Archive for the 'National Security' Category

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Bilgepumps Episode 38: Section 22 – The Forgotten Electronic Warfare Superstars of WWII and the Historians who are changing that
FEBRUARY 24TH, 2021

General Headquarters, South West Pacific Area, Section 22 was a secret radar intelligence organization established under General Douglas MacArthur in World War II.  This posts is the first in a series of six that will include the entire 82 slide information packet that I sent to the CIMSEC Bilge Pumps pod cast which was recorded this morning (Feb 19, 20201) and will “air” Feb 24, 2021

Section 22 Field Units Map, 7 Oct 1944 (via Alwyn Lloyd)

The beginnings of the secret Australian radar countermeasures unit during the Pacific War Feb 2020
Student thesis: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) – CDU

The Daughter Unit clued me in this week to a humongous ruckus which brewed among Air Force contributors to military-oriented discussion boards on Reddit – a ruckus which involves the current Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force – which for the laymen audience, means the very tippy-top enlisted, that singular and exemplary senior NCO who supposedly sits at the right hand of the highest military commanders in the land, to keep them appraised of the interests of the enlisted men and women. The Daughter Unit keeps track of this military ‘gen on a more regular basis than I do, as my two-decades long service was a good while ago, and I walked away from it all and constructed another life and long-term interests in writing, book-blogging and publishing. I will confess to some sentimental feelings for my service, as it provided me with a lot of fun, foreign travel, a decent paycheck and benefits (to include the pension and retirement benefits), a chance to hang out with some amazing people (as well as a soupcon of psychos, amiable freaks and the severely mal-adjusted), and a kind of mental grounding, even a rough sympathy when it comes to people who work for a living and get their hands dirty and their fingernails broken. But enough about me, and my not-particularly-rewarding career as an enlisted minion, toiling away in the bowels of the mighty military public affairs machine some two- or three-decades past.

The office of the Chief Master Sergeant of any service is a huge thing, in all the military forces: the name of the current Chief-Master-Whatever is one of the things military recruits to whatever branch are expected to know and recite on demand when in Basic Training. General officers there are, in legions, and the multi-stars roost en masse like grackles in the highest levels of command – but there is only one Chief Enlisted, for all four (five counting the Coast Guard) military services. This one – CMSAF JoAnne Bass – is the first female to take up that exalted office for any of the services. I wish her the best luck in the world. When I began serving, there weren’t but a bare half-dozen of female senior enlisteds in the Air Force, and a fair number of the junior enlisted that I served with were the first or second females in certain traditionally male specialties which had just been opened to females. Unfortunately, as things are shaping up in the first months of her tour of duty, Chief Bass had better buckle in, as it looks like it’s going to be a bumpy flight. She put her foot wrong, straight off the bat, when a young NCO (innocently, or perhaps not so innocently) inquired on the CMSAF’s FB page as to how her last name was pronounced – like the fish or the musical instrument?    Read the rest of this entry »

The Roosevelt administration was significantly infiltrated with Soviet spies. Harry Dexter White was assistant Secretary of the Treasury and played an important role in the Bretton Woods Conference.

After the war, White was closely involved with setting up what were called the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions were intended to prevent some of the economic problems that had occurred after World War I. As late as November 1945, White continued to argue for improved relations with the Soviet Union.[21] White later became a director and U.S. representative of the IMF. On June 19, 1947, White abruptly resigned from the International Monetary Fund, vacating his office the same day.

The Wikipedia article is quite defensive about White’s role vis a vis the Soviet Union.

This codename was confirmed by the notes of KGB archivist Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, in which six key Soviet agents are named. Harry Dexter White is listed as being first “KASSIR” and later “JURIST”.[65]

Other Venona decrypts revealed further damaging evidence against White, including White’s suggestions on how to meet and pass information on to his Soviet handler. Venona Document #71 contains decryptions of White’s discussions on being paid for his work for the Soviet Union

The Venona transcripts make it clear that White was a Soviet asset.

What of Biden? We have the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, which have been largely suppressed. Hunter was paid millions by China, even though he is an addict and weak link to his father. Other Biden family members are deeply corrupt in other areas.

Biden appointees are pro China if anything. and a significant matter.

Biden’s appointees won’t be weak on China, they will be pro-China. The geopolitical implications of Biden coming to office are going to have long-term repercussions. Even before the election China was threatening the US military, crossing the sea boundary into Taiwan’s territory with invasion forces 2-3 times each week, threatening other neighbors, attacking diplomats of other countries, and attempting to destroy Australia’s economy. Given Pres. Trump’s opposition to Chinese communist bullying of other countries vs. Biden’s pro-China stance, it was understandable that China has supported Biden from the beginning. Having worked in several countries neighbors to China, I can say that many people overseas are not happy with the idea of Biden as president.

China is not shy about asserting its opinion

February 2021 reprises a red-line drama, not yet as tragedy and not as farce but definitely as a threat to world peace. The repetition tests the will of President Joe Biden’s administration to defend American security and a common-sense understanding of human freedom.

“Red line” meaning China’s rules.

What is behind this ?

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Pundits describe a fractured Republican party: the cult of Trump versus policy conservatives. This narrative compounds wishful thinking with ignorance of life outside the beltway, but has some truth. Trump, some say, is considering nurturing a third party.

The Republican establishment thinks they are more Republican than the Trumpists and have decades of battle scars to prove it. But they need him – whether he runs again or campaigns for others or is a strong voice. But for him the structural support of a party with a century and a half’s institutional memory can be helpful; most voted consistently with him. When Biden swears in 1000 appointees before his first full day in office, I worry that any Republican splits weaken a future Republican president’s hand. It is true that some of Trump’s best bets were ones the establishment would never have considered, but it is also true minor posts took a long time to fill.

