DOD watchdog lists top 10 challenges for 2017

A fascinating list from the IG.  Not everything on the list is what I would expect from the IG but I am glad to see eevrything on the list.  The 130 page report can be downloaded here: http://www.dodig.mil/IGInformation/archives/2017_Oversight%20Plan_Final_Signed_508.pdf

Here is the summary of the "Management Challenges" (which I find an interesting way to phrase these).

1.    Countering Global Strategic Challenges

a.    Global Threats From China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea

b.    Interagency cooperation

2.    Countering Terrorist Treat

a.    Developing Security Forces

b.    Insider Threats

3.    Enabling Effective Acquisition and Contract Management

a.    Linking requirements to military plans

b.    Contract management oversight

c.    Illegal Technical Transfer

4.    Increasing Cyber Security and Cyber Capabilities

a.    Offensive and Defense Operations

b.    Technology Platforms/Infrastructure

5.    Improving Financial Management

a.    Financial auditability

b.    Eliminating improper payment

6.    Protecting Key Defense Infrastructure

a.    Installations, Energy, Environment

b.    Space

c.    Defense Industrial and Technology Base

7.    Developing Full Spectrum Total Force Capabilities

a.    Posture and Structure of the force/Building a diverse force despite Capabilities Despite Budget Pressures

b.    Chemical, Biological, Nuclear, Radiological, and Explosive Issues

8.    Building and Maintaining Force Readiness

a. Equipment Accountability and Reset

b. Suicide Prevention

c. Healthcare – Cost, Fraud, Access to Care

d. Talent Management, Force of the Future

9.    Ensuring Ethical

a.    Accountability, Integrity, Whistleblower Issues

b.    Sexual Assault Prevention and Response

10.    Promoting Continuity and Effective Transition Management

c.     Leadership Changes

d.    Planning and Internal Controls

efense

DOD watchdog lists top 10 challenges for 2017

https://fcw.com/articles/2016/12/20/dod-oig-top-10.aspx

• By Sean D. Carberry
• Dec 20, 2016

 

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has released its 2017 Oversight Plan that outlines 10 areas of focus, including cyber.

"Increasing Cyber Security and Cyber Capabilities" is one of the DOD's performance and management challenges the watchdog will audit in 2017, along with other areas such as acquisition, countering the terrorist threat and force readiness.

"The DOD OIG identified these challenges based on our oversight work, research, and judgment; oversight work done by other components within the DOD; input from DOD leaders; and oversight projects by the Government Accountability Office," the report states. "While we solicited input from the DOD, we identified these challenges independently."

"The DOD continues to face significant challenges in protecting and securing its networks, systems, and infrastructure from cyber threats and in increasing its overall cyber capabilities," according to OIG, despite some strategic progress from Cyber Command.

The report reiterates what top Pentagon officials have been saying throughout 2016:  cyber threats to the DOD continue to increase, and nation states such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are investing heavily in "sophisticated campaigns to penetrate and compromise DOD's networks."

Last week, the DOD OIG released a summary report of 21 audits conducted between Aug. 1, 2015, and Jul. 31, 2016. That report made 61 specific recommendations the DOD needs to take to improve cybersecurity. Those recommendations were added to 138 outstanding items from previous audits.

The coming year will bring more than 12 tech-related audits covering the defense of DOD networks, developing cyber capabilities and infrastructure, cyber offensive and defensive operations, and building and retaining the cyber workforce.

The audits will drill down on specific topics such as implementation of the Joint Information Environment, physical access controls, security controls over contractor systems, insider threat programs and cyber threat indicator sharing.

The Oversight Plan states that DOD continues to face challenges "in developing or acquiring unique cyber capabilities to conduct defensive and offensive operations."

The report also says that DOD does not have "an effective cloud computing implementation strategy or process to collect data and measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the DOD cloud initiative."

The DOD did not have any comment on the OIG Oversight Plan.

About the Author

Sean Carberry is an FCW staff writer covering defense, cybersecurity and intelligence. Prior to joining FCW, he was Kabul Correspondent for NPR, and also served as an international producer for NPR covering the war in Libya and the Arab Spring. He has reported from more than two-dozen countries including Iraq, Yemen, DRC, and South Sudan. In addition to numerous public radio programs, he has reported for Reuters, PBS NewsHour, The Diplomat, and The Atlantic.

Carberry earned a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and has a B.A. in Urban Studies from Lehigh University.

North Korea and Military Proliferation to Iran: An International Security Dilemma by Dr. Bruce E. Bechtol Jr.

This is arguably the most authoritative open source analysis of north Korean proliferation activities with Iran.  It is extremely well sourced analysis.  Unfortunately it is not online so you have to download the PDF from my dropbox at the link below.  It is well worth the read for anyone interested in north Korea's proliferation.

