gannon/Guckert gets in, and what questions he's fed. Its the list that counts, not the momentary rhetoric any of the actors, costumed in civies or stripes.

Today is a "big picture" day. Not a cacophany of local economic polaroids, but the policy expressed in the fullest of mature reflection.

09:15 Congress has received the list: pdf version and html version.

Senator Kennedy has an oped piece in today's USAToday. link.

Walter Reed is going to steal the sunlight from all the beds in Christendom, since care to vets actually has no military value, and Boston, New York, Philidelphia, Chicago, Salt Lake, San Francisco and Los Angeles were obviously poor choices to site a hospital.

The Portsmouth Yard is on the CLOSE list, 201 uniformed and 4,032 civilian jobs lost. The Brunswick NAS is on the REALIGN list, 2,317 uniformed and 61 civilian jobs lost. Groton too. 7,098 uniformed and 952 civilian jobs lost.

I was impressed by Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who (a) is up front that "military value" is in the eye of the beholder [subtext, every Congressman or Congresswoman is as gifted as Don Rumsfeld, who doesn't have a monopoly on that], and (b) undersea warfare based in New England has primary military value, and (c) "jointness" means Navy/Marines, and is operationally specific, not everybody playing for Army. There's a guy I could work with, if he could work with a Berkeley Commie. The 28 pages is just the butcher's bill, there are 12 volumes to digest by someone's staffers, and the cognitive dissonance of planning 20 years out, for a "War on Terror" that, apparently is scheduled to last most, or all, and perhaps more, of those 20 years, doesn't seem to have started resonating yet.

Not a single woman working the Pentagon got called, on either side of the podium. Now to read the butcher's bill.

Google key: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I was invited to submit a question to a chat hosted at the DCCC's website featuring Rep. John Conyers (D-MI-14), and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY-28). Conyers is the ranking minority on the House Judiciary Committee, and Slaughter is the ranking minority on the House Rules Committee.

I sent this:

Do you agree with, or disagree with, the following statement? "

Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymmetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future."

If you agree with the statement, can you accept the subordination of Congress to the Executive, under the fiction of apolitical objectivity, in the BRAC process?

The answer surprised me. I pitched Rumsfeld's scrapping of symmetric deterence, at least on land and at sea, his F-111 but writ very, very big, and the BRAC '05 as an opportunity for a Congressional check on a usurpation of Legislative power by the Executive. I expected an answer arising from the powers of Congress, not the Executive, in Art 1, Sec 8:

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

John Conyers took the power in Art 1, Sec 8 that immediately preceedes these:

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

The pitch swung on was the Winter/Spring 2002 Bush-Blair conspiracy to fabricate a casus belli in Iraq.

Rep. Conyers:

Thank you for your question. As you know art 1, sec 8 gives Congress the exclusive power to make war. Frequently, however, we find this being ignored or modified in such a way that the Congress is no longer in charge, as I think they should be. Just recently, it was revealed in a secret British memo that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the President were planning the Iraq war in 2002, even before authorization was sought from Congress. 88 Members of Congress have joined with me in asking the President to explain these meetings.

It is possible that John Conyers will take that line of inquiry to its Constitutional conclusion.

The record of the chat is here. Several exchanges over the prostitute working out of the Whitehouse, the suppression of Kerry-Edwards votes in Ohio in '04, like the suppression Gore-Liberman votes in Florida in '00, and other issues.

Posted by EBW at 06:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Spent the morning observing a Stryker. A model Iraqis are unlikely to see. Nausea, vomiting, not feeling well. Blood draws to monitor blood levels of acetaminophen. Good equipment made by a socially responsible Canadian company, the bed of choice in the Maine Med ER.

Grace self-medicated for pain due to otitis media during the night.

Solve for 22kg with N * 500mg doses of acetaminophen. N is not known, though there is an upper bound.

Toxicity levels were not obtained. Administration of N-acetylcysteine was not necessary.

I spend so many nights up with the boys, and Grace kindly wanted to let me sleep. Age 8 is early for self-medication with a dangerous analgesic. We played fish and dozed and discussed one of Yaya's friends who tried to commit suicide by taking acetaminophen. A learning experience.

In BRAC list land there was a press availability today, heavily costumed, and really low on content. The vision that can't be named, but it can be scaled back to make it more palitable to those who's oxen are not gored. Tomorrow the balloon goes up. Will it be wine or vinager?

