Category: Information

Minerva: Pentagon and Social Scientists

Defense Department Planning To Expand Minerva Initiative, (Inside The Pentagon)…Jason Sherman

The Pentagon plans this year to expand a fledging program launched by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to foster cooperation between the military and social scientists in a bid to improve understanding of 21st-century security challenges and develop a cadre of experts to influence national security policy.

Gates, a former college president, launched the Minerva Initiative last year with the goal of invigorating the type of collaboration between the Pentagon and academic institutions that thrived during the Cold War.

Just as the National Defense Education Act of 1950 encouraged the study of subjects like Marxism, Leninism and communism, yielding insights into the Soviet Union, Gates has handpicked new areas for research that he hopes will produce long-term results. These include Chinese military and technology studies; research that illuminates the perspectives of terrorists; research into possible disciplines required to deal with current and future security challenges; and religious and ideological studies.

On Dec. 22, the Pentagon awarded contracts to seven researchers working with 16 academic institutions. The National Science Foundation, which last summer partnered with the Defense Department on the Minerva initiative, is expected to announce another round of awards this month.

Iraq: U.S. Public Support for Withdrawal

Poll Finds Support For Obama’s War Views. (Washington Post)…Michael A. Fletcher and Jon Cohen

Americans are more upbeat about U.S. prospects in Iraq than at any time in the past five years, but nearly two-thirds continue to believe the war is not worth fighting and 70 percent say President-elect Barack Obama should fulfill his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. forces from the country within 16 months, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Israel: Iran Threat

Israel Warns U.S. Of Iranian Nuke Attack, (USA Today)…Unattributed, December 18, 2008, Pg. 7

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it could try to attack the United States.

Barak, who spoke Wednesday at a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the world should press Iran to stop it from building nuclear weapons.

“If it built even a primitive nuclear weapon like the type that destroyed Hiroshima, Iran would not hesitate to load it on a ship, arm it with a detonator operated by GPS and sail it into a vital port on the east coast of North America,” he said.

Indicating the possibility of a military strike, Barak said, “We recommend to the world not to take any option off the table, and we mean what we say.”

Iraq: Flawed Intelligence, Prediction Markets

The use of Prediction Markets within the Intelligence Community may be helpful in improving the quality of intellgience. Regarding the WMDs, unlikely to have gotten a 100% of the analysts to bet that WMDs would be found.  This may have led to more in-depth understanding and awareness on the assumptions and probablilities associated with the respective assessments.

Intelligence Chief Blames War Policy, Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C.–Gently admonishing President Bush, the nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.

Bush told ABC News last week that his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.”

“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” he said.

Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”

Thomas Fingar, who stepped down Dec. 1 from the post of deputy director of national intelligence and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council,

nKorea: Info Security

The Information Fortress Known As North Korea(Los Angeles Times)…John M. Glionna, Nov 14, 2008.

Some intelligence is smuggled out by groups and individuals these days, but the main thing outsiders know about the reclusive regime is that they know nothing.

Kim’s approach is, ‘Know thy enemy but don’t let them know us,’ “

These days, much of the information gathering on North Korea comes not from governments but private individuals and human rights groups that have managed to piece together a clandestine network of internal reporters. Some nongovernmental aid organizations return from the country with observations of what goes on there.

“Nobody is too confident about information out of North Korea,” Kang said. “Even the North Korean government isn’t that confident of the statistics they compile.”

“What Kim Jong Il has put together is a counter-intelligence masterpiece,” said Korean historian Andrei Lankov.

“I speak of the CIA’s record in North Korea as the longest running failure in the history of American espionage,” said Donald Gregg, a CIA station chief in South Korea in the 1970s and a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul. “It has always been the toughest of the tough targets. In my day, we truly did not know what was going on there.

“The lines of communication are opening up,” Howard said.

Good Friends publishes regular Internet reports on North Korea. One included such headlines as “Food Shortage Lowers the Attendance of a Munitions Factory in Eunduk County” and “15 People Publicly Executed in Onsung County.”

The group has also broken North Korean news, including an explosion in June involving a petroleum pipeline near Pyongyang.

“Someone threw a cigarette without thinking. There were lots of casualties, even deaths,” Kang said. “South Korean intelligence denied the story. They later came back and said we were right.”

Presidential Election: No endorsement

Deciding to agree to disagree, Indianapolis Star, Oct26, 2008.

It’s a strange year. Were I asked by the man in the moon to describe the political leanings of our country, I’d say Americans were center-right. Yet we’ve had nearly two terms of a frustrating and until recently ill-prosecuted conflict in Iraq, economic troubles and widespread criticism from abroad. We’ve seen a level of White House arrogance that has troubled even some Republicans. That’s why many Americans seem willing to forgo their center-right tendencies to consider the case of a liberal and little-tested African-American U.S. senator from Chicago.

For The Star’s editorial board, with its history of mostly right-of-center positions and our desire to maintain consistency without being outwardly partisan, it became a tough and in the end extraordinarily difficult choice.   

Plotting Points: Election Polling Data

FiveThirtyEight.com

Extracts fro the FAQ page.

What is the mission of this website? Most broadly, to accumulate and analyze polling and political data in way that is informed, accurate and attractive. Most narrowly, to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections.

What is the significance of the number 538? 538 is the number of electors in the electoral college.