The Trumpists need to accept that all of the people pulling back are not the sorry excuses for Republicans of the Lincoln Project, though they may not want to share a foxhole with them. Trump could have handled the last two months better and in not doing so, he irritated some, like McConnell, left to pick up the pieces. McConnell may be a Rino but he got those appointments through because he knew what he was doing. However, the establishment needs to remember, Trump nominated and backed them, their strengths came from their abilities rather than political resumes.

The establishment needs to be honest with itself. For decades the party promised and didn’t deliver, risks weren’t taken. They must acknowledge where Trump’s strength lay – at least in terms of the people I read, the people I know. It was policies. His actions – and boy did he act – in a Republican tradition. A good many people first voted for Trump as the better of two bad choices and came to see him as a transformative president. Some that hadn’t in 2016 said they’d crawl over broken glass to vote for him in 2020. Sure, some found him offensive, some had buyer’s remorse. He engendered turmoil and tension, though often in response to the wolves that circled him. (A baying that hasn’t stilled as he leaves the White House.) A resonant fact, however, is that many more voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. And the reason for most was, I suspect, what he’d done. Whether or why he lost, with 74 million votes he’s a force.

He was volatile and transparent. He wounded and was wounded. We winced at ad hominem attacks on his staff. He entertained. We were used to laconic heroes, but here was a man of action but also of emotional responses. But the four years – how and what he accomplished, the assumptions that made of his tenure a coherent whole – embodied instincts true to human nature and its potential. And that whole was conservative, American conservative.

He seemed to possess endless energy to push back while striding forward, he persevered. And his focus was on what counted: internationally, improving the United States’ ability to respond quickly and forcefully, to expand its frontiers; domestically, reducing the government’s (especially the national government’s) impositions and cleansing the unAmerican doctrines of tribalism parading as political correctness. In doing so, he implicitly respected his constituents. Are these not what they wanted, had wanted?
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Jay Nordlinger’s National Review article has stuck in my mind – an interesting family history of curious (in both senses) people and how complicated man and his loves and choices are. I know nothing about math and little about American communists, who seemed (and seem) to me quite foreign.

But the Browders were broad in their abilities: perhaps the effect on of Russia and America, communism and western values, might draw observations, especially if readers are more familiar than I with their lives. Bill Browder “goes around the world campaigning for “Magnitsky acts” — laws in honor of the murdered lawyer” who had represented him, battling Putin who was behind Magnitsky’s persecution and death. His grandfather is probably not a familiar name today, but he represented the Communist Party in America for decades and was famous for what we may (I’m sure my parents who were more his contemporaries would) see as absurd, the concise argument: “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” The generation between – three sons – were remarkable American mathematicians.

The complexity of human nature? What we learn from our parents and what we believe and how we rebel? How remarkable talents are handed down and how some families are able to cultivate those talents? How math can deliver real answers and politics become fuzzy as consequences, empirical evidence, is ignored? Oh, well, at least this may entertain as we await Tuesday’s verdict on our culture – perhaps a temporary one but important nonetheless.

Today, 9/11/2020, is the nineteenth anniversary of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Often forgotten or glossed over as time goes on were the actions of the passengers of Flight 93, whose resistance to Al-Qaeda’s suicide-hijacker team brought the plane down in Shanksville, PA rather than Al-Qaeda’s chosen target, saving the lives of other Americans at the price of their own.

On the 2018 anniversary of 9/11/2001, President Trump dedicated the National Park Service memorial to their actions that day.  The NPS has since posted a memorial web page with the recordings of the cockpit flight recorder, cellphone calls from the plane, and court trial evidence including crash photos, here:   https://www.nps.gov/flni/learn/historyculture/sources-and-detailed-information.htm

Yet for all that, I have not seen anything matching what a friend of mine, Tom Holsinger, wrote about 9/11/2001 and the people on Flight 93 — our fellow citizens who rose up and fought Al Qaeda, when all others, our military, our political leaders, our law enforcement, were frozen in surprise — at the strategypage.com web site in October 2002.  I have not read any written commemoration of their act, before or since, as moving as this passage:

Students of American character should pay close attention to Flight 93. A random sample of American adults was subjected to the highest possible stress and organized themselves in a terribly brief period, without benefit of training or group tradition other than their inherent national consciousness, to foil a well planned and executed terrorist attack. Recordings show the passengers and cabin crew of Flight 93 – ordinary Americans all – exemplified the virtues Americans hold most dear.

 

Certain death came for them by surprise but they did not panic and instead immediately organized, fought and robbed terror of its victory. They died but were not defeated.

 

Ordinary Americans confronted by enemies behaved exactly like the citizen-soldiers eulogized in Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture.

 

Herman Wouk called the heroic sacrifice of the USS Enterprise’s Torpedo 8 squadron at the Battle of Midway “… the soul of America in action.” Flight 93 was the soul of America, and the American people know it. They spontaneously created a shrine at the crash site to express what is in their hearts and minds but not their mouths. They are waiting for a poet. Normally a President fills this role.

 

But Americans feel it now. They don’t need a government or leader for that, and didn’t to guide their actions on Flight 93, because they really are America. Go to the crash shrine and talk to people there. Something significant resonates through them which is different from, and possibly greater than, the shock of suffering a Pearl Harbor attack at home.

 

Pearl Harbor remains a useful analogy given Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto’s statement on December 7, 1941 – “I fear we have woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” They were giants on Flight 93.

 

This was the spontaneous memorial wall erected by Americans for the passengers and crew of Flight 93 in a field near Shanksville, PA that Tom Holsinger wrote about above.

On September 2, 1945, the surrender ceremony for Imperial Japan occurred in Tokyo  Bay with General Douglas MacArthur officiating.

There are several films of this event. There was the official one MacArthur’s Signal Corps camera crew recorded.  There is a film from war correspondent William Courtenay and a finally a film taken by Commander George F. Kosco of the US Navy.

I have included in this post several versions of each of these films in black and white and color below.

