Found below are a few military news items that caught my attention this past week. I am hopeful that the titles and short commentary will encourage SFTT readers to click on the embedded links to read more on subjects that may be of interest to them.
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BBC Analyses US Military Options for North Korea
President Trump has said “all options are on ...
How ironic that intelligence officials can be targeted so readily in Kabul by a suicide bomber. That kind of intelligence is supposed to be secret. You know, the fact that there are intelligence service employees and a top intelligence official in a specific vehicle in downtown Kabul. Coincidence? Nah. Inside information of a personnel manifest in a vehicle on a specific route at a certain time was passed along. That’s pretty ...
Continue Reading →Back in the fall of 2006, the Kagans, Frederick and Kimberly, from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), peddled the “surge” on a set of Power Point slides via General (Ret.) Jack Keane. First to the Office of the Vice President, then to the President, then to the Pentagon, and then to CENTCOM, and finally to Congress – standard operating procedure back then. The result? The “surge” into Iraq and the “reversal ...
Continue Reading →Four primary threat streams emanate from the Pakistan – the Mullar Omar Quetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Hekmaktyer organization, and AQ. For almost a decade these distinct groups have co-existed and operated exclusively with AQ parceling support from each. It does not bode well when recent intelligence and battlefield evidence indicates that the threat has merged. Regardless of the reason, be it recent US/NATO pressure creating battlefield syndicates or ISI ...
Continue Reading →In regards to the highly touted release of the administrations review of Afghanistan, one-step up and two-steps back.
One-step up, “strategy is showing progress”; two-steps back, no new information on how soon Afghan Security Forces will be able to assume responsibility for security and when the “rat-lines” coming out of Pakistan can be severed.
One-step up, “we are on track to achieve our goals”; two-steps back, gains are still “fragile and reversible” and ...
Continue Reading →National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) are authoritative assessments by the Director of National Intelligence related to a particular national security issue. NIE’s are not written in a vacuum and express coordinated judgments of the entire US intelligence community. Although these assessments are classified, summaries and excerpts are simultaneously provided to policy makers and/or leaked to the media when NIE’s are published.
Commanders in Afghanistan argue that the most recent spate of ...
Continue Reading →The narrative is set for the Administrations pending Afghanistan Policy Review slated for this December – who to believe whether sufficient progress is currently being made, the lack of viable options to address the ongoing threat that emanates from Pakistan’s tribal regions, and how soon will Karzai’s government be capable of providing security on its own? The following news reports provide background on this Gordian Knot.
In a recent article from Foreign Policy entitled An Unnecessary War – – Afthanistan used to be the central front in the war against terrorism. Now it’s a distraction from it, the author argues that policy makers may be taking their eyes off the “bigger” picture and one that is more critical to US security.
Highlights