Summary:  This article looks at North Korea’s military proliferation to Iran – all of it.  For those who have questions about North Korea’s long history of proliferation (which is ongoing) to Iran, or perhaps even question that there is a robust proliferation relationship this article will help answer them.

Bruce E. Bechtol Jr. “North Korea and Military Proliferation to Iran: An International

Security Dilemma,” ChiMoKoJa – Histories of China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan, Vol. 2, (2016), 71-95.

Download the 30 page article here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x5vcorxedlkta5f/North%20Korea%20Iran%20article%20latest%20draft%202016.pdf?dl=0

 ChiMoKoJa – Histories of China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/chimokoja-histories-of-china-mongolia-korea-and-japan

Conclusion.  And as always we must know (and understand) our enemies and know what will deter them.  But knowing our enemies has to be more than a pithy phrase from Sun Tzu that we toss about.

In general, it is always better to deter aggression and prevent conflict than to reverse aggression and engage in conflict. But deterrence is difficult because it is a psychological effect, built on a foundation of beliefs and expectations. To make it work, the United States must understand what potential enemies think they can handle and what they fear most. To prevent war and deter aggression in this time of technological proliferation and budgetary constraints, American military leaders and defense policymakers must get in the heads of adversaries and exploit their fears.

Can unconventional warfare have a deterrent effect?  (Yes, of course it could if we have the demonstrated capability and the demonstrated will to conduct such a campaign.  The problem is the lack of demonstrated political will to do so).

At the same time, potential enemies must believe that the U.S. can strike at things they value. There are many ways to do this beyond the traditional use of bombers, drones and missiles. One would be having the ability to surge support for local allies, including national armed forces like the Ukrainian military as well as militias. The last thing that potential enemies—whether states like China, Iran, North Korea and Russia or organizations like the so-called Islamic State—want is to be forced to conduct their own counterinsurgency or counterguerrilla campaigns. The thought of having to do so might give them pause as they plan aggression.

We have to be willing to operate in the gray zone between peace and war where revolution, resistance, and insurgency take place and by doing so we can demonstrate not only our capabilities but our will to operate in this area that we have long ceded to our enemies who have sought asymmetric advantages over us and our friends, partners and allies to neutralize our technological dominance.  In short we need to be able to conduct political warfare. (

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html)

Political Warfare is a strategy suited to achieve U.S. national objectives through reduced visibility in the international geo-political environment, without committing large military forces. Likewise, Political Warfare can function as a critical, integrating element of U.S. national power against non-state adversaries such as the current Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Most often, the Department of Defense role in Political Warfare will be one of supporting other U.S. Government agencies that are more likely to lead strategy and planning development. 

Political Warfare emerges from the premise that rather than a binary opposition between “war” and “peace,” the conduct of international relations is characterized by continuously evolving combinations of collaboration, conciliation, confrontation, and conflict. As such, during times of interstate “peace,” the U.S. government must still confront adversaries aggressively and conclusively through all means of national power. When those adversaries practice a form of Hybrid Warfare employing political, military, economic, and criminal tools below the threshold of conventional warfare, the U.S. must overmatch adversary efforts—though without large-scale, extended military operations that may be fiscally unsustainable and diplomatically costly. Hence, the U.S. must embrace a form of sustainable “warfare” rather than “war,” through a strategy that closely integrates targeted political, economic, informational, and military initiatives in close collaboration with international partners. Serving the goals of international stability and interstate peace, this strategy amounts to “Political Warfare.”

As will be described here, Political Warfare encompasses a spectrum of activities associated with diplomatic and economic engagement, Security Sector Assistance (SSA), novel forms of Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Information and Influence Activities (IIA). Their related activities, programs, and campaigns are woven together into a whole-of-government framework for comprehensive effect. In this regard, Support to Political Warfare is a novel concept in comparison to the last generation of national security thinking and military operational concepts. Yet, Political Warfare is not without recent precursors in U.S. policy and strategy, with the Cold War being a prime example of approaches foreshadowing the current conception.

To Deter Adversaries, U.S. Military Must First Understand Their Fears

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15553/to-deter-adversaries-u-s-military-must-first-understand-their-fears

Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division gather their equipment before boarding a CH-47F Chinook, Nawa Valley, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, May 25, 2014 (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Whitney Houston).

By Steven Metz, April 17, 2015, Column

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For American defense professionals, the 1990s now seem like a distant dream. The United States was fresh off a stunning military victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. The Soviet Union, long Washington’s bête noire, had crumbled. The American economy was robust, churning out important technological innovations one after another. In these halcyon times, U.S. military leaders and defense officials predicted that they would master what they called the “revolution in military affairs,” thereby attaining battlefield superiority over every possible enemy. Since the U.S. would be able to impose its will on opponents, there was little need to consider how enemies thought or what they intended to do.