The end of this ceremony marked the close of the most destructive war in human history whose 75th anniversary passed today.

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Today’s date, 6 August 2020 marks the 75th Anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Some where in the neighborhood of 70,000–80,000 people in Hiroshima were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm that reached it’s peak three hours after the detonation.  Japanese military personnel made up 20,000 of the 70,000–80,000 immediate deaths.   This bombing set in motion a train of events including the subsequent atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Soviet Union’s accelerated invasion of Japanese occupied Manchuria on 9 August 1945 and Emperor Hirohito’s 15 August 1945 broadcast of Japan’s surrender under the terms laid out by the Potsdam Declaration.

Much has been written on these events and I’ve revisited them here on Chicagoboyz annually from 2011 to 2018.  This year, 2020, I’m going to address a different part of the Atomic attacks.  Namely, how the American military electronically communicated about the Atomic bomb.  How the secrecy and limitations of that communications system meant Admiral Nimitz knew about the Atomic bomb long before General MacArthur. And how General  MacArthur was working to change that for the proposed and cancelled by A-Bomb invasion of Southern Japan

Figure 1 – This is the mushroom cloud marking the use of the “Little Boy” uranium-235 atomic bomb dropped from the B-29 “Enola Gay.” This photo was taken from the B-29 “Necessary Evil” which was piloted by Captain George W. Marquardt.

AMERICA’S SECRET TALKER

In World War 2 many of the major powers developed strategic level code & cypher radio electronic communications systems between it’s top level political & military leaders and the various theater commanders.  The German Geheimschreiber (secret writer) is the best known of these systems because British crypt-analysts at Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park with the the aid of eventually ten Colossus computers.

Much less well know is the Anglo-American equivalent of the German Geheimschreiber,  The US Army Signal Corps and Bell Telephone Laboratories SIGSALY.  This system was the only form of secret broadcast radio-electronic communications the American and British government trusted to transmit information on the Atomic bomb in the World War II.   It was due in large part to that level of communications security that Admiral Nimitz was informed of the atomic bomb before General MacArthur.  Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii and later Guam was reachable by SIGSALY after his initial courier briefing.  General MacArthur between October 1944 and May 1945 was not, for a number of reasons I’ll get into a little later.

First, a quick introduction: SIGSALY was a highly secret WW2 digital voice communications system that used a special one-time pad encryption.  There were only 12 station made in all of WW2 and MacArthur’s had two.  The first in Brisbane was sent to Manila.  The 2nd SIGSALY meant for Hollandia was instead placed in a Australian built barge barge in the SWPA “Signal Corps Grand fleet,” a motley collection of small ships and barges with powerful Signal Corps radios.  The barge mounted SIGSALY  was intended for quick sea movement and it was key for MacArthur’s communications at Okinawa and Kyushu during the planned invasion of Japan.

Figure 2 – This is a SIGSALY digital radio-telephone system screen captured from the Crypto Museum web site.  

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Today, the Department of Justice (so- called) dropped its prosecution of General Michael Flynn. This followed a ferocious defense by Sidney Powell, an attorney and author of the excellent book, “Licensed to Lie” which explained the federal misbehavior in the Enron cases, one of which resulted in a unanimous decision by the US Supreme Court that reversed the conviction of Arthur Anderson Accounting Corporation in a miscarriage of justice by Andrew Weissmann who should be disbarred for the Mueller investigation which he ran with Mueller as a senile figurehead.

Why was Flynn prosecuted ?

Here is an explanation.

The only other Republican candidate to repudiate the “Bush Freedom Agenda” was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That is why the 2016 Republican primary became a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. The whole of the American Establishment had signed on to a utopian crusade to impose the liberal world order on the Muslim world. After nine years of frustration in Iraq, it saw in the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrations of 2011 a second chance to bring its agenda to fruition. The result of this was the near-collapse of Egypt and an eight-year civil war in Syria that killed half a million people and displaced 10 million refugees.

Flynn called attention to this massive intelligence failure and had to be destroyed. It’s a shame that Cruz did not endorse Trump at the end on become part of a unity campaign.

I have previously posted my opinion on the Flynn matter, which does not differ from David Goldman except in detail.

After Flynn was driven out of his post at DIA, things got even more threatening to the intelligence officials, as he became a prime advisor to candidate Trump and, early in the campaign, other Republicans. After the 2016 elections, the IC officials went all-out to keep him out of the White House, sometimes resorting to spreading ridiculous stories. President Obama warned Trump not to appoint Flynn as national security advisor, and Susan Rice actually warned the president-elect that Flynn might be in violation of the Logan Act, for which nobody has ever been prosecuted, and hence blackmailable by the Russians. Meanwhile, the Bureau had opened a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn’s activities. His digital communications were monitored, “unmasked” at the request of Obama officials, and leaked to friendly journalists.

Goldman’s version is a little different.

As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief. America’s noble – or perhaps narcissistic – intentions did more damage than Trump’s indifference.

In retrospect, I think I agree even more with Goldman on this. I supported the Iraq War at first but it was botched beyond redemption.

This is another post I made on the same topic last February.

CIA must be disestablished. Its functions should be returned to the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury. FBI must be restricted to law enforcement. At home, the Agencies are partisan institutions illegitimately focused on setting national policy. Abroad, Agencies untied to specific operational concerns are inherently dangerous and low-value.
Intelligence must return to its natural place as servant, not master, of government. Congress should amend the 1947 National Security Act. The President should broaden intelligence perspectives, including briefs from State, Defense, and Treasury, and abolish CIA’s “covert action.” State should be made responsible for political influence and the armed services for military and paramilitary affairs.

This is an obvious fact. Our intelligence capability has been destroyed in China and Iran by CIA incompetence in its secure communication systems.

In the press of events related to the Great Wuhan Coronavirus Pandemic, many anniversaries of the Second World War have been passing by with little notice and less comment.  For example, April 1st 2020 was the 75th Anniversary of the April  1st 1945 “Love-Day” landings on the western shores of Okinawa.

