Both Colin Clark at DoD Buzz and Paul McLeary at War, Security, COIN and Stuff have covered Eric Edelman's publication of a CSBA manuscript predicting the United States' continued domination of global affairs - as long as the right decisions are made. Amidst all the dire forecasts of the decline of American Empire, Edelman predicts a different future. Now, not all of you may know Mr. Edelman. He was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for the Bush administration's second term, between 2005 and 2009.

Accepting the new conventional wisdom of decline and an end of US primacy could well lead to an alteration of the strategic underpinnings of American global policy and could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A rigorous assessment should consider the strengths and weaknesses of the United States’ putative competitors on the global scene as well as the enduring strengths and sources of resilience that have enabled America to extend its primacy and maintain a stabilizing, global hegemonic role against all expectations. There is a need for a framework to inform how US policymakers might think about the problem of developing strategies and policies to extend that role yet again, since it is at least an arguable proposition that rather than a multipolar world, the global system, after the current Great Recession passes, will continue to be unipolar but with some additional challenges for US leadership.

While others will comment favorably on Dr. Edelman's words of promise and look for the continued supremacy of Pax Americana, I'll offer a different interpretation. He's a neocon at heart. This is more of a standard philosophy of the neocon culture that wants to see American military might used unilaterally against a bad, scary, and uncertain world. It's an alternative reality that the neocons want to invent, rather than the multipolar world that currently exists and is forecasted to continue in the National Intelligence Council's 2025 report and the JFCOM Joint Operating Environment report.

The truth is that the US government is sorely challenged by a global economic crisis, just like everyone else, and we're not going to emerge from it easily. Our military has been stressed to the breaking point, and the continued research, development, and acquisition of multi-billion dollar defense systems will ensure we don't have the force required for future combat operations. The only way our government can hope to function is to recognize the need to work with other countries, stop trying to change cultures through massive American interventions, and develop strategies that are bounded by resources.

So I'm not going to give Edelman's report much time. He's busy creating a universe that doesn't exist, will never exist. How the CSBA let him in the door, I have no idea. It's not a good story.

Yes, they were lying about al Qaqaa

Just three days too late for it to do any good, the Los Angeles Times breaks the definitive story on al Qaeda. Not only did the theft of the high explosive go on after the invasion, the looting went on while we had troops at the site. There were just too many looters, and too few troops. They asked for backup but didn't get any.

Of course there's no way this information wasn't available to the Defense Department, and the White House, three weeks ago. The story isn't just based on soldiers in the field. Mark Mazzetti reports:

"That site was just abandoned by the 101st Airborne, and there was never a physical handoff by the 101st to the Marines. They just left," said a senior officer who worked in the top Marine command post in Iraq at the time. "We knew these sites were being looted, but there was nothing we could do about it."

No, the White House and the DoD civilians covered it up, telling various lies on the way (which their journalistic and blogospheric allies duly relayed to the public) just long enough to get the Beloved Leader past the election. And now they expect, almost certainly correctly, that everyone will now treat it as old news. The warbloggers will ignore it if they can't figure out some cockamamie way to convince themselves they've discredited it, while patting themselves on the back about how much more responsible and fair-minded they are than the mainstream media.

In the end, this one cover-up almost certainly didn't make the difference. But of course this wasn't the only cover-up. The cover-up of how Ken Lay and his friends got to write Administration energy policy worked. The Valerie Plame cover-up worked. And the result was that the Administration went back before the voters looking much cleaner and much more competent than it was or is.

Just remember, if their lips are moving, they're lying.

Could it be any clearer that this?

The Defense Department was mum Friday on the reasons for the abrupt removal of a Guantánamo war court judge who had threatened to suspend the trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr in a showdown with the controversial prison camp.

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Military prosecutors had been pressing Brownback to set a trial date, but he has repeatedly directed them first to satisfy defense requests for access to potential evidence. At a hearing earlier this month, he threatened to suspend the proceedings altogether unless the detention center provided records of Khadr's confinement....read on

For quite a while, the debate over blogs in the Defense Department was over whether U.S. troops should be allowed to have them at all. On the one hand, some officials were concerned about security breaches, with troops inadvertently sharing compromising information online. On the other, some saw blogs as a morale-boosting outlet for the troops.

But as Noah Shachtman explained in an interesting report, a study was written for U.S. Special Operations Command that took an entirely different approach to online communication, which included the suggestion of possibly “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers.”

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.... Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

The report introduces the military audience to the “blogging phenomenon,” and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.

The Kinniburgh/Denning report was quite provocative, suggesting paying prominent bloggers to address “entrenched inequalities,” presumably in the media. The study did, however, note the downsides of such a plan: “People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.” You don't say.

Now, it’s worth emphasizing that there’s no apparent evidence that the Pentagon actually put any prominent bloggers on the payroll. A spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command told Shachtman that the Kinniburgh/Denning report was merely an academic exercise: “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking.”

As far as I know, prominent bloggers who toe the administration’s line on Iraq policy are doing so for misguided ideological reasons, not unethical financial ones.

When it comes to kicking Americans out of the military because they’re gay, the occasional defense — offered by conservatives who know the policy is absurd — is that the Pentagon is merely following the law. If Congress wants able-bodied, patriotic, American volunteers to join the Armed Forces, regardless of sexual orientation, lawmakers should change the policy. If not, the Defense Department doesn’t have a lot of choice.