A decade later, however, the slogging, bloody counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that technology could not solve every security problem. Ideas and concepts, not to mention will and perseverance, mattered greatly. Then, just as the U.S. extricated itself from the counterinsurgency morass, the American economy tanked, taking the defense budget with it. The dreams of the 1990s had given way to nightmares.

Now military leaders and defense policymakers believe that America’s military superiority is shrinking and might someday evaporate entirely. In speech after speech, interview after interview, defense officials list the things that “keep them up at night.” At times, the cause of concern is China’s growing military power, at others it is what are called “hybrid threats,” or enemies that combine increasingly advanced conventional weapons, political action, irregular warfare, terrorism and criminal behavior to achieve political objectives.

Unfortunately, recognizing these potential threats does not automatically produce solutions. To address evolving threats within the strict budgetary constraints of sequestration, the Pentagon has developed what it calls the “third offset strategy” to pursue new technologies, organizations and operational concepts that can offset potential adversaries’ advances in technological and asymmetric capabilities. This is important but may not be enough: American strategists also must get inside the heads of existing or potential enemies, asking not only what they might do to the U.S., but also what the U.S. can do to keep them up at night, exploiting their fears to constrain them.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15553/to-deter-adversaries-u-s-military-must-first-understand-their-fears

Reading for Thursday April 16, 2015

LEAD) USFK commander voices need for THAAD deployment to S. Korea

Excerpt:

Scaparrotti is the one who brought up the need for a THAAD battery in South Korea for the first time in June. The proposal has since become one of the most sensitive defense and political issues in Seoul as China and Russia have expressed strong opposition to such a deployment.

Supporters say the advanced missile defense unit is necessary to meet ever-growing missile and nuclear threats from North Korea, while opponents claim mid- and lower-altitude missile interceptors are enough as the North is unlikely to attack the South with such high-altitude missiles.

Regarding North Korea's nuclear and missile capabilities, Scaparrotti said he assumes the communist nation has the capability to deliver a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead.

"They claim to have a capability to deliver a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile. They paraded it and they've shown it to us. But they haven't tested it," he said."But I, as a commander, I have to be prudent and assume that they can deliver one and act on that basis."

What he did not say is that a good commander has to be prudent and ask for what he needs to accomplish the mission and defend his forces.  There should be no criticism of him or his requests to deploy THAAD.

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2015/04/16/26/0301000000AEN20150416000251315F.html

2015/04/16 02:54

By Chang Jae-soon

Study pans use of '360-degree reviews'

Excerpt:

Some military officials said identifying toxic leaders is not the challenge at hand.

"Most people have worked for a toxic leader at some point, and it wasn't a secret. Everybody knew who was a jerk. The question is: What was done about it?" an unnamed official told Rand researchers. "You could find them; then what? What did we do about it? Doesn't the culture determine what happens at that point? Do we need 360 or do we know?"

http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/04/15/360-reviews/25784447/

A Nuclear Turning Point

Excerpt:

But on closer inspection, what is truly puzzling is that anyone supports the agreement at all. In striking this deal, the Obama administration abandoned a decades-old mainstay of U.S. nonproliferation policy, and opponents are right to reject it. The United States has always opposed the spread of sensitive nuclear technologies—uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing—to all states, including its own allies, and it is a mistake to make an exception for Iran.

Conclusion:

Defenders of the accord have argued that there was no viable alternative short of war. But this is not true. If the United States had given Iran a choice between, on the one hand, continued international isolation, increased economic sanctions, and, all else failing, military strikes on its nuclear facilities and, on the other hand, a zero-enrichment deal that lifted sanctions and provided other face-saving goodies, including nonsensitive nuclear technologies, Iran would have eventually chosen the latter.

Instead, we gave up the game. Iran out-negotiated us. We abandoned a clear international standard we had established in order to meet Iran halfway in its unreasonable demands. What we have to show for it is not a historic deal, but the death of a 70-year-old bipartisan pillar of American foreign policy.

The longstanding, bipartisan nonproliferation standard is dead.

Matthew Kroenig

April 20, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 30

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/nuclear-turning-point_914660.html

So who are today's Adams and Mahan?

Four years later, in Realities of American Foreign Policy, Kennan wrote that the chief threat to the security of the United States was “the association of the dominant portion of the physical resources of Europe and Asia with a political power hostile to ourselves.” Such a threat to U.S. interests, he noted, could only emanate from certain regions of the globe “where major industrial power, enjoying adequate access to raw materials, is combined with large reserves of educated and technically skilled man-power.”