Figure 1 – This is the West Point Atlas map of both the 1 April 1945 Love Day landings through 8 April 1945 and initial Imperial Japanese 32nd Army dispositions to defend Okinawa.

The Okinawa campaign in WW2 has often been described as marking the end old style total war. Where “cork screw and blow torch” close combat to the death between American attackers “who fought to live” and Japanese defenders who “died in order to fight” played out its last dance.

Figure 2 – This is a photo of the USMC III Corps Landing beachhead on Okinawa April 1, 1945.

Upon closer examination, as this 75th anniversary article series will demonstrate, Okinawa is far better described as a high tech war for the electromagnetic spectrum between technological peer competitors air and naval forces.  A “secret radar war,” if you will, where two opposing command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) sensor networks were directing land, sea and air forces in a series of both combat and logistical moves and countermoves.

And while the less advanced, and organizationally deficient, Japanese military lost Okinawa proper. It still took advantage of the primarily US Navy institutional biases, American military inter-service rivalries, logistical planning weaknesses caused by that rivalry and US Navy’s unwillingness to learn from “non-approved” sources to never the less defeat the US Navy’s original Phase III plan to overrun the upper Ryukyu’s and install island air and radar bases close enough Kyushu to properly provide land based air superiority for the invasion of Japan.

These campaign objective failures were hidden in tales of US Navy destroyer picket heroism in the “Fleet That Came to Stay:…and classified top secret files…because of the coming budget war associated with the pending merger of the War and Navy department’s into the Department of Defense.  After 75 years, this series will part the curtains on these hidden histories.

figure 3 – This is a map of the Ryukyu Island chain with Okinawa at the lower center-right. It’s location would allow American airpower to dominate the sea lanes from China and Korea to Japan. Phase III of Operation Iceberg was to capture Miyako Jima at the lower center-left for the RAF Bomber Command Tiger Force as well as Kikaiga Jima, Amami Oshima and Tokuno Shima for USAAF & USMC fighter bases to cover the planned Operation Olympic landings on Kyushu.

Too accomplish that objective, this series will examine the planned goals of the Operation Iceberg campaign against what was accomplished. How various American military institutions, doctrine and planning failed.  And why the defeat of the US Navy’s  Phase III plans set the stage for an American blood bath of preventable naval casualties during the planned Operation Olympic assault of the Japanese home islands, had the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not made the invasion of Japan unnecessary.

Figure 4 – The yellow highlighted names on this map show islands in the Ryukyu chain that hosted Japanese air bases that were used through out the 83 day Okinawa campaign as staging areas for kamikaze, visual spotter and radar snooper aircraft. These bases were never fully suppressed by American or British carrier air strikes. Three of these air bases were scheduled for invasion and capture in the Operation Iceberg Phase III plans. None of these bases were taken due to US Navy casualties from the fanatical Japanese resistance on and around Okinawa.

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ITALY COVID-19 Confirmed Cases and Deaths 25 Feb 2020

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The themes of this update will be on issues of COVID-19 spread, testing, public health institutional credibility, some e-mails evaluating the CDC and our elites, and my personal analysis of same after the top line infection numbers and headlines.

The SARS-CoV2 virus and it’s COVID-19 virgin fields infection seems to have a top line R(0) of between three and 6.7 — that is one person infects near seven people on average — because there are repeated “super spreader” events where one person slimed an institution with a lot of close contact and then the fomite contamination of that institutional setting causes everyone present to get the disease. Examples thus far include the Diamond Princess Cruise ship, a pair of prisons in China, and multiple hospitals in China and now South Korea. The rate of growth of the COVID-19 pandemic is such that we will be fighting it on a very large scale in a few weeks (no more than 10) in every nation world wide with the public and private medical institutions, societal resources, and people we have right now, with all their flaws. And not what we wish they were, but will never have. There simply isn’t going to be time and energy for blame games when issues of daily survival break upon us all.

Top line, there are currently 78,986 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, including 2,468 fatalities as of 23 February 2020 at 11:52 a.m. ET on the BNO News corona virus traking site (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/) China, Taiwan Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Italy, and Iran all appear to have local, or endemic, spread of the disease. See multiple charts attached and headline summary

Bar Chart of World COVID-19 Infections as of 23 Feb 2020

Bar Chart of World Wide COVID-19 Infections Without China and the Diamond Princess Cruise Liner

World Headline Summary:

o Italy confirms 3rd death and cancels last 2 days of carnivale in Venice as cases soar above 100
o 4 more cases confirmed in UK
o 200 Israelis quarantined
o Japan confirms more cases
o Japanese Emperor expresses hope for Tokyo Games (fat chance)
o ROK Gov’t total cases above 600
o Trump says US has everything ‘under control’ as he asks Congress for more money (I call B.S. below)
o EU’s Gentiloni says he has ‘full confidence’ In Italian health officials
o Turkey, Pakistan close borders with Iran as confirmed cases soar
o Global Times (Chinese Gov’t news source) says virus may not have originated at Hunan seafood market
o Axios reports shortages of 150 essential drugs likely. (Most source in China)

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As of this morning’s time hack, world wide there are now 1,770 dead and 71,223 infected by COVID-19. Community spread is underway in Singapore (see chart), Taiwan and Japan. The USA thinks it might be on-going in the USA. Both Japan and the USA refuse to state this, but actions being taken argue otherwise.  Two horrid COVID-19 infection reports from Chinese news sources — the Taiwan News is reporting re-infection with COVID-19 is causing heart failure and South China Morning Post is reporting 34 and 94 day from exposure to infection super spreaders.  Recovered from COVID-19 infection Ontario couple are still testing positive for coronavirus. Finally,  COVID-19 fomit** contamination of Chinese money and survival of corona-virus in high heat & humidity are also in the update.

