Fifty years and two days ago, the Soviet Union began
building the Berlin Wall. It seems almost that long since Senate
Democrats passed a budget. But now that the glass debt ceiling has
been shattered, and a congressional Supercommittee has been created
to vouchsafe to us our economic future, we have a moment to catch
up with the global reality show.
There’s an awful lot of important SGO we’ve ignored in
during the debt ceiling mess, so we have to do at least a quick
roundup. (For those just joining us, “SGO” is the
comprehensively-useful acronym for “s*** goin’ on” invented by my
pal and former SEAL, Al Clark.)
President Sarkozy’s excellent Libya adventure goes into
its sixth month without noticeable effect on Muammar Gaddafi.
President Obama, playing Sancho Panza to Sarkozy’s Don Quixote, has
kept the operational tempo of US Air force sorties sufficiently
high to conceal our allies’ inability to go it alone. So, while the
Supercommittee debates defense budget cuts, just how is the Libya
operation being paid for?
According to congressional sources, the Air Force is
robbing its training budget to pay for its part of the Libya
operation. I can only guess which part of the training budget is
being raided, but I’m sure it’s not being taken out of the funding
to train airmen on how to accept openly-serving homosexuals in
their ranks. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is being
implemented as the Obama regime’s top military priority. Maybe the
Libya costs are being taken out of the budget for training of Air
Force pararescue jumpers. You don’t know the PJ’s: they train much
like the SEALs do, but their mission is combat search and rescue.
Their school is known in the spec ops community as “superman
school,” so the PJ’s probably won’t be cut by the Supercommittee,
if only out of professional courtesy.
So the Air Force is probably taking the Libya operational
costs out of the training budget for our fly-guys. That’s no
problem because now-retired Defense Secretary Bob Gates was sure
that we’d never have to fight a conventional war again. So if every
hour of flying over Libya is paid for by canceling an hour of some
graying lieutenant colonel flying against a few greenhorn
lieutenants to teach them how old age and airborne treachery
overcome youth and enthusiasm, it’s no big deal. Until some of the
young’uns have to fly air combat maneuvers in something other than
a flight simulator.
And as well as things are going in Libya, they’re just as
good elsewhere in the Middle East. While we are playing tag with
Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad — the Syrian guy whose daddy achieved a
coveted spot on the “state sponsors of terrorism” team in 1979 —
is merrily massacring his subjects. According to Hillary’s State
Department, Bashar has devolved from “reformer” to “illegitimate”
in just a few months, merely for murdering a few thousand Syrians
who are left to his mercies while we defend innocent Libyans, if
any such there be.
The Big Question in the White House is whether Barry
should demand Assad’s resignation. As the Washington Post
recently
editorialized, a presidential demand for Assad’s resignation
would be the “last handkerchief” to be dropped. The Post
is wrong. Barry has a whole drawer full of handkerchiefs. The
presidential gauntlet has been sent to a GSA warehouse to be placed
aside Indiana Jones’ lost ark.
We have an immediate and compelling interest in removing
Assad from power. The facts that we are engaged militarily in Libya
where we have no such interest, and that Barry is tossing wet
hankies at Assad, will not go unnoticed by enemy and friend and
nations such as Iraq, which is both.
And while we’re guessing how quickly our Iraqi experiment
in nation-building will fall apart (it’s even money which will go
first: Iraq or Afghanistan), it’s anyone’s guess how many covert
cyberwar missions were blown by McAfee’s revelation of “Operation
Shady Rat.” The aforementioned Rat was an enormous cyberespionage
operation against 72 entities — governments, companies and even
the International Olympic Committee — which the computer security
company said indicated was the creation of a “state actor.” In this
case, as McAfee’s report implies at length, the “state actor” was
clearly China.
That China would be responsible is not exactly a surprise.
“Shady Rat” is the apparent successor to the “Titan Rain” Chinese
cyberespionage op of the late 1990s to early 2000s. The severity of
the Chinese cyperespionage campaign cannot to be overestimated. As
McAfee’s report said:
What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been
nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth —
closely guarded national secrets (including from classified
government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives,
negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field
auctions, document stores, legal contracts, SCADA configurations,
design schematics and much more has “fallen off the truck” of
numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the
ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.
McAfee’s report, according to a source in the cyberwar
community, may have done more harm than good because it indirectly
divulged that McAfee was doing its own cyber-counterattacks. It
said:
McAfee has gained access to one specific Command & Control
server used by the intruders. We have collected logs that reveal
the full extent of the victim population since mid-2006 when the
log collection began.
McAfee and our intelligence and military cyberwarriors
should — absolutely and comprehensively — be on the
counterattack, as I
argued in the latest AmSpec magazine. The obvious question that
my source said was worrying our intelligence and law enforcement
communities is whether the revelation that McAfee gained access to
the [Chinese] command and control server resulted in the
adversary’s ability to track and terminate several classified cyber
operations against them.
Classified information, contrary to the liberal meme, is
not made public for damned good reasons. I’m betting that the
McAfee report didn’t release something that the Chinese didn’t
already know. That’s not likely the case in the White House’s
latest escapade.
First the tragedy, and then the outrage.
The Jedi — aka “DevGroup,” formerly known as SEAL Team 6
— lost seventeen of its men in the Taliban shootdown of a Chinook
helicopter in Afghanistan. About thirteen others — sailors, airmen
and soldiers — were also lost. We must grieve for them all. And —
if you’d like to do something to help the kids of these brave men
— please visit www.specialops.org,
the website of my friends at the Special Operations Warrior
Foundation. SOWF helps the children of fallen spec ops guys get
into college and pays their way all the way through their degree.
Last week, the SOWF board voted to extend their scholarships to all
killed in the Chinook crash, whether they were spec ops guys or
not. Please give generously.
At about the same time, we learned that the Obama regime
was cooperating with a group of Hollywoodenheads producing a movie
about the DevGru operation that got Osama bin Laden. The producers
are being given access, according to many reports, to military,
intelligence and special operations information, as well as to
White House and administration officials. Inevitably, much of what
they learn will be highly classified information. Whether or not
all they learn ends up in the movie, it will all become
public.
That movie will — coincidentally, I’m sure — be released
about a month before the November 2012 election to maximize the
political benefit bought with classified information.
Never mind the SEALs, the Night Stalkers who flew them,
the USAF assets in the air and the CIA people on the ground. I
can’t wait to see how Obama and his White House Supercommittee
heroically pulled it all off.