Such geopolitical reasoning, Kennan wrote in American Diplomacy, was scarce among Americans in 1898 when the U.S. went to war with Spain and as a result acquired the Philippine Islands. He credited two Americans of that time with understanding international realities: Brooks Adams and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Adams, Kennan noted, “sensed the ultimate importance of the distinction between sea power and land power” and grasped “the danger of political collaboration between Russia, Germany and China,” while Mahan, “was charting new paths . . . which led in the direction of a more profound appraisal of the sources of American security.” He called their efforts in this regard “an isolated spurt of intellectual activity against a background of general torpor and smugness in American thinking about foreign affairs.”

U.S. Marines fighting in Seoul

Image Credit: U.S. Navy

George Kennan’s Geopolitics of the Far East

A worldview based on “unsentimental calculations of the balance of power” and an understanding of human nature.

http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/george-kennans-geopolitics-of-the-far-east/

By Francis P. Sempa

April 15, 2015

Top diplomats from S. Korea, U.S., Japan hold cooperation talks

Excerpt:

The meeting appears to reflect the urgency the U.S. sees in the need for improvement in Korea-Japan ties, which have been badly strained for years, due mainly to Tokyo's attempts to whitewash its wartime atrocities and colonial occupation, especially its sexual enslavement of women for its troops during World War II.

• Yonhap News Agency

onApr 16, 2015 @ 10:40 AM

http://www.globalpost.com/article/6518251/2015/04/16/top-diplomats-s-korea-us-japan-hold-cooperation-talks

PACOM House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, Prepared Statement

Extensive overview of the situation and threats in PACOM.

By Commander, US Pacific Command, ADM Samuel J. Locklear, III | April 15, 2015

http://www.pacom.mil/Media/SpeechesTestimony/tabid/6706/Article/585175/pacom-us-house-of-representatives-armed-services-committee-prepared-statement.aspx

Lippert doubts North’s sincerity

But what he could not diplomatically say is that he is not at all surprised by the regime's insincerity.

Also note his comments on Korea-Japan historical issues and the US "role."

http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3003154&cloc=rss%7Cnews%7Cjoongangdaily

The Politics of Rebalance: The Future of US Leadership In Asia

With the recent survey by the GOP that national security issues eclipse economic issues does that mean Asian issues will become an election issue?  Having some "contextual intelligence" would be a good thing for the next president.  But I wonder if we will ever hear the phrase contextual intelligence during the campaign - even if national security issues dominate I doubt contextual intelligence will resonate on a bumper sticker or in sound bites - e.g.,  "I have more contextual intelligence that candidate X"

Excerpt:

In crafting policy on Asia, the next U.S. president – Democrat or Republican – will require “contextual intelligence,” an essential presidential leadership skill Joseph Nye defines as “an intuitive diagnostic skill that helps a leader understand change, interpret the outside world, set objectives, and align strategies and tactics with objectives to create smart policies in a new situation.” Candidates’ level of contextual intelligence on four critical areas – Asian security, trade and investment, civil society, and China – as we previously posited in these pages may serve as a bellwether of whether pragmatic or ideological politics will drive the future of U.S. Asia policy.

Image Credit: U.S.-Japan Council via Flickr.com

How will U.S. presidential candidates frame the future of U.S. policy towards Asia?

http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/the-politics-of-rebalance-the-future-of-us-leadership-in-asia/

The Iran Pact Is Not A Model For Dealing With Reclusive North Korea

Excerpts:

However, this is not the case. North Korea is very different from Iran, and is unlikely to fit in with such a plan.

The major difference is to be found in Iran’s political structure. Iran is clearly not a democracy in a strict sense, but it is still a country in which popular opinion actually matters. The Iranians can vote and their elections are generally free and fair, though participants have to act within certain established restrictions. There are competing political parties in Iran, and Iranians can protest against government policy at rallies, as well as creating political and social associations.

...

Unfortunately, the situation in North Korea is very different. To start with, North Korea is not a country in which popular opinions have any real significance. The country is run by a small group of hereditary elites. This elite group would probably not mind if its people were better off, but its ability to hold on to power does not depend on popular support. North Koreans do not vote, or rather vote in elections where the sole candidate always wins 100% of all votes. No independent political organizations exist. The media’s only interest is in the alleged greatness of the current government and its current policies. Participation in anti-government rallies is suicidal.

HOME | COMMENTARIES | PARALLEL THOUGHTS

http://www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/parallelt-thoughts/iran-korea-04152015093311.html

A commentary by Andrei Lankov
2015-04-15