31 Dec 2019 to 16 Feb 2020 COVID-19 Infection Level Bar Chart

Number of COVID-19 Infections outside China as of Feb 16, 2020

Singapore COVID-19 Infection Status 15 Feb 2020

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December 7th 2019 is the 78th anniversary of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surprise Pearl Harbor attack on the capitol ship battle line of the US Pacific Fleet.  After that attack there was a round of American elite political and military leaders a collective swearing of “Never Again.”  That is, “Never again will the USA be so surprised by a foreign enemy.”

This is what Pearl Harbor looked like through Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force (IJNAF) bomb sights on December 7th 1941.

Yet despite that, America has indeed been “surprised” in exactly the way of Pearl Harbor repeatedly since 1941.  The Korean war is one example five years after WW2 ended.  The Soviet Invasions of both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan in 1968 and 1979 are two others   It was certainly an intelligence surprise on 9/11/2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center in NY City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.,  and the “surprise” of there being few/no Weapons of Mass destruction in post 2003 Iraq, and Iran’s recent drone and cruise missile attack on Saudi Arabian oil refining facilities.

The reason for this pattern of failure boils down to the forgotten and unlearned  — frankly impossible for American elites to learn —  intelligence lessons of Pearl Harbor.  Those unlearned lessons being that the interlocking  patron-client political relations inside the American federal civil government, military and intelligence organizations lead to narrow self-interested group think over the concerns of outside reality.  And that this tendency towards self-interested group think is at its absolute worse when facing a foreign enemy with a police state internal security system that is running a campaign of strategic deception and denial.

If that “worst case” foreign enemy sounds a lot like Imperial Japan, the People’s Republic of North Korea, China, the Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran. It means you have paid attention to both American history since Pearl Harbor and to current events.

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The end of the Pacific War historiography of “Atomic Diplomacy” seems destined for a second round of debunking, after the 1980’s declassification of WW2 Ultra files, with what looks like a “Jon Parchell talking to Japanese scholars about Commander Mitsuo Fuchida’s version of Midway” moment. [1]

That is, an accepted American Pacific War historiography is about to be ‘up ended’ by Japanese language scholarship little/unknown in English language for years after its appearance. In this particular case, the ‘scholarship’ is a 2011 NHK documentary titled as follows:

 “Atomic bombing – top secret information that was never utilized”

原爆投下　活（い）かされなかった極秘情報

Original link:

http://www.nhk.or.jp/special/onair/110806.html

Currently accessible link:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkev97

Atomic Bomb Pit #2 – B-29 BocksCar’s Loading Site on Tinian.  This was the plane that killed Nagasaki.  Japanese intelligence tracked it, but Japanese military leaders could not bring themselves to stop it.

The NHK documentary answers questions that “Atomic Diplomacy” has never bothered to ask.  Specifically “What did the Imperial Japanese Military & Government know about the American nuclear weapon program, when did it know it, and what did it do about it.”

NHK’s documentary lays out the following:

1. The Japanese military knew of the Manhattan project in 1943 and started its own nuclear weapons programs (IJA & IJN) as a result.[2]
2. The Imperial Japanese Military gave up these nuclear programs in June 1945. [3]
3. The Imperial Japanese Military & Foreign Ministry were informed of the American Atomic test on July 16, 1945 and refused to believe it was a nuclear detonation.
4. The code breakers of the Imperial Japanese Army had been tracking the combat operations of the 509th Composite Group including both A-bomb drops.[4] The Imperial General Staff was told of the special message to Washington DC for the Hiroshima attack, sat on the information, and warned no one.
5. The Imperial General Staff repeated this non-communication performance for the 2^nd nuclear attack on Nagasaki.

Not having Japanese language skills myself, I had a link to a 2013 English language translations of the documentary sent to me by an acquaintance.

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The Hong Kong demonstrations are still going on.

Now, The CCP has been sending troops into the city, saying it is just a troop “rotation” but no photos of troops leaving have been seen.

Michael Yon, who covered Iraq and Afghanistan, is onscene.

He is also watching both Koreas. He considers neither trustworthy.

The proximate cause of the Korea-Japan “dispute” is Korean cultural weakness that magnifies, amplifies, fertilizes any paper cut into gangrene. The USA and Japan must be prepared to amputate South Korea. The day is coming.

The ultimate cause of the disputes is China. Core China culture runs Korea as a barnyard animal.

As for Hong Kong, Strategic Elegance: “Home Depot says suppliers are moving manufacturing out of China to avoid tariffs”

Hold strong Hong Kong! Hong Kong does not have to beat CCP — only outlive.

We are entering very dangerous times and the media sees only the politics of 2020.

Watch that Steve Bannon video at SDA. He thinks that if the CCP goes into Hong Kong to do another Tiananmen Square, the CCP will collapse.

It’s become something of a regular occurrence for the American mainstream media to blow a foreign policy story because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Yet they seem to have greatly sunk to new lows in missing the real importance of events leading to the 19 June 2019 Iranian shoot down of an American drone.

RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator)

President Trump has ended the 1980 Carter Doctrine!

The free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf is no longer a “Vital Interest,” thanks to frac’ing, for a near energy independent USA.

BACKGROUND

CENTCOM confirmed Last Wednesday night of 19 June 2019, in international air space over the Strait of Hormuz, an Iranian surface to air missile (SAM) battery shot down a US Navy RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator) Global Hawk. The ~$120 million drone in question was a navalised version of the USAF Global Hawk, used as proof of concept for the production MQ-4C Triton. It was essentially an unarmed, jet powered, sail plane with the wing span of a 737 jet liner and several tons of sensors. The drone fills the mission of the U-2, at similar altitudes, without the risks of a human pilot in the event of a shoot down.

Pentagon RQ-4N Shoot Down Map with Drone and SAM launch battery location.

