Blogs of War

The pro-Pollard buzz that was building in the Israeli press, blogs, and social media channels throughout last year has culminated in an official plea from Netanyahu:

Dear Mr. President,

On behalf of the people of Israel, I am writing to you to request clemency for Jonathan Pollard.

At the time of his arrest, Jonathan Pollard was acting as an agent of the Israeli government. Even though Israel was in no way directing its intelligence efforts against the United States, its actions were wrong and wholly unacceptable. Both Mr. Pollard and the Government of Israel have repeatedly expressed remorse for these actions, and Israel will continue to abide by its commitment that such wrongful actions will never be repeated.

As you know, Mr. President, I have raised the question of Jonathan Pollard’s release numerous times in discussions with your administration and with previous U.S. administrations. Previous Israeli Prime Ministers and Presidents have also requested clemency for Mr. Pollard from your predecessors.

Since Jonathan Pollard has now spent 25 years in prison, I believe that a new request for clemency is highly appropriate. I know that this view is also shared by former senior American officials with knowledge of the case as well as by numerous Members of Congress.

Jonathan Pollard has reportedly served longer in prison than any person convicted of similar crimes, and longer than the period requested by the prosecutors at the time of his plea bargain agreement. Jonathan has suffered greatly for his actions and his health has deteriorated considerably.

I know that the United States is a country based on fairness, justice and mercy. For all these reasons, I respectfully ask that you favorably consider this request for clemency. The people of Israel will be eternally grateful.

Sincerely yours,

Benjamin Netanyahu

Fairness, justice and mercy. These are precisely the reasons why Jonathan Pollard should not see the light of day.

Fairness

The intelligence community, the one which Jonathan Pollard betrayed, is overwhelmingly composed of patriots. Most of them quietly shoulder the burden of secrecy. They do this, not for personal gain, but because it is a requirement of their service. They tolerate the rules, regulations, and the invasions of privacy. They may struggle with strained relationships, long hours, and sometimes even great personal risk. They do this quietly and at a government pay grade because they are patriots.

Pollard, on the other hand, acted without honor. He is not an American patriot. At the time of his arrest he was, by most accounts, a greedy, cocaine-snorting, narcissist:

For about a year after the time Pollard met Avi Sella, he gathered computer printouts, satellite photographs, and classified documents from his department three times a week and brought them to various Washington apartments. There, they were copied and returned to Pollard, who restored them to the Navy the following day. In exchange for his services Pollard received, in addition to the agreed salary, a lavish collection of gifts for himself and his wife, including a honeymoon in a private compartment aboard the Orient Express.

Pollard did not sacrifice for his country. He traded it for diamond rings, bundles of cash, and expensive vacations. He betrayed every American and every patriot who served with or before him. So yes, fairness is important. How could releasing Pollard to a hero’s welcome in Israel be in any way fair to the countless Americans and patriots he betrayed? Fairness demands some measure of…

Justice

Pollard’s apologists have conjured up so many silly arguments over the past two plus decades that (and this is part of their strategy) casual observers may understimate the impact of his betrayal:

Joseph DiGenova, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, said Tuesday that Pollard was a spy who was paid and who tried to entice others to join his operation.

Mr. DiGenova said Pollard received about $500,000 a year plus expenses for giving intelligence documents to Israeli agents.

“By the time he was caught, he caused enough damage to U.S. intelligence that, according to the Defense Department, it cost between $3 billion and $5 billion to fix because of what he compromised,” Mr. DiGenova said. “That the country he spied for is seeking clemency is not only unprecedented, it is a joke.”

The bits and pieces of the Pollard damage assessment that have leaked out over the years are shocking. It’s easy to understand why the U.S. intelligence community continues to oppose his release:

THE men and women of the National Security Agency live in a world of chaotic bleeps, buzzes, and whistles, and talk to each other about frequencies, spectrums, modulation, and bandwidth — the stuff of Tom Clancy novels. They often deal with signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and their world is kept in order by an in-house manual known as the RASIN an acronym for radio-signal notations. The manual, which is classified “top-secret Umbra,” fills ten volumes, is constantly updated, and lists the physical parameters of every known signal. Pollard took it all. “It’s the Bible,” one former communications-intelligence officer told me. “It tells how we collect signals anywhere in the world.” The site, frequency, and significant features of Israeli communications — those that were known and targeted by the N.S.A. — were in the RASIN; so were all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union.