Except, that’s wrong. Gay soldiers discharged under the DADT policy have dropped from 1,200 a year in 2001 to less than half of that now -- and it's probably not a coincidence.

The U.S. military says it is enforcing the ban on open homosexuals in the ranks, as it has for decades, in the face of statistics that show a sharp drop in the number of discharged homosexuals as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue.

Homosexual rights advocates cite the plunge as evidence that the military is losing interest in enforcement and lets openly homosexual men and women serve because commanders need every able-bodied troop.

"Truth be told, I don't think the Pentagon is a big fan of the law anymore," said Steve Ralls, spokesman for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is pushing for the ban's demise.

Then maybe it's time to end the ban?

President Bush announced that he was opening up the military airways to help ease air traffic congestion for the holidays and Fox & Friends was jumping for joy. Finally, Bush did something that they could celebrate, right? Wrong....

Download | play Download | play (h/t Scarce for the vid)

"Great," said Steve Doocy a few times as he waited for Mike Boyd, an aviator analyst to agree....unfortunately, he quickly threw water on their happiness and called Bush's new measure a waste of time..

Doocy:...what's that going to do?

Boyd: What Bush said yesterday isn't going to fix anything.

Q: Yea, but isn't it going to open it up at least the people will not experience potentially some of the delays that we've all been experiencing in the last year. It seems to have gotten so much worse?

Boyd: It's not going to be any better or any worse, but the point is there is not much military air space that's going to make a whole lot of difference. Plus, we still have the dilapidated air traffic control system that can't handle weather, managing those airplanes, so we're just as vulnurable as we were last week. Not gonna be any better, but it might not going to be any worse.--but this is no solution. What I heard yesterday from President Bush was him reading off of a crib sheet. It was really embarrassing.

Doocy: Mike Boyd, who will not be going to the White House Christmas party this year...(laughter)

I'm sure Mike was anxiously waiting for his invite to appear....That'll teach him....

WaPo:

President Bush yesterday announced measures intended to curb airline delays during the Thanksgiving travel frenzy, including freeing up military airspace for commercial use. "We can do better," Bush said at a White House briefing. "We can have an aviation system that's improved."

The Federal Aviation Administration and the Defense Department will open military airspace from Florida to Maine -- creating Thanksgiving express lanes for commercial planes -- between Wednesday and Sunday next week.

Sidney Blumenthal, Salon contributer and executive producer of "Taxi to the Dark Side" wants the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs to do her job:

One Defense Department official, believing the administration policy on detainees and torture to be illegal and counterproductive, told me that in his and others' efforts to reverse it they approached you as a last hope. After all, you have virtually unrestricted access to the president. But he recounted that you rebuffed them, and described your attitude as dismissive.

Your complicity in the torture policy is one reason that I am writing you. Despite the futility of those inside the administration in bringing the problem to you, you still remain in place to redress it. As the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, responsible for defending America's reputation in the world, you must engage the issue that has most seriously damaged our image. Your obligation will continue so long as you hold your post. Those who care about the good name of the United States will not cease viewing you as a last resort, even if you disdain or ignore them, because they cling to the desperate hope that a nagging conscience or its sudden awakening will compel you actually to do your job.

ACLUblog:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public hundreds of claims for damages by family members of civilians killed or injured by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU received the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in June 2006.

The hundreds of files provide a vivid snapshot, in significantly more detail than has previously been compiled and released, of the circumstances surrounding reports of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.[..]

The ACLU pointed out that during both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Department has instituted numerous policies designed to control information about the human costs of war. These policies include:

• Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas;
• Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort;
• Inviting U.S. journalists to "embed" with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review;
• Erasing journalists' footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan; and
• Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.

The files made public today are claims submitted to the U.S. Foreign Claims Commissions by surviving Iraqi and Afghan family members of civilians said to have been killed or injured or to have suffered property damages due to actions by Coalition Forces. The ACLU released a total of 496 files: 479 from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan. The documents released by the ACLU are available online in a searchable database at www.aclu.org/civiliancasualties

hee hee

NYTimes:

A senior Pentagon official resigned Friday over controversial remarks in which he criticized lawyers who represent terrorism suspects, the Defense Department said.

Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, told him on Friday that he had made his own decision to resign and was not asked to leave by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Stimson said he was leaving because of the controversy over a radio interview in which he said he found it shocking that lawyers at many of the nation's top law firms represent detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

''He believed it hampered his ability to be effective in this position,'' Whitman said of the backlash to Stimson's comments.

You think?

Surprise, surprise, surprise....

WaPo:

The Defense Department paid two procurement operations at the Department of the Interior to arrange for Pentagon purchases totaling $1.7 billion that resulted in excessive fees and tens of millions of dollars in waste, documents show.

Defense turned to Interior, which manages federal lands and resources, in an effort to speed up its contracting. Interior is one of several government agencies allowed to manage contracts for other agencies in exchange for a fee.

But the arrangement between Interior and Defense "routinely violated rules designed to protect U.S. Government interests," according to draft audit documents obtained by The Washington Post.

More than half of the contracts examined were awarded without competition or without checks to determine that the prices were reasonable, according to the audits by the inspectors general for Defense (DOD) and Interior (DOI). Ninety-two percent of the work reviewed was awarded without verifying that the contractors' cost estimates were accurate; 96 percent was inadequately monitored. Read on..