Iran has claimed it used it’s ‘Third of Khordad’ domestically built SAM system, operated by the IRGC, to shoot down the drone. This SAM system is described as a copy or derivative of the Russian Buk M3 / SA-17 GRIZZLY that incorporates the Bavar 373 missile that, in turn, appears to be a derivative/copy of the Soviet 5V55/SA-10B with additional controls. If you think of it as a late model Raytheon MIM-23 Hawk medium-range surface-to-air missile battery firing an early version of the MIM-104 Patriot PAC 1 missile, you would not be far wrong.

Press TV Tweet of Iranian SAM

It was this lack of a human pilot, either as a death or a prisoner of war, that saw President Trump jump off Iran’s scripted “escalation ladder.” Instead of destroying a SAM battery and converting 150 odd IRGC missile operators into another “Martyr blood sacrifice” for the Mullah regime to celebrate. Pres. Trump responded with cyber-attacks on Iranian missile control systems to remind the Mullah’s of the West’s technological “Black Magic” and additional economic sanctions that will cause further payroll cuts to both the IRGC and it’s over seas terror networks. (Truth be told, the new economic sanctions threaten the Mullah’s power far more than any set of tit for tat military strikes.)

And in a move treated as an afterthought, if the MSM mentioned it at all, President Trump ended an era in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy.

END OF AN ERA
It has been almost 39 & 1/2 years — 10 years before the Cold War ended — that President Carter pronounced access to Mid-East oil a “Vital Interest” that the United States would go to war to protect.

Our two wars in Iraq both have that date, and that policy, as their starting point.

Now that era is over.

Last week Pres. Trump forged a completely new Middle East Foreign policy for America. Specifically, Pres. Trump took the opportunity Iran’s military escalations leading to the shooting down of the RQ-4N to end the January 23, 1980 “Carter Doctrine” expressed as follows —

“…An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

This is how Vandana Hari at the Nikkei Asian Review put it:

Asia has most to lose if Middle East turmoil hits oil supplies
As US-Iran tensions, can crude importers defend their interests?
JUNE 21, 2019 14:21 JST
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Asia-has-most-to-lose-if-Middle-East-turmoil-hits-oil-supplies

“U.S. President Donald Trump says he might take military action against Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But he has indicated he won’t necessarily jump in to protect international oil supplies from the Middle East if they are under threat from the Islamic Republic.

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The position, articulated by Trump in an interview with Time magazine on June 17, should not come as a surprise, even if it appears to be at odds with the Pentagon beefing up aircraft carriers and troops in the Middle East in recent weeks, citing a threat from Iran.

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As Trump spelt out in the interview, the U.S. is no longer as dependent on oil from the Middle East as it was, thanks to burgeoning domestic production.

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Air Force General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasized the message a day later, pointing out that China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea were heavily dependent on supplies moving through the Strait of Hormuz, and needed to protect their interests. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made similar comments.”

The pronouncement above was the full “Bell, Book and Candle” exorcism of American foreign policy — President, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State.  And please carefully note that it happened two days before the RQ-4N was destroyed.

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While “freedom of navigation” on the high seas over all and the Persian Gulf in particular remains a “major interest” of the United State of America.  It is no longer one which America will automatically go to war over.

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In ending the Carter Doctrine, President Trump has fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise of “No More Iraq’s.”

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By changing the cost benefit calculations of Middle-Eastern oil — no more free riding on American protection of Persian Gulf Sea lanes — the only way a nation can “win” internationally now is by “getting close” to the American hyperpower.

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The American Left has finally gotten what it always wanted…no more “Blood for Oil“ in the Middle East.

Somehow, I don’t think President Trump delivering that reality to them will make them very happy.

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It’s damned rare, when you read the histories of the Second World War, that you can definitively find a place where one man, with the right skills, at the right place, at the right time, provided a make or break/victory or defeat  level of difference in a military campaign with his contributions.  Let alone one so central to the identities of the US Navy and US Marine Corps as the Guadalcanal campaign. Yet, for the period of September 1942 and March 1943, there was one US Marine non-commissioned officer who did just that.

He was Master Technical Sargent Dermott H. MacDonnell.  His performance as chief radar operator for Marine Air Group 23’s (MAG-23) SCR-270 radar made the difference between keeping and losing daylight air superiority over Henderson Field in the darkest days of the Guadalcanal campaign.  He was the Guadalcanal Air Campaign’s “Horseshoe Nail of Victory.”

MTSgt Dermott H. MacDonnell at base of SCR-270 radar on Guadalcanal.  His performance with this radar won and kept air superiority in the darkest days of the Guadalcanal campaign Source:  Marine Corps Historical Archives, courtesy of MACCS History

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Professor ZZZ asks: “Trump is not Stalin but in the history of national (federal) political figures in this country, I’m wondering … where [would] you put Trump? … Having a POTUS so publicly awful along those lines lowers the horrible bar so dramatically that we will pay for years to come. Not being Stalin but being Roy Cohn is a hell of a legacy.”
 
Tillman responded:
 
[. . .]
 
Trump is ahead of Woodrow Wilson: World War I, and! his resegregation of the federal civil service. I grant you that being ahead of Wilson is not saying much…but then, the nation survived Wilson, and no one today thinks of Wilson as having lowered the bar vis-a-vis future presidents. Professor ZZZ seems to be worried about this. He wrote: “Having a POTUS so publicly awful along those lines lowers the horrible bar so dramatically that we will pay for years to come.” Really?—Will we pay for it in years to come, or is this just a shabby slippery slope-type argument?
 
I cannot say I see much sense in Professor ZZZ’s references to Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn’s permanent claim to fame is his association with McCarthy and aggressive anticommunism. Trump, by contrast, has been criticized for being too close to Putin. It is not exactly the same; actually, the two are not alike at all.
 
If words and pretty speeches are the measure of a president, then Trump comes up short. The question is whether that is the correct standard for measuring presidents in a dangerous world.

Read the whole thing.