The loss of the RASIN was especially embarrassing to the Navy, I was told by the retired admiral, because the copy that Pollard photocopied belonged to the Office of Naval Intelligence. “He went into our library, found we had an out-of-date version, requested a new one, and passed it on,” the officer said. “I was surprised we even had it.”

The RASIN theft was one of the specifics cited in Defense Secretary Weinberger’s still secret declaration to the court before Pollard’s sentencing hearing. In fact, the hearing’s most dramatic moment came when Pollard’s attorney, Richard A. Hibey, readily acknowledged his client’s guilt but argued that the extent of the damage to American national security did not call for the imposition of a maximum sentence. “I would ask you to think about the Secretary of Defense’s affidavit, as it related to only one thing,” Judge Robinson interjected, “with reference to one particular category of publication, and I fail to see how you can make that argument.” He invited Hibey to approach the bench, along with the Justice Department attorneys, and the group spent a few moments reviewing what government officials told me was Weinberger’s account of the importance of the RAISIN. One Justice Department official, recalling those moments with obvious pleasure, said that the RASIN was the ninth item on the Weinberger damage-assessment list.

The compromise of RASIN alone would justify life in prison but the piece goes on to detail the compromise of the Rota reports, DIAL-COINS, and the National SIGINT Requirements List. Pollard compromised not only individual intelligence systems and methods. He compromised the security of every single American citizen. So please Mr. Netanyahu don’t talk to us about justice. Justice was served and it was served with…

Mercy

Jonathan Pollard is alive. He is alive after betraying the patriots at his side. He is alive after betraying the government which trusted him. He is alive after betraying those who fought and died, sometimes quietly and without public acknowledgment, for this country. He is alive after betraying every single American man, woman, and child. Jonathan Pollard is alive and he is treated humanely. He is a living testimony to our mercy.

As I have said before, I support Israel as an ally. I even respect Mr. Netanyahu’s (now) persistent support of the spy Israel once betrayed. However, Jonathan Pollard was never a harmlessly naive ideologue. His betrayal was cold, calculated, and immensely damaging. May he stay in prison indefinitely where he can reflect on America’s fairness, justice, and mercy.

I will leave you with video of Jonathan Pollard in action:

Forums, Twitter, and blogs are have been buzzing over this “new” Chinese jet for days. The quality of the jet is uncertain but props to the Chinese for excellent execution of a stealth marketing campaign – complete with the sort of grainy spy shots usually reserved for car launches.

I’ve rounded up some resources for those of you who want to keep tabs on this but first a couple of questions:

Raymond Pritchett believes that this news raises interesting (but likely to go unanswered) questions about our understanding of Chinese military development:

In less than one week we have:

1. Confirmation new PLAN aircraft carrier is under construction
2. PACOM confirming DF-21D is now at IOC.
3. 4/5 Generation Stealth technology demonstrators on the runway

All of which is either well ahead of projected schedules or was never before thought to exist, at least publicly? Perhaps it is time the Secretary of Defense answers a few tough questions, like why the DoD appears to be caught with their pants around their ankles when it comes to major PLA developments.

There’s plenty of OSINT on the J-20. It has been the subject of speculation on forums and blogs for years so it’s unlikely that anyone was caught off-guard by this one. Well, let’s hope not anyway. What do we know beyond OSINT? I’d like to know but that’s the unanswerable question. Still, the concern is valid and shared by many.

More important, perhaps, is the question of Chinese espionage. Debate over whether penetration of U.S. Defense contractors assisted China with the development of the J-20 seem almost unnecessary. Chinese determination, Russian engineering assistance and lazy American security practices are a pretty potent combination. China will continue to close gaps and will do so with increasing efficiency as long as this dynamic exists.

What about the military significance of this jet? As a near term military threat to the United States it doesn’t mean much. Deploying these as a viable platform on a large scale just isn’t in the cards and won’t be for quite some time. Building the airframe, even a fairly complex one, is only the first and easiest step. Additional hardware capabilities have to be developed, systems integration is highly complex, massive logistical issues have to be sorted out for production to occur on a large scale, and then there’s actual deployment. Let’s not forget that you need highly skilled personnel to support and man these things in battle.

There is no doubt that China is capable of closing the gap, even innovating, but by the time they get these issues sorted out (another 20-30 years or so at best) I expect the game will have changed considerably. That sort of dominance probably isn’t even the primary motivation at the moment as RIA Novosti military commentator Ilya Kramnik points out:

Given its traditional policy of aircraft manufacturing, China will most likely create a functional analogue of foreign-made 5G planes that will cost 50% to 80% less than Russian and U.S. models. China will most likely sell the plane in Central Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, as well as to the richest African countries.