Posted by EBW at 05:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Driving today. Herron's Baga (Casco Bay) north, across the Arossagunticook (Andrascoggin), to the Wôbômkategw (Sandy River), and back via Kinibec Badabaga (Augusta) to Kskebaga (MerryMeeting Bay) and back to Herron's Baga. Thinking about azowigabi. A wigwômsiz. An odôolagw. Both. Saw dadamakwak (red ones -- beaver). Thought about the Brunswick NAS and Seavy Island, the Portsmouth Yard. "Robbin Hood was a Sagadahoc Sachem and a friend of the Colonists." That's the general run of Maine history. "Robbin Hood was a drunk who signed away land he didn't own." That's the other side of the fish. Abenaki men didn't own the corn fields or the clam beds, they couldn't alienate real property. The same underlying fact pattern as in Santa Clara Pueblo.

A Tribal Law contributor, an Abenaki away, pointed out that under Alaskan Native statutory land entitlements, Cook Inlet Region, Inc., a Native Alaskan Corporation (tribe), obtained an in lieu right that permitted it to turn unfulfilled land entitlement for rights to (among other land) federal bases being closed, and winding up with land all over the US. If either or both the Yard and the NAS are listed, and the political defense for either or both fail, in addition to Augusta and other opportunists -- either a Trump hotel-casino property made from Los Angeles class attack boats oriented semi-vertically, a pod of perpetually breaching cold war orcas, with views of the Piscataqua, or a Trump hotel-casino with high-stakes games run out of P-3 Orions orbiting the Gulf of Maine -- there will be claims by Penobscots, Passamaquoddies and even Aleutes, for Abenaki land. And everyone will think themselves clever by not talking to us.

The Ipperwash process grinds on. In 1942 the Canadian Army expropriated Stoney Point and Kettle Point (Ipperwash) and set up a temporary infantry training camp (photo), paying the displaced Chipawa band $50,000, to get lost. In 1945 the camp's command (CITC A29) was disbanded, but the Stoney Point Band couldn't trade up to the neat barracks the Canadian Army had built where their homes used to be. In 1947 the Canadian Army found a new tennent for Ipperwash, Canadian boys ages 12-17 who liked to wear pith helmets, march about, and play soldier, six weeks each summer -- the Boy Scouts, minus God, plus guns and radios (photo) and a pretty nice beach on Lake Huron (photo) .

The Stoney Point Band were kept out of their homes, or what became of them, and finally in May 1993 a group of Natives occupied what was by this time "Ipperwash Provincial Park", to the dismay of White "cottagers" (squatters), who took to vigilanteeism. A stand-off developed between Indians and Whites, and in 1995 the use of force by the Whites resulted in the killing of Dudley George (Kettle and Stony Point Indian Band), by an Ontario Provincial Police sniper, who shot the unarmed man fatally in the mid-chest. It was a BRAC exercise conducted in Ontario, where Indians simply moved back to their homes, 53 years after being evicted under the War Powers Act.

One of the benefits of having a Commission investigate the murder is that the documentation trail is bi-lingual. Nishnaabemwin and English. A few sentances from the parallel texts.

WAA-ZHICHGENG WAA-NAAGDOONGGEWE

RULES OF PROCEDURE AND PRACTICE

1. Niizhing te waa-zhichgeng gonda Commission nakiiyaat. Ntam dandagkenjgaade gaa-zhiwebak wi pii Dudley George gii-nbot.

   Commission proceedings will be divided into two phases. Part I will focus on the circumstances and events surrounding the death of Anthony O'Brien (Dudley) George.

   Eko-niizhing dash maanda Gchi-ndagkenjgeng, da-gnwaabndaanaawaa gonda Commission gchi'ii ezhnoomaagemgak maanda sa gaa-zhiwebak Dudley George gii-nbot, da-dbaajmawak gewe ge-zhichgengba wii-bwaa nakaazang baashkzigan pii miinwaa maanda gegoo nikeyiing zhiwebak.

   In Part II of the Inquiry, the Commission will review key policy issues raised by the events surrounding the death of Dudley George and will make recommendations directed to the avoidance of violence in similar circumstances. These issues will include the relationship between police and Aboriginal people,

   Na'ii ge-dgo-gnwaabnjigaadek: enaangoondwaat dkonwewninwak miinwaa Nishnaabek, enaangoondwaat dkonwewninwak miinwaa gchi-gimaanaang Ontario naagaanzijik, gaa-zhi-gnoondiwaat Nishnaabek miinwaa gonda yaazhdendngik naaknigewin, miinwaa ge-zhichgengba wii-bwaa-nakaazang baashkzigan Nishnaabek nji ezhi-nsastamwaat
   gaazhi-waawiindmawndwaa ki miinwaa/maage bkaan gegoo.

   These issues will include the relationship between police and Aboriginal people, the relationship between police and government, the interaction between police and protestors, and the avoidance of violent confrontations over Aboriginal land.
   