Seth’s last line is a good summary of the general flaw with many anti-Trump arguments. However, Seth doesn’t go far enough with specific examples:

-Trump didn’t withdraw US forces precipitately from an overseas conflict, leaving the worst of our enemies to fill the resulting power vacuum as Obama did in Iraq.

-Trump didn’t reverse longstanding US policy, deprecating alliances with pro-American countries, in a foolish and futile effort to buy the love of the Iranian mullahs as Obama did.

-Trump didn’t let himself get played by the North Korean dictatorship as Clinton, both Bushes and Obama did.

-Trump didn’t use the IRS to harass his political opponents – as Nixon threatened to do, as the Clintons did to right-wing activist organizations, and as Obama did to organizations and individuals who were active in the Tea Party movement.

-Trump didn’t use the FBI and CIA to spy on his Democratic rivals’ election campaigns as Obama seems to have done to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

I can think of numerous other examples of unwise or malicious actions taken by previous presidents that Trump hasn’t done. Feel free to add additional examples in the comments.

I am more and more coming around to the opinion of David Goldman and Michael Ledeen.

The Russia hoax was aimed at Michael Flynn and his role as a Trump advisor.

It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.

General Flynn saw that our battlefield intelligence was too slow. We collected information from the Middle East and sent it back to Washington, where men with stars on their shoulders and others at the civilian intel agencies chewed it over, decided what to do, and sent instructions back to the war zone. By the time all that happened, the battlefield had changed. Flynn short-circuited this cumbersome bureaucratic procedure and moved the whole enterprise to the war itself. The new methods were light years faster. Intel went to local analysts, new actions were ordered from men on the battlefield (Flynn famously didn’t care about rank or status) and the war shifted in our favor.

I read Dakota Meyer’s book. He was denied permission to accompany his Civil Affairs unit into an Afghan village because he was being punished for shooting at Taliban tribesmen firing mortar rounds into his base camp. The reason ? They were “not in uniform.” The ROE of the Obama administration saved his life as the unit he should have been with was ambushed and killed. He made attempts to rescue them, resulting in his award the Medal of Honor.

On 8 September 2009, near the village of Ganjgal, Meyer learned that three Marines and a Navy Corpsman, who were members of Meyer’s squad and his friends, were missing after being ambushed by a group of insurgents. Under enemy fire, Meyer entered an area known to be inhabited by insurgents and eventually found the four missing servicemen dead and stripped of their weapons, body armor and radios. There he saw a Taliban fighter trying to take the bodies. The fighter tackled Meyer, and after a brief scuffle, Meyer grabbed a baseball-sized rock and beat the fighter to death.[8] With the help of Afghan soldiers, he moved the bodies to a safer area where they could be extracted.[9] During his search, Meyer “personally evacuated 12 friendly wounded and provided cover for another 24 Marines and soldiers to escape likely death at the hands of a numerically superior and determined foe.”

In his account of the battle in his book, he relates how it took hours to get permission for artillery to respond to the ambush.

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This blog post on “The June 1944 Normandy Invasion and the Bane of Technologically Illiterate Officers in the Luftwaffe” marks the second in a series of posts departing from past history columns I’ve written for Chicagoboyz in that it is exploring a theme I refer to as “The Bane of Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders.”[1] .

The issue with ‘Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders‘ I’ll be exploring in this and future articles is that such leaders tend to make the same classes of mistakes over and over again.  And when those military leaders reach flag rank on the bones of theories and doctrines that fail the test of combat through their technological illiteracy.  They then bury the real reasons why those doctrines failed behind walls of jargon and classification to avoid accountability for those failures.

In this particular case, the mistake is how the otherwise technically competent Luftwaffe Funkaufklärungsdienst  (Roughly translated — Electronic Intelligence Early Warning Service)  managed to miss a completely unambiguous invasion warning for the Normandy  Invasion — D-Day, June 6th 1944 — the night before the invasion.

This happened because the German officers over the Luftwaffe technicians were technologically illiterate regards both the Allied identification friend or foe (IFF) and Allied radio navigation systems they were monitoring, as well as the radar techniques their own Luftnachrichten Dienat (Air Surveillance Service) were using to track RAF Bomber Command night bomber streams through chaff.

RAF 100 Group Electronic Warfare Techniques 1944-45, showing a combination of radar reflecting chaff and several forms of active jamming. The Funkaufklärungsdienst was created by the Luftwaffe in the spring of 1944 to deal with these techniques.  Source: Steve Blank’s “Hidden in Plain Sight:The Secret History of Silicon Valley,” http://steveblank.com/secret-history

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Electronic warfare is much like mine sweeping/hunting at sea, or combat engineers breaching a minefield on land, in that it is a thankless job when it is done right and “hard” on military officers careers in exercises/planning.  Thus it tends to be avoided, even when it is central to recorded military history.  Case in point — When Stephen L. McFarland wrote “Conquering the Night: Army Air Forces Night Fighters at War” in the late 1990’s (pub date 1998) as a part of “AIR FORCE HISTORY AND MUSEUMS PROGRAM.”  He completely left out the fact that German bomber tail warning radars were picking up Allied night fighter IFF challenges.    This was a fact that Alfred Price had published fourteen years earlier in 1984!

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Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the completion of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK.  The strategic goals of the operation were to destroy German fighter production and inflict a “wastage” rate of the German fighter force such that it was losing fighter planes faster than it was producing them. In  measurements of this objective.  In the initial assessments of the BIG WEEK bombing, 8th Air Force thought they had done that.   Actually, this was as wildly optimistic as the claims of air to air kills by the heavy bomber crew machine gunners.

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Despite destroying 70% of the German fighter aircraft assembly buildings targeted. The USAAF high command had grossly underestimated damage done to electric motor powered machine tools within those buildings and the UK’s Ministry of Economic Warfare that the USAAF relied upon for intelligence of German industry had underestimated German fighter production by a factor of 2 & 1/2 times.

