In every declared symmetric conflict in the gunpowder era, the side with the higher tail-to-teeth ratio has won the conflict. Not every battle; not every asymmetric or undeclared conflict, although even there it’s statistically significant in favor of the big-tail forces. But every “war” has been won by the tail, not the teeth.

…

The short version of this is “Brave soldiers win battles; brave REMFs win wars.”

It just has to be the right sort of tail.

Now comes some suggestion in the UK Daily Mail that even old-tech submarines are too quiet for anti-sub technology: The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced.

Not from the world’s most reliable source, and there seems very little about it in the newspapers as yet, although the blogs are all over it. The Agonist asks if this Daily Mail story (which gives neither the name nor the date of the US exercise) is actually old news being re-floated at budget time?

He has some great scary scenarios which are likely being adopted by al Queada right now, now that he’s spelled them out (and the likely over-reactions) in such lovely detail.

Only problem is that the FBI is now interviewing the author. (This last part is, I think, a joke.)

Firedoglake, The Falafel Squad,

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails….

But I don’t watch movies that dumb.

UPDATE (11/9): FBI Denies Data Mining Grocery Records

There’s a lot of evidence that the Army is politicized: after all, the senior officers are in the tank for GWB or they are forced out. The junior officers are leaving in droves as a result. The enlisted appear divided, with a very substantial group at least unhappy about the war with no end in sight.

This isn’t good, but I wonder how different it really is from Vietnam. You know, that conflict from which the Colin Powell’s Army said it learned so many lessons. Before it forgot them.

Today, it’s The Man (yes, the man), the TLAs the TSAs, behind “Taking off your bra for national security”:

… According to the Associated Press, [Lori] Plato set off security alarms when she and her husband were entering a federal courthouse in Coeur d’Alene. Plato told the AP that the U.S. Marshals Service not only asked Plato to remove her bra but gave her no viable options for doing so with any measure of privacy: “I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn’t have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available. They said, ‘No.’”

Does this count as progress?

Maybe it will after the lawsuit.

It’s worth reading the AP version of the story to see just how weak the defense is:

McDonald acknowledged that security workers told Plato that she couldn’t pass through security wearing the bra but said she wasn’t ordered to remove it.

“She’s inflating it,” U.S. Marshal Patrick McDonald said. “All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn’t anything we wanted to happen and it wasn’t anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”

I could do that cross-examination. I’d enjoy it.

Air Force Arranged No-Work Contract: While waiting to be confirmed by the White House for a top civilian post at the Air Force last year, Charles D. Riechers was out of work and wanted a paycheck. So the Air Force helped arrange a job through an intelligence contractor that required him to do no work for the company, according to documents and interviews.

For two months, Riechers held the title of senior technical adviser and received about $13,400 a month at Commonwealth Research Institute, or CRI, a nonprofit firm in Johnstown, Pa., according to his resume. But during that time he actually worked for Sue C. Payton, assistant Air Force secretary for acquisition, on projects that had nothing to do with CRI, he said.

Riechers said in an interview that his interactions with Commonwealth Research were limited largely to a Christmas party, where he said he met company officials for the first time.

“I really didn’t do anything for CRI,” said Riechers, now principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. “I got a paycheck from them.”

And how did Congress confirm him? Did they know about this? If not, why not?

Concurrent’s top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier. Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.

It’s a charity, it pays folks big bucks, and it lobbies too. And it’s rewarded for all this with money from the black (secret) budget, plus ‘faith-based’ money which we know is a cover for the GOP feeding its base.

Speaking of which, is there any chance that a Democratic administration will cut off this ‘faith-based’ funding or will the GOP machine still be at the federal trough?

Think Progress » DNI McConnell: I Lied To The Senate Earlier this week, in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.

A government official later told the New York Times that McConnell was wrong, and that the intelligence had been collected under the old FISA law which required warrants. A chorus of House Democrats immediately raised concerns about McConnell’s claims.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) demanded McConnell back up his sworn statement. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said the Protect America Act “played no role in uncovering the recent German terrorist plot.” House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes urge McConnell “to issue a public statement immediately” correcting his remarks.

In a statement released today, McConnell unapologetically acknowledged he lied to the Senate:

Either Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lied to the Senate or he believed what he said when he said it.

So either we have a liar or a dunce running our national intelligence service. No wonder he fits in with Bush, Rove and Gonzales.

Marine Corps claims described in congressional correspondence are at odds with the actual text of a February 2005 urgent needs request from Marines in Iraq.

In a letter Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) on June 26, 2007 (pdf), the following was written:

Press reports about the February 2005 Marine Corps Urgent Operational Needs Statement [pdf] that you referenced in your letter concerned me a great deal as well. Since learning of this needs statement, my Committee staff has met with the Marine Corps multiple times. The Marine Corps' answer to the Committee staff has been two-fold: 1) the Marine Corps has initiated its own internal review of how urgent operational needs statements are handled; and 2) the Marine Corps indicated that the request from theater called for more effective armor materiel, which came in the form of fragmentation kit upgrades, rather than a specialized vehicle like the MRAP. I have directed my Committee staff to continue meeting with the Marine Corps on this matter until the internal review is completed. [Emphasis added]

However, even the briefest look at the February 2005 request (pdf) shows otherwise; that is, that the Marines on the ground, in Iraq, requested MRAPs specifically.  The first lines in that document on the first page, under "Description of Need," are:

MINE RESISTANT AMBUSH PROTECTED (MRAP) VEHICLE. This is a Priority 1 Urgent UNS in support of OIF EDL. Total AO requirement is 1169.
There is an immediate need for an MRAP vehicle capability to increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in a hazardous fire area against known threats.

On its face, it seems that the Marine Corps engaged in telling the congressional staffers of the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee a bold-faced lie.  The only other possibility is that Senator Levin's staffers misinterpreted or wrongly portrayed the Marine Corps' claims. 

If it's the former, Congress should consider prosecuting the responsible parties for making false statements under 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  Congress cannot intelligently and adequately perform its legislative and oversight functions if the executive branch is not providing it with truthful information--hence the existence of 18 U.S.C. § 1001.  There need to be penalties for willfully misinforming Congress, especially on matters of life and death in wartime.  These requests were not made by bureaucrats at the Pentagon, but by Marines in Iraq regarding a vehicles which, if procured sooner, could possibly have saved the lives of hundreds. 

If Congress never penalizes or threatens to penalize those who lie to it, then it will only invite more dishonesty and a withering of its own stature.