We will encounter the usual defense of theft. Not being Federally Recognized means no standing, sitting, or even goofing off. The Penobscots will want to put up a casino. John Baldacci will wage stern moral war against local option sales and income taxes and Homestead-plus property tax reform, the Passamaquoddies and the Washington County delegation to Augusta and slots, a sloted racino at Bangor, and whatever fun and games the state Republicans come up with, and suggest, without too great a specificity, a cunning scheme to rescue either SoYoCo or Brunswick or both because everyone has to look re-electable or bump-up-able next year when Maine politics gets real.

Tomorrow's reading: Geoffrey D. Strommer & Craig A. Jacobson, INDIAN TRIBES AND THE BASE REALIGNMENT AND CLOSURE ACT: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE TRUST LAND ACQUISITIONS, 75 North Dakota Law Review 509 (1999).

Google keys: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 07:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There are peacocks at the Navy School. They roost in the pool area, wonder the grounds, and skwank when ever they please. Bletchley Park has peacocks too. There is a reason why State is opposed its closing. It isn't the peacocks, but its related. Its intelligence, and more than mere intercept and decipherment of intercepts, its human intelligence at the highest levels, decipherment of human intent and human ability. A year or two at the NPS is highly valued in the promotions boards of other peoples' navies.

When the subject drops a card deck walking from the keypunches to the card readers, does s/he (a) scowl and utter a phrase in a foreign language that is probably worth repeating, or (b) smile and comment that random reording should generate interesting compile-time diagnostics, and in theory could run as well or better than had he or she remembered to number and triple-band his or her deck? The former are non-promotes. The latter are promotes. The 029s are history, but the function of the NPS as a tool for the training of, and observation of, allied officer corps, remains.

So much for State's interest in the NPS. They haven't gotten the "we don't need no stinking allies" memo from the NeoCons and latter-day Birchers who momentarily control the three branches of government.

But suppose one did buy the rational for closure. The Navy can obtain equivalent post-graduate education at civilian institutions. Why not apply it to the service acadamies too? They really aren't cost-competitive with two years of JC and a junior-year transfer to an in-state land-grant, where all the costs are on some state's budget. ROTC works, so toss the service acadamies on the scrap heap of history and mission efficiency.

Cadets will become contract employees until graduation, like ROTC contracts became sometime after I was the worst middy in the Pacific Fleet, which cuts all those pesky "injured as a cadet" benefit claims from the VA budget, gets all those cadet rapes off the JAG table and into the hands of state college administrators and prosecutors, and best of all, ends the 50% Xtian nutball manditory minimums that district level grass roots political reality imposes on Congressional appointments to the service acadamies.

I look forward to the day when the on-line diploma mills grant advanced degrees in boat handling, aero, and combined arms, using virtual classrooms and the latest Clancey-ware on Xboxes, and when C3I can be conducted, like blogging, in pajamas and slippers (curlers optional).

As Gertrude Stein remarked of Oakland, "there is no there there." Closing Leavenworth or Carlisle or Monterey or ... so Rumsfeld can continue to chase jihadis with Hummers sounds like a pretty desireable outcome ... if you're working for the other side. I could be wrong, but I've spent time in two out of those three.

The idea of closing base housing and the E-Schools as well as the O-Schools and sending all those MilFams out into the (competitive) civilian housing and (competitive) education markets, so far from a PX (like New Mexico and God) and so close to Walmart (like New Mexico and Texas), and just making military life more unpredictable and more precarious, golly gee, now there's an idea.

Hmm. Google ranks us 14th for web for the keys "BRAC" AND "LIST". Kwel. We could be running ads for ... redevelopment consultants on that data point alone. Fixed fee, eyeballs, or a percentage of gross. Now there's a question.

Google keys: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 02:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey is apparently on the BRAC list, along with the Portsmouth Yard and the Brunswick Naval Air Station.

[Good morning region6.ang.af.mil, amedd.army.mil, monroe.army.mil, wpafb.af.mil, sheppard.af.mil, langley.af.mil, natick.army.mil, spawar.navy.mil, monmouth.army.mil, west.saic.com, ncnc.northcom.mil, larc.nasa.gov, psns.navy.mil, aero.org, * -sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, dfas.mil, *-quantico.nmci.usmc.mil, lead.army.mil, redstone.army.mil, gunter.af.mil, itsd.state.ms.us, travis.af.mil, detrick.army.mil, losangeles.af.mil, ncsc.navy.mil, redstone.army.mil, npt.nuwc.navy.mil, belvoir.army.mil, ria.army.mil, navsea.navy.mil, cannon.af.mil, scott.af.mil, kirtland.af.mil, lia.army.mil, nps.navy.mil, drms.dla.mil, pica.army.mil, amedd.army.mil, *-hawaii.nmci.navy.mil, uslec.net, tobyhanna.army.mil, nhchasn.med.navy.mil, usar.army.mil, *-norfolk.nmci.navy.mil, wecnq.com, amc.af.mil, patrick.af.mil, hill.af.mil, jfcom.mil, wapa.gov, altus.af.mil and wcsh6.com and spb.sovintel.ru (which really is in Moscow, I can see their packets going into a hole at 2 Krasnokazarmennaya Moscow 111250). I'm publishing while writing so we can enjoy each other's company to the fullest.