See my Jan 1, 2019 Chicagoboyz post “Industrial Electrification and the Technological Illiteracy of the US Army Air Corps Tactical School 1920-1940” for many of the  reasons why this was so.

Assessment of American “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola

The 8th Air Force lost 565 heavy bombers shot down or scrapped from combat damage so bad it was not worth the effort to repair them.  8th and 9th Air Force fighters escorting the bombers suffered 28 planes shot down.  The over all loss rate per raid averaged 6%…but the American total force losses were 2,600 air crew killed, wounded or captured.  This was 1/5th of 8th Air Force.

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Today marks the 75th Anniversary of the sixth and final day of Operation Argument otherwise known as BIG WEEK.  On Friday, February 25, 1944 the 8th Air Force returns to Messerschmitt factories in Regensburg preceded by 15th Air Force there.  Other Messerschmitt fighter plants at Augsberg and Furth are also hit by 8th Air Force.  These raids mark the conclusion of the first major operation in the final battle for air superiority before the Normandy invasion scheduled for June 1944.

Day Six of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola

Day Six of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 2) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola

ETO Strategic Operations

Mission 235: In the final “Big Week” mission, 4 targets in Germany are hit; 31 bombers and 3 fighters are lost.

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1. 268 B-17s are dispatched to aviation industry targets at Augsburg and the industrial area at Stuttgart; 196 hit Augsburg and targets of opportunity and 50 hit Stuttgart; they claim 8-4-4 Luftwaffe aircraft; 13 B-17s are lost and 172 damaged; casualties are 12 WIA and 130 MIA.
2. 267 of 290 B-17s hit aviation industry targets at Regensburg and targets of opportunity; they claim 13-1-7 Luftwaffe aircraft; 12 B-17s are lost, 1 damaged beyond repair and 82 damaged; casualties are 4 KIA, 12 WIA and 110 MIA.
3. 172 of 196 B-24s hit aviation industry targets at Furth and targets of opportunity; they claim 2-2-2 Luftwaffe aircraft; 6 B-24s are lost, 2 damaged beyond repair and 44 damaged; casualties are 2 WIA and 61 MIA.

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Escort is provided by 73 P-38s, 687 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-47s and 139 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-51s; the P-38s claim 1-2-0 Luftwaffe aircraft, 1 P-38 is damaged beyond repair; the P-47s claim 13-2-10 Luftwaffe aircraft, 1 P-47 is lost and 6 damaged, 1 pilot is MIA; the P-51s claim 12-0-3 Luftwaffe aircraft, 2 P-51s are lost and 1 damaged beyond repair, 2 pilots are MIA.

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Mission 236: 5 of 5 B-17s drop 250 bundles of leaflets on Grenoble, Toulouse, Chartres, Caen and Raismes, France at 2129–2335 hours without loss

MTO Strategic Operations

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Continuing coordinated attacks with the Eighth Air Force on European targets, B-17s with fighter escorts pound Regensburg aircraft factory; enemy fighter opposition is heavy. Other B-17s hit the air depot at Klagenfurt, Austria and the dock area at Pola, Italy. B-24s attack Fiume, Italy marshaling yard and port and hit Zell-am-See, Austria railroad and Graz airfield and the port area at Zara, Yugoslavia; 30+ US aircraft are lost; they claim 90+ fighters shot down.

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For extensive background, see this Wikipedia article, where the passage above came from:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Week

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From Pickle Barrel’s to Radar Pattern Bombing of Cities

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In evaluating the WW2 Combined Bomber Campaign in Europe there is far more propaganda about “precision bombing” than actual accurate and precise bombing.  When using the Norden bombsite in test conditions, on a clear and still day, with an absolutely distinct against back ground target, with a picked high skill aircrew, from less than 10,000 feet altitude,  you could get within a few hundred feet of the target.

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Things were far less then perfect in combat over Europe.  Bombing altitudes exceeded 20,000 feet and the number of days where cloud cover measured less than 4/10ths were few and concentrated in the summer.

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“Big Week” was fought in European winter.  Too fight then, the USAAF had to resort to the use of both British provided “H2S” 10 cm and hand built American “H2X” 3 cm wavelength radars carried on pathfinder bombers leading the USAAF bomber streams.

B-17 Pathfinder in Big Week with a hand built “H2X” Radar provided by the British Branch of MIT’s Radiation Laboratory Source:  http://www.482nd.org/h2x-mickey

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Day Five of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 1) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola

Day Five of “Big Week” Combat Results (Slide 2) from “Coming of Aerial Armageddon” by Dr. John Curatola

Missions 237, 238 and 239 are flown against targets in France; 7 B-17s are lost. Heavy clouds cause over half the bombers dispatched to return without bombing.

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Mission 237: 49 of 81 B-24s hit the Ecalles sur Buchy V-weapon sites; 1 B-24 is damaged. Escort is provided by 61 P-47s

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Mission 238: 258 B-17s are dispatched against V-weapon sites in the Pas de Calais; 109 hit the primary target, 10 hit a road junction E of Yerville, 7 hit a rail siding SW of Abbeville and 6 hit targets of opportunity; 7 B-17s are lost and 75 damaged; casualties are 5 WIA and 63 MIA. Escort is provided by 81 P-38s, 94 P-47s and 22 P-51s; 1 P-38 is damaged beyond repair; the P-51s claim a single German aircraft on the ground.

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Mission 239: 5 of 5 B-17s drop 250 bundles of leaflets[clarification needed] on Amiens, Rennes, Paris, Rouen and Le Mans, France at 2023–2055 hours without loss.

Bomber Command directly contributed to the attacks on the aircraft industry in Schweinfurt. Some 734 bombers were dispatched on the night of 24/25 February, and 695 struck the target.^[1] Of the bombs dropped, 298 hit within three miles and 22 hit inside the target area. Little damage was done.