The export models of the J-20 and the planes of that series made for the Chinese Air Force will have foreign, including Russian, equipment and weapons. Moreover, in the next 20 to 30 years China will have to continue to import modern aircraft technology. Despite the strides made by China’s aircraft designers in the last 20 years, China has only slightly narrowed the technological gap dividing it from the global leaders.

So the J-20 has nice lines, will integrate a lot of outdated hardware, and will be obtainable by any petty dictator with a few extra dollars in the bank. It’s looking more like a Volkswagen Jetta than a game changer.

As promised, here are a few resources:

Forum Threads:
AsiaWind
SinoDefenseForum
MilitaryPhotos.net
Defense Forum of India
The Aviation Forum
Tiexue.net

Blogs:
Top81 – Chinese Military Aviation (Scroll to the bottom for tech specs)
China Defense (possible cockpit mockup)
Information Dissemination
War is Boring
The DEW Line

Twitter:
The #J20 Hashtag
Kursed
TheDEWLine
Galrahn
and of course BlogsofWar

Some sage thoughts on Twitter this morning from @petulantsage:

New rule: every time you enable or make excuses for Iran you should be lashed, one for every post-graduate degree you have.

Is that anti-intellectual? No…that’s anti-you. They don’t want to negotiate with us and never will. Period. There’s nothing to talk about.

Does that mean send Fifth Fleet and a bunch of AC-130s and B2s to level Iran? No. It means keep making scientists assume room temperature.

It means the head of the IRGCs drone program mysteriously disappearing from his balcony. And motorcycle-borne assassinations.

In sum, Iran doesn’t want an actual military faceoff and neither do we. Instead of negotiating endlessly, let’s be as ruthless as them.

Iran’s relationship with the United States, and Western world in general, has been defined by the assumption that they are untouchable. Analysts are quick to point out that intense Iranian nationalism is a barrier to any attempts at deconstruction/reconstruction of their political system. Invaders, even those with good intentions, are not welcome. Counterterrorism types are quick to point to Iran’s feared global network of terror facilitators and proxies who will respond to any conventional military attack with wave after wave of terrorist attacks on every corner of the globe. This is Iran’s version of mutually assured destruction and it has served them well.

Our own capabilities have served us well too. The Iranian political class does not want a what is assuredly an unsurvivable conventional war. Their strategy, executed quite well I think, has been to challenge the West on multiple fronts but pull back short of the line. If conventional war does come they fully expect it to come from the air and have prepared accordingly. This balance, if you can call it that, has worked because of an underlying assumption on the part of the Iranians. They believe that they can play dirty while the West is shackled by a number of self-imposed restraints and ultimately a (justifiable) fear of putting boots on the ground.

By identifying and targeting those who actively work to support Iran’s most evil intentions (nuclear scientists for example) we can send a different message: you are not safe. In fact, you are not safe anywhere. You are not safe when you travel and, more importantly, you are not safe in your own home. We will, if you persist, kill you during your morning commute. Do not sleep too soundly in that five star hotel because we just might smother your ass with a pillow.

Individual specificity is the future of war. It is brutal and ugly but it is less brutal and ugly than the alternative. By definition some tactics (the high casualty innocent civilian targeting terrorism favored by our enemies) are still off limits. In a war against individuals innocents are spared and justice is served. The illusion of safety for bad actors who support hostile regimes is shattered. Apply these tactics on a larger scale and over time, indefinitely, and these regimes will likely find it increasingly difficult to place intelligent people in supporting roles. The message to scientists, agents, oppressors, even “religious” leaders is clear: you are not just a small irrelevant cog in a larger machine, you are not lost in the crowd, YOU are the enemy and we will kill you.

There are definitely signs that this is happening, both in the struggle against Iran and in the greater war on terror. But is it happening on the scale needed to change some of these long standing assumptions? This is largely a covert effort (which it should be) so evaluation is difficult. Observers can only point to Iran’s behavior as an indicator. My gut feeling is that our capabilities in this area are increasing (just wait until we get indoor nano-scale lethal UASs) as is our comfort level with the approach but we’re not quite there. Iran continues to move aggressively froward on a dangerous track. Ironically, our greatest hope in preventing a devastating war is in taking off the gloves and getting dirty. We have to be “as ruthless as them”.