Later adds due to non-existant in-addr.arpa delegations: OCNR-1, VA (yup, and AISC-9 can fix that for you), AISC-9, Fort Lee (yup, I can fix that for you and OCNR-1, I renumbered hq.af.mil...), URRAD, Texarkana, Presidio of Monterey (howdy neighbors), SDSAN Anniston, HCSSA San Antonio, General Dynamics and some more contractors. ebw]

Who would have thought that the NeoCons could co-opt the pseudo-altruistic good-government (cut fat and meat) and the pacifist (cut meat and bone) theories of defense policy, readiness, and procurement, and wipe out -- not the Bad Guys in {Kabul,Baghdad,Tehran,Pongyang}, but the Gingrich Generation in the House?

I'll try and keep this simple. Not my strong suit. The guy who said (mix of paraphrase and quotes) "air and special ops takes Afganistan and Bin Laden", "100,000 troops takes Iraq and no post-hostilities planning necessary" and "You go to war with the Army you've got", wants to do to the Navy (but not the Air Force) what he's done to the Army. Since 1945 the Army and the Navy have had their CONUS bases, and more importantly, their institutional centers of doctrinal development, the War Colleges and the Charm Schools, and their European and Pacific Commands. Rumsfeld's goal is to transform these stable institutions into situational ad-hoc commands. Restated, the military is not only subordinate to civilian government on the core policy issues of war and peace, but the military needs no institutional capacity to reason about warfare distinct from that civilian leadership. If you don't already know what "compression of the sensor to shooter loop" means in all its fullness, you may want to reflect on the institutional capacity to reason about warfare distinct from domestic party and faction.

A lot of garbage has been written about some New American Way of War, but most of it is cover for generational competition (there is a publish-or-perish regime in military academia too), marketing collateral from technology vendors, and golly-gee-invincibility messaging for the Hill and media. What's new is the current state of the relationship between fire and maneuver, the changing nature of close air support, the compression of the sensor to shooter loop, and important coalition and jointness issues, and as I pointed out earlier in the essay The Importance of ... Doing Nothing, the strategic reality that the US is engaged in something profoundly different from the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

From Walking Backwards, on the covert motivations of factions within the Bush regime.

As Dwight points out in discussing Professor Bainbridge's dubious reasoning about the Filibuster, the essence of the doctrine of judicial review [of Executive acts] is espoused in an unbroken line of cases beginning with Marbury vs. Madison. Institutional independence of law enforcement began with two Special Agents appointed in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, and for the Civil Service generally, in the Progressive Period. Since before Elizabeth I, the professional class have dominated the political class in the English, and American Navies. Since Cromwell's New Model Army, in England, and later the States, merit mostly prevails over purchase of command. It has never before, in the history of the Armed Forces of the United States, been necessary to create professionalism by an Act of Congress, to limit Congress, or the Executive, from taking field or fleet.

Institutionally, the transformation at hand is the extension of faction from electoral politics to the Army, and now the Navy. The faction is, from my perspective, the assendency of Oliver North's "asymmetric forces" nonsense -- a subject of disacord in a Naval Post-Graduate School staff and Litton defense contractor household -- the force structure representation of predatory colonial wars of resource extraction, and the defense tech sector looking for more aero-space dollars, and the so-called "wise men" who make up the uniformed part of the 4% of GNP defense spending crowd.

I know, I'm getting obscure again. Suppose you don't care that the military is pithed, either because you think the threat model is reduced, or you just care about local bases, or some other reason to be indifferent to a major part of the budget and policy and patronage pies. How are the NeoCons (plus the co-opted pseudo-altruistic good-government and the pacifist national voter blocks) wiping out the Gingrich Generation in the House, not the Bad Guys in {Kabul,Baghdad,Tehran,Pongyang}?

The BRAC is supposed to isolate evaluation from politics, a noble goal. However, this BRAC is conducting an evaluation that is "in a box Donald Rumsfeld has built". It is a box that contains no deterence mission for a Navy transformed from Blue to Brown (Blue Water Navy vs Brown Water Navy for the Google strings), no potentially hostile symmetric forces in Europe, East Asia, or at Sea anywhere, and is the kind of thing people used to get really concerned about -- a first strike weapon. A MIRVed, days to impact conventional force, co-incidently retaining all of its real nuclear war fighting capabilities. Not the best toy to give to an idiot.

Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymmetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future.

from Coming to what's left of Maine near you

No monies will be "saved" by base closures. Funding will simply move from line items that Donald Rumsfeld values less, to those he values more. The box that Donald built is an overt assault on the House as the defense appropriations authorizing body, and it makes the use of force more, rather than less likely, and you are on your own dear reader if you think Special Ops and satellites will find the non-state opfors better than InterPol. If you didn't vote for Bush, or you didn't vote for Rumsfeld, but you buy Rumsfeld terms and conditions, you voted for him, and you voted for Bush. This is about as political as it gets. This is the electric acid kool-aid test, and the wounded only get bayonetted.

Time to change out of PJs, the uniform of the unwashed and unemployed, and go play with kids. Having taken courses at both the NPS and Berkeley, both in things that go "bang", how to drive boats, and engineering/maths, I find the rational offered for the closure of the NPS to be ... faith based. [I appreciate the diligence of the nps.navy.mil reader collecting the linked set. ebw]

Oh. So why not the AF? I still need to write that up -- an analytical paper on strategic targeting of national power systems, and more generally, civilian infrastructure. In days we'll all know if all those obsoleted ICBM silos and B-52 bases are on Donald's list of things to get rid of by the mid-terms, or not.

Google keys: BRAC list

correction: The hit from a Moscow-based intel service was unrelated to the domestic BRAC ballet. It was about the Iranian domestic reform dance (line dancing minus the Texans).

213.221.61.114 114.spb.sovintel.ru wampum.wabanaki.net [09/May/2005:12:33:02 -0400]
"GET /archives/001040.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6957 
"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=hashem+aghajari"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"

Posted by EBW at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Ask the Naval Sea Systems Command a question about the Portsmouth Yard (public), the Groton Electric Boat works (General Dynamics), the Norfork Yard (public), the Los Angeles class boats and their maintenance, early retirement or extension, anything related to cost and benefit, and NSSC answers: �It�s inappropriate to respond to your query regarding BRAC issues.� That makes intelligent policy evaluation, independent of the fleet of 1 year MacJobbers working for a Bush appointee and some political overhang who are working for the Executive Branch, not the Legislative Branch (either the point of the whole exericse, or a distinction without difference), a triffle harder than it needs to be.

Foster's Daily Democrat is doing a good job of coverage inspite of the attitude shown by the NSSC (that better CNOs have sent the equivalents to the Great Lakes Training Command in an afternoon). If there is an '08 or '12 capable candidate who doesn't have a sub to Foster's, its probably because he or she doesn't intend to be competitive in Rockingham and Hillsborough counties.

When you stand in a kayak you can see differently. The risk is obvious. Is Rumsfeld's vision of a light, agile military, that serves no deterrence purpose and is incapable of contesting symmetric forces, in which the Navy serves a supporting, non-diplomatic purpose of close-shore support for ground forces, a "good idea"?

Leopold II was an interesting military planner. He catapulted the Belgian military into the colonial war line of business in the Congo, the direction Rumsfeld has taken, away from the European forces problem, and being well beyond insane, and had rings of 12 forts around Liege and another nine around Namur, built, to defend Belgium from (a) the Germans in the East, (b) the Dutch in the North, (c) the French in the South, and (d) the English in the West. Because of the delay in reducing the fortresses at Liege and Namur, the Schlieffen Plan's timetable was off-set, which resulted in the delay that allowed Joffre to recover, for d'Esp�rey to take command of the Vth Army, and for the First Battle of the Marne to end, not with the capture of Paris, but in trenches and the end of mobile warfare on the Western Front. Donald Rumsfeld's equivalent inadvertent gift to the national defense isn't yet apparent.

I think I'll do a daily Base Realignment and Closure note as the due date for the list draws neigh. What's the worst that could happen? A sharp note from the regime that I'm aiding and abetting the ... Eisenhower and Carter administrations instead of the Reagan administration, like all right minded patriots?

Google keys: BRAC list

Posted by EBW at 01:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Some have it coming out on Friday, the 13th. [Note to inbound googlers, you'll want to look at today's BRAC post as well. ebw]

Others have it coming out in the Tuesday-to-Thursday window.

It could be as early as Tuesday. Prior post is here.

I sent my C.V. to robert.cook@wso.whs.mil. No reply. None expected actually. Nothing from General Dynamcs or the Portsmouth Yard or any member of the Maine or New Hampshire delegations either. I guess it really isn't that important. Owls Head Aviation can rattle around in Brunswick, and Portsmouth/Kittery can take a sober look at a casino hotel as its industrial future. Maybe the Mic'macs will bail them out.

