Perspicuous Risk

"The US government has known about the flaw since the US campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said." CSM

---

"That final sentence is a bit worrying, and reflects a common pitfall within the US and many other "sophisticated" armed forces: Officers and war-planners often make the mistake of assuming their enemies are dumb, and not particularly adaptable. " WSJ

---

Not a big deal? Maybe not except that a look at what your opponent is watching is ALWAYS useful. You may also discover that what you are doing is more visible than you thought.

The question remains why this downlink was not encrypted to begin with. I think that the CSM has it right in attributing this failure to what I would call the "Raghead" factor. This is the tendency among Americans to assume that people who are culturally different from them are also primitive. This frequently shows up as a factor in our foreign affairs and we never seem to learn. We spent several billion dollars in Iraq trying to beat the ever shifting and evolving IED challenge and found that as fast as we devloped technical counter-measures or more sophisticated surveillance platforms, the insurgents developed new IEDs. They often bought parts for their new designs on the internet electronics market, disassembling larger gadgets if necessary to get the boards, etc., that they wanted.

This blind spot seems odd in a culture (ours) that is obsessed with levelling and the rejection of the idea of elites. I suppose that the level that is sought is one that represents the lowest common denominator of US society?

We actually DO have elites. To see them, all you have to do is tune in "Morning Joe" in the AM on MSNBC to watch the elites of left and right preening in their splendid plumage.

Nothing will change. We are sure that we are smarter, more virtuous, more ingenious, have better health care, etc., than anyone else. pl

ABOUT PAT LANG: Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.

18 December 2009 in Science, The Military Art | Permalink