This is next to impossible to enforce but it should make it easier to monitor the few who are clueless enough to conduct transactions with Wikileaks from a military network:

The U.S. armed services are issuing internal messages to all personnel barring them from visiting the WikiLeaks website, which recently posted 77,000 classified diplomatic and military messages on the long war in Afghanistan.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed Thursday for The Washington Times that all four services “have put out such messages” after The Times had obtained copies of Navy and Marine Corps messages banning troops from accessing WikiLeaks.

Mr. Whitman later told The Times that the Army and Air Force had not yet issued such statements.

I certainly wouldn’t want my IP address showing up in their logs if I had a security clearance.

Manning doesn’t seem to have any fans on the House Intelligence Committee:

“If they won’t charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder,” Mr Rogers said.

Asked if treason during wartime was a capital offence punishable by death, he said: “Yes and I would support it 100 per cent.”

“The death penalty clearly should be considered here,” he said. “[Pte Manning] clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offence, I don’t know what is.

“We know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed. That’s pretty serious.”

Heroic sources, even our own troops, are more likely to die as a result of this incident than Bradley Manning. The more realistic possibility for Manning is decades behind bars.

The free culture movement and hacker ethos are full of both great and absolutely terrible ideas. As ideologies and subcultures go they’re sort of like the Libertarian Party. Everything lines up so well, makes so much sense, and then people go off the deep end. Wikileaks has definitely gone off deep end.

Wikileaks is an especially powerful concept that resonates with the especially naive but this project subverts democratic institutions, ignores the rule of law, and exposes heroic sources to imprisonment, torture, even death. If Americans want greater transparency, or other policy changes, they have democratic processes at their disposal. Creating that change, through those processes, is the only legitimate way for Wikileaks supporters and free culture types to achieve their goals.

Apply these tools to people who have no absolutely voice, no recourse, no hope and you might have a leg to stand on but no rational person can argue that U.S. citizens fit that profile. As it stands now these people are enemies of this state, enemies of legitimate freedom, and enemies of democracy.

Q&A on the IC Post-9/11 and Truth about Contractors address some of the issues raised in the Washington Post series but the tone is dry, defensive, and bureaucratic.

This is the kind of communication that doesn’t really appeal to anyone except the people who created it. It certainly won’t win any converts. This highlights what has always been a challenge for the IC – balancing effective public relations and secrecy. My problem with that is that not only should it be a priority for them but they should have mastered it by now. In fact, they should be better at it than anyone else – period.

Perhaps this mess will highlight the need for the IC to aggressively move beyond damage control as a PR strategy. It’s time to kill the lame brochureware web sites, limit the dry memos to internal use or policy wonks, and engage the American people.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. – Top Secret America, Washington Post

Everyone seems to up in arms about this figure. It’s seen as confirmation that we have too many spies, too many analysts, and generally too much of everything associated with top secret work. While that may be true this number isn’t quite the slam dunk many think it is because encapsulates countless people who are only indirectly involved in the handling of intelligence or classified material.

To understand what this number means you have to first have some appreciation of what is involved in staffing and supporting a secured project or facility. The nature of the work often requires that administrative and facilities staff, down to the janitor level for example, be cleared at some level. White it’s undoubtedly true that some of this work is inappropriately classified the process of compartmentalizing access (think need to know) actually works pretty well most of the time.

A good place to get a feel for what these projects look like, and how they’re staffed is my former employer’s career site. SAIC has countless Top Secret, Top Secret SCI, and other cleared jobs in their database. A quick scan reveals the following:

Supply and Material Manager – Top Secret
JOB DESCRIPTION: Provide logistics and supply expertise in support of the JDICE team at Nellis AFB, NV.

Candidate will perform material and equipment acquisition for in-house and project related material and supply requirements, identify vendors capable of providing material, equipment, and supplies for specific requirements, issue requests for quotes to qualified vendors, evaluate vendor quotes for specific components and determine the best value approach for fulfilling material requirements, develop purchase orders for specific requirements for Air Force and OSD equipment, ensure compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), Department of Defense Acquisition Regulations for material acquisition, utilize spreadsheets and hand receipts for developing, issuing, and tracking material. Candidate will monitor, store and issue government furnished equipment and material for regular office and test specific use, and act as the organization’s alternate Telephone Control Officer, equipment custodian and supply liaison. Additionally, candidate will also provide logistical support, equipment, supplies and personnel to facilitate effective and efficient execution of JDICE activities. Must be willing to travel (approximately 10%).