Really its the New Hampshire Republicans in the House and Senate who get to run for re-election on a "bogus defense jobs are bad for NH but good elsewhere" message. Mainers can try and get Phish to do two gigs a season, one at Loring, the other at the NAS. Of course, the next cycle will present candidates the opportunity to articulate a defense industrial and continental readiness policy that translates differently from the current one. The photo is from MB's piece in July, 2003. The Portsmouth Yard is across the harbor, and in July 2007 most of the 4,100 civilians working for SUBMEPP will be working on their last ERO, and looking at relocation to Norfolk, Virginia, and the rest of Portsmouth will be looking at a finite date when the Yard is padlocked. Their Year(s) Zero.

Peace Action Maine will declare a moral victory, which won't actually change the truely insane and dangerous weapons systems and policies that are contingent on weapons systems from continuing to be truely insane and dangerous, but everyone likes a moral victory. Even Pyrrhus of Epirus.

Posted by EBW at 01:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone who reads political blogs on the left hand side of the dial has some idea that Paul Wolfowitz was Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. Who Gordon England is and what job he's currently doing is more a trivial pursuits, sailor edition, than part of the generic journo-blogo repitoire of political literacy.

But he is interesting and he is the nominee for Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the OSD. From his biobraphy at SECNAV

Prior to joining the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. England served as executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation from 1997 until 2001. In that position he was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation: Information Systems and International. Previously, he served as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company (later Lockheed), president of General Dynamics Land Systems Company and as the principal of a mergers and acquisition consulting company.

Yesterday's piece on the Base Closure and Reallignment Commission made the point that at least two of the uniformed services -- the Air Force and the Navy, are institutions lacking strategic missions. The problem for the Air Force goes even deeper than the end of parity with the Soviets, but I haven't yet written the piece on strategic bombing of electrical infrastructure (which I expect only VJ will read anyway, but writing is for writing), so I'll leave the strategic (non-nuclear) bombing value proposition as an assumed truth.

He made news recently by putting his mark on a bit of procurement policy paper approving the closure of General Dynamics' yard in Maine, making the economic vaporware arguement that the Navy would save $300 mil per unit if all future Destroyers were built at the Litton Industry's yard in Mississippi. The DD(X) procurements are currently split, one hull in three at the Maine yard (Bath Iron Works), two hulls in three at the Mississippi yard (Ingalls at Pascagoula). Fortunately for the Republican majority in the Senate, and several thousand Mainers, and possibly most tax payers if single-source and non-competitive government contracts is a bigger failure of process than 300 million hypothetical "economies of scale and efficiency saved" green stamps in a system that loses billions of dollars on well-known bogosities every year, someone at the OSD, or more likely, someone in politics who cares about the Republican majority in the Senate, scotched Gordon England's clever plan.

But that's ordinary administrative venality, playing with pretend money and sacking an entire town somewhere "out there" in fly-over land. There's worse.

As Secretary of the Navy England should have been figuring how to de-couple the Navy from an obsoleted or vastly down-scaled mission -- being the third leg of America's Strategic Nuclear Deterrence. There's not a lot left to deter, whether what's being "deterred" is run out of Moscow or Beijing. Getting at least half of the SSBN fleet off the operational budget and onto a lower cost maintenance and life-extended budget, and getting more than two crew shifts per boat to maintain manpower should have been his first priority. Instead, like several SECNAVs before him, he's left the SSN and SSBN fleets drift downward with few accelerated retirements. In effect, the only "signal" from the Navy's portion of the "deterence trident" that the Soviet Union, and China, no longer present a credible threat of initiating an intercontinental nuclear exchange, is the fact that no new SSBNs are entering the fleet. Everything is riding down its 30 year plus or minus life-time operating cost curve, mostly undisturbed by policy oversight.

It is the SECNAV's job to notice things like that.

However, if the SECDEF is keen to transform the Army from a stable institution composed of stable commands in Europe and Korea, into an unstable institution composed of ad hoc situational commands, anywhere on a moment's notice, the "agile spear", and the SECNAV's loyalties are ... not to the Navy's permanent mission of bi-coastal blue water defense, then the SECNAV's job is replacing the blue water navy with a brown water navy -- one Rumsfeld can take with him into the littoral combat sphere of operations.

There are some real problems with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. First, it assumes that the unfortunate recipients of the brown water navy's attentions lack the means to pot shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats shooting up their shores. Its 100 kg of commodity explosives, a commodity rocket moter, and a guidance system of choice, from joy-stick and wireline to active sensors and integrated, or standoff illuminators. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of surface-to-surface artillary capability in the littoral combat zone as an article of faith is not the only problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. Not only must the natives be passive recipients of the attentions of the brown water navy, but they must lack the means deny use of the littoral zone to vessels other than those shallow-draft, fast, unarmored boats. Its 1,000 kg of commodity explosives or a dozen commodity RPGs, a commodity fast boat, from Zodiac inflatables to Cigarette boats, and a guidance system of choice, from hand-on-wheel to auto-pilot. Rinse and repeat.

