I couldn't resist folks. I penned an op-ed piece for Military.com yesterday based on the Obama administration's reaction to the Great Christmas Day Underwear Bombing Caper.
Bottom line is that everyone discussing this attempted terrorist attack and the responses to it are talking about defense, and we hear nothing about offense.
I use the analogy of the MRAP scurry to describe the automatic reaction to pile more concrete into America's TSA Maginot Line.
All the after-action testimony, recommendations and takeaways resulting from the attempted Christmas Day bombing by Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab will not get us one inch closer to preventing these kinds of attacks on our countrymen in the future. Everyone is conspicuously ignoring the simple fact that the only way to prevent such a plan from ever evolving into action is to detain or kill the people plotting it before they even get to the airport. But no one's talking about any of that, and you surely won't see it in any official mea culpa......But what the MRAP did not do was prevent an IED from exploding. The MRAP did not kill one single IED emplacer, nor did it destroy a single IED-making plant, fabricator or planner. Instead, what eventually stopped the IEDs from going off was killing and capturing the people financing, sheltering, building and putting the IEDs into the ground and drying up support for those who might follow. It was an aggressive offensive strategy that stopped the IEDs, not hunkering down inside a bank vault on wheels - snipers, not cold-rolled steel, proved the decisive factor.
In the piece, I tell Military.com readers not to bother reading the White House report or the list of changes mandated by the administration. But here, we gotta take a look at a few of them and try to contain our laughter.
Potus Directive Corrective Actions 1-7-10
More gadgets and gizmos for overworked (or voyeuristic) TSA screeners to see through our clothes:
Agressively pursue advanced screening technology, protocols and procedures, especially in regard to aviation and other transportation sectors...
Hey State Department, let's just think about whether we should be issuing visas to dudes who we're warned might be terrorists...?
Review visa issuance and revocation criteria and processes, with a special emphasis on counterterrorism concerns...
Time to reorganize an already reorganized (new) organization:
[DNI shall] immediately reaffirm and clarify roles and responsibilities of the counterterrorism analytic components of the Intelligence Community in syncronizing, correlating and analyzing all sources of intelligence related to terrorism.
...huh? Have you ever heard more bureaucratic drivel? All it's missing is "synergize across platforms to increase revenue streams to facilitate top leveling and skill rebalancing."
And this last one is my favorite:
[The NSA will] develop and begin implementation of a training course to enhance analysts' awareness of watchlisting processes and procedures in partnership with the National Counterterrorism Terrorist Center and the Terrorist Screening Center.
Great, now the code breakers and cell phone signal listeners get to spend a Thursday and a Friday in "workshops" to "enhance awareness" of watchlists. I would love to have been in the meeting where this little morsel of "reform" was hashed out. How about a course on how to send a signal through AQ in the AP's cell phones so their heads will explode when they're coordinating an attack...oh, yeah, sorry -- they're "suspects."
You get my point. Here's my walkoff, now let the pile-on begin!
President Obama said in his Jan. 7 remarks after the release of the White House report on the Christmas Day attack that "of course, there is no fool proof solution" to preventing such an attack. Well, actually, there is. Leave a smoking hole from a Reaper drone where the next Abdulmutallab sets foot instead of relying on some overworked TSA screener to interpret what's in someone's underwear at an airport security stop.
-- Christian