Not exactly James Bond is it? In your company you probably refer to this as the “wharehouse guy.”

Accounting Specialist – Top Secret SCI
JOB DESCRIPTION: Provide logistics and supply expertise in support of the JDICE team at Nellis AFB, NV.

Candidate will perform material and equipment acquisition for in-house and project related material and supply requirements, identify vendors capable of providing material, equipment, and supplies for specific requirements, issue requests for quotes to qualified vendors, evaluate vendor quotes for specific components and determine the best value approach for fulfilling material requirements, develop purchase orders for specific requirements for Air Force and OSD equipment, ensure compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), Department of Defense Acquisition Regulations for material acquisition, utilize spreadsheets and hand receipts for developing, issuing, and tracking material. Candidate will monitor, store and issue government furnished equipment and material for regular office and test specific use, and act as the organization’s alternate Telephone Control Officer, equipment custodian and supply liaison. Additionally, candidate will also provide logistical support, equipment, supplies and personnel to facilitate effective and efficient execution of JDICE activities. Must be willing to travel (approximately 10%).

Boooring. Again, this person is not complicating the gathering, analysis, and distribution of the nation’s intelligence. They’re just working the periphery.

Help Desk Support Specialist IV – Top Secret

The Enterprise Support Technician will be a member of a larger EST staff providing help desk functions to the Theater Command, Control, Communications, Computer & Intelligence (C4I) Support Center (TSCS) – Belvoir Operations Center. EST personnel will be the entry point of all calls to TCSC-Belvoir Operations Center and will coordinate TCSC network information and updates to the TCSC COMSTAT Report with the USSOUTHCOM TNCC. Enterprise Support Technician will analyze the TNCC-published TCSC COMSTAT networks service call report and make recommendations to reduce the number of TCSC-related future calls by responding to key problems. EST candidate will refine user training, develop online help screens, and provide input to TNCC. EST may be required to remotely monitor Network monitoring consoles after normal duty hours. EST will provide preliminary screening of problems and requests and forward those issues that cannot be resolved by the EST to the appropriate TCSC section, team, or staff member for action. Additional duties include creating user accounts, performing routine scheduled enterprise maintenance and daily back-ups of servers, as well as administering the Blackberry Enterprise Services for TCSC-SOUTHCOM customers. May be required to work a rotating shift.

A Top Secret Help Desk guy is, at the end of the day, still just a help desk guy.

These are just a few examples but countless non-cleared positions in the workforce have their cleared counterpart performing equally boring work off somewhere else – hopefully quietly. It’s usually not as exciting as it would appear. In fact it’s usually quite tedious and boring in the way that only government or government contractor work can be. So, the spies, analysts, and super-genius scientists who reverse engineer UFOs, are out there but they’re a fraction of the 854,000 figure that everyone is throwing around in disgust at the moment.

The great majority of the 854,000 people with top secret security clearances thrive within expensive offices located in the United States. The number of heroes protecting Americans by gathering intelligence in foreign countries is tiny. – Ishmael Jones, The Corner

On the Web:
Frontline: Top Secret America
Washington Post: Top Secret America

U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee today issued the following statement in response to the first story in a series of reports by the Washington Post examining the American national security apparatus:

“The first story in this series generally tells us a lot of what was already known—the national security bureaucracy is large, redundant and lacks the nimbleness to respond to threats posed to our nation. The first installment somewhat overstates the problem of intelligence growth by conflating intelligence and defense activities, but it supports my long-held belief that the answer to addressing threats to American security won’t come in the form of a larger intelligence bureaucracy. It will come from building a streamlined and integrated national security community that is capable of quickly responding to current and emerging threats.

“In 2006, as chairman of this committee, we examined this issue and issued a report that found problems with bureaucratic growth at the top and a lack of urgency and direction within the intelligence community. It is frustrating that years later, others are looking at this issue and finding the exact same problems.

“Congressional Republicans have pushed for years to address these issues, by seeking to limit bureaucratic growth at our intelligence agencies and focusing scarce national security dollars towards operations and away from agency headquarters. Republicans also have fought successfully to cut pork-barrel spending in the annual intelligence bill by eliminating the earmarks that fuel some of the unnecessary growth and don’t offer the American people the transparency they need or deserve for directed spending.

“Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee will continue to push to get resources and funding to our intelligence professionals in the field and out of Washington. As we have in the past, we will continue efforts to limit bureaucratic growth, redundancy and earmarks in future intelligence bills to get money where it is needed most—providing for the security and protection of our nation.”