But lack of water-born denial capability in the littoral zone of the area of operations, the inability to repeat the War of the Tankers as an article of faith, is not the last problem with the littoral combat sphere of operations theory. These two articles of faith posit littoral combat operations without cause. I'm getting tired of beating around the bush. The "brown water" isn't the Orinocco or the Amazon, its the coast of West Asia, the Persian and Arab and Omani Gulfs.

The littoral combat was for the control of indefensible oil embarcation points, and associated sealift landings for the logistical tail of the on-shore portion of the operation, and the unrestricted transit to and from those indefensible oil embarcation points and sealift landings, and the "reach back" to the ports where forces were "surged out" from, and where tankers and containerships go to and come from to sustain the purpose of the original US vs Other State military conflict.

The last article of faith of the littoral combat sphere of operations theory is that no other blue water navy, either regional or global in nature, will engage the brown water navy in blue water, or otherwise compromise the strategic exercise of sea power confined to brown waters.

With those three articles of faith, the Litorial Combat Ship (LCS) program at the expense off the Next Generation Destroyer (DD(X)) program isn't criminally insane, If those articles of faith are just someone's wishful thinking, and there is a lot of that in the current crop of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet political appointees in the Pentagon, then its a trillion-dollar fiasco, as if it was the Wasp, Hornet and Lexington that went down on December 7th, 1941, leaving the US to fight out the rest of the Pacific naval war with the Arizona, the Idaho, and the California -- ships of the line circa 1914.

That's why Rumsfeld wants England bumped up from SECNAV to DSECDEF. Rumsfeld has a lot more "modernizing" to do. He's got the whole dump-the-armor-for-Intel for the Army program to sell to Congress, That's "Intel" as in "Intelligence" and "Intel" as in laptops-as-a-substitute-for-armor. He needs someone who has the "agile spear" vision, and England appears to have that, and not a lot else. Except for one little detail.

The top three corporations in the defense industry account for 25 cents out of every defense budget dollar, and as MB pointed out last December 7th, is lobbying to both drive the defense budget up to 4% of GNP, and to capture as much of the Defense budget as it can for high margin "missile defense" and exotic and/or space-based or space-expoloiting products, where those top three capture much more than 25 cents on every dollar.

Gordon England is both from GD, one of the big three, he's also from the zoomie / exotics / tech side of GD. SECNAV and stepping on the toes of the black shoes in the fleets was just a step up to the big-time -- SECDEF after SECDEF.

Not my choice for a senior staffer at the OSD, but then again, I count how many attack boats India's got or is buying off the Russians, and how many attack boats the PRC is on-schedule for, all of these are blue water sea-denial assets, and tastes vary.

Posted by EBW at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

With the few exceptions of governments actually committed to the planned use of military assets to obtain policy objectives, "military necessity" is defined by local politics. The antenna farm at Cutler, which pumps out 50 characters/second of submarine command and control messages over Very Long Wave radio, has been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

The airfield at Brunswick, which flies long-range maritime patrol aircraft, has also been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

The shipyard at Portsmouth, which overhauls and repairs nuclear-powered submarines, has also been short on mission since the end of Cold War.

Being short on mission is common to every global thermonuclear war postured military asset. Which military assets continue to be funded is a political issue, there is no "rational necessity" test.

However, as long as there is funding to operate submarines as instruments of national policy, that is, covert placement of armed and instrumented engineering spaces just off any point of the Atlantic, Mediterranian, Baltic and Circumpolar coasts, or at any blue water intercept coordinate is necessary to achive national policy goals, funding for the antenna farm at Cutler is safe.

Similarly, as long as there is funding to operate long-range maritime patrol aircraft as instruments of national policy, that is, rapid placement of armed and istrumented engineering spaces at any point in the central and western North Atlantic, or at any blue water intercept coordinate is necessary to achive national policy goals, funding for the air field at Brunswick is safe.

Again, as long as there is funding to operate submarines as instruments of national policy, the Submarine Maintenance Engineering, Planning and Procurement activity (SUBMEPP) must also be funded. Whether it is funded at the yard at Bremerton, the yard at Pearl Harbor, the yard at Hampton Roads, or the yard at Portsmouth is a balence of Atlantic Fleet fictions between Portsmouth and Hampton Roads -- yard efficiency, economies of scale vs single point of failure, and the effectiveness of Congressional delegations as lobbiests -- and the dirty secret that all four yards are public, contrary to the ideologies of privatization and reduction of government.

The General Dynamics yard at Bath is not a DoD facillity, so it is not within the scope of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), which needs 60 staffers in a wicked big hurry, to start four months of frenzied analysis and cross-country travel, obviously some to Maine, by May 16, when Secretary Rumsfeld�s realignment and closure recommendations must be given to the commission. Bath's problems lie elsewhere, nominally in the single-source cost-savings narrative, which is a rational for the Ingall's (Litton) yard in Passcagoula over the General Dynamics yard in Bath, but more fundamentally in the change of naval policy from blue water to brown water capabilities. In a nutshell, the Navy is trying to follow the Army down the special forces / asymetric forces / fast mobile rathole, because that's where the money is.

Where the Press Herald errs is in first accepting the assumption that the Base Realignment and Closure Commission is a rational process. There are dozens of very expensive bases, from Texas to North Dakota, that can not be postured as military assets except for fighting an intercontintal thermonuclear war. Most of the 8th Air Force, B-52 Wings in Texas, Louisiana, Missori, and the Dakotas, and most of the 12th Air Force, B-52 Wings in Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington, serve little useful purpose other than hauling cruise missiles and dumb bombs strategic distances to deploy in tactical theaters. Most of the 20th Air Force, the 90th Space Wing in Wyoming, the 91st Space Wing in North Dakota, and the 341st Space Wing in Montana, serve little purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something. And that's just the Air Force's obsolete "strategic" assets, overwhelmingly in Red States. The Atlantic SSBN fleet at King's Bay Georgia is wicked expensive, in a Red State, and a lot of it could be stood down and life-extended, because it too serves little present purpose other than proping up claims that ICBMs are protecting America from something.

Where the Press Herald errs next is accepting the assumption that necessity and utility evaluation is policy neutral. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is set on recreating the Armed Forces as a light mobile active force, abandoning heavy armor and the concept of European and Korean Theater Commands. In a nutshell, more Marines-lite and no follow-on forces capable of operating against WARSAW-PACT equivalent forces. Secretary of the Navy Gordon England is set on the same course, transforming the blue water Navy organized around carrier strike groups into a brown water force organized around littorial missions in support of light mobile ground forces. As Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees of the Executive, they are acting within their authority to reorganize operational commands, to discard and replace training and doctrine, and to make recommendations to Congress on any subject whatsoever. However, it is Congress that appropriates Defense funding, and exercises its independent judgement on the fundamentals -- e.g., adding Blackhawk helicopters and keeping a production line open. Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future. The Secretary of Defense makes policy recommendations. Policy recommndations are not policy neutral. Congress, not the Executive, make policy choices through Defense Appropriations. Congress may choose to extend the life of the Los Angeles Class attack submarines, and it may choose to maintain a blue water capability in the northern hemisphere, the Secretary of Defense is free to ignore Congress, but he is not free to tell Congress what it can, and cannot do.

The BRAC is not objectivity from on high. George Bush had to use a recess-appointment on April 2nd to get Anthony Principi as the commission chair. Senator Trent Lott (R-MI) put a hold on the nomination because of his opposition to domestic base closings. On April 5th Charlie Battaglia was hired as the Commission�s chief of staff, and having no infrastructure left over from the series of Base Realignment and Closure C commissions in 1991, 1993 and 1995, the Commission moved into office space on Jefferson Davis Highway in Crystal City, Va., and has quickly hired 30 staff members, many of whom have been involved in previous BRAC processes. He still must recruit another 60 people � mostly administrative staff and associate analysts � for yearlong positions. These positions are sought by people who are either on their way out of government, or just entering government. They are Mac-Jobs.

Posted: April 20, 2005

The Base Closure and Realignment Commission is seeking qualified personnel for the following positions:

Associate Analysts � must possess writing and analytical skills toassist senior analysts in evaluating complex and extensive data. Ability to work under pressure and overtime. Very challenging assignment. Skilled in Microsoft Office Suite. Some travel. Position available from May 2 to October 8, 2005. Past experience as a legislative assistant a plus.

Commission Security Officer. Responsible for maintaining the physical security of the Commission office and documents. Process the security clearances of staff as required. Experience as a federal security officer a requirement.

Advance Team Member. Coordinate and prepare senior officials� visits and arrange for field hearings over a two to three month period commencing in late May. Extensive travel within the United States.

Position assignment from May 2 to October 8, 2005.
Staff Assistants. Maintain executive calendars, prepare draft correspondence, maintain files and documents, expense records and other duties as assigned. Excellent oral and interpersonal skills, experience in operating Microsoft Office Suite. Administrative skills required.

Competitive salary commensurate with experience and skills. Send resume to: robert.cook@wso.whs.mil

That is what is coming to Kittery and Brunswick. Not anything more than that. That is what the Portland Press Herald should have written about.

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