CNBC Monday reported on recordings made by an Earthworks activist at a Houston oil and gas industry confab last week. The tapes reveal that companies use psyops techniques and even former military personnel to break the “insurgency” of community activism opposing domestic drilling.

“We have several former psyops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” Range Resources communications director Matt Pitzarella said on tape. “Really, all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of psyops in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”

In another session, Matt Carmichael, manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum, made similar recommendations.

“Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency,” Carmichael said. “There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”

What are psyops techniques and troopers and how does the military use them? Think strongman Manuel Noriega in Panama being blasted incessantly by Van Halen and Howard Stern until he finally surrendered to U.S. troops in 1990. Or leaflet drops over villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Colorado, the U.S. Army’s airborne 324th Psychological Operations Company is based out of the Buckley Air National Guard base in Aurora. The unit regularly conducts winter warfare training in the mountains near Vail – clearly for future deployment to the mountains of Afghanistan.

In 2003, a psyops trooper heading into Camp Hale – a former 10th Mountain Division and CIA training ground between Vail and Leadville – told the website Real Vail that psyops are all about marketing (with a gun): “We provide information, that’s basically what we are, In a layman’s sense, we do marketing. We try to sell democracy and the concept of how it works.”

In that same article, a professor who studies psyops techniques had this to say: “It’s all bullshit,” said Donald Goldstein, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. “Warfare has changed to the point that instead of just killing people, you have to understand them first.”

The link between modern warfare and domestic energy production seems particularly topical given the Republican push for more drilling on federal lands and in American suburbia to improve security abroad.

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain recently said he’s a “Koch brothers’ brother from another mother,” referring to Koch Industries’ David and Charles Koch – the energy and chemical industry giants pumping millions into conservative candidates and the tea party movement. In Beaver Creek, Colo., this summer, Charles Koch said the campaign to unseat President Barack Obama and his pro-environment policies would be “the mother of all wars.”

McChrystal responds — well, not exactly with a smile on his face, but with a seeming recognition that persuading skeptics, and not browbeating them, is part of his job. History teaches there are a “tremendous number of unsuccessful efforts to defeat an insurgency,” he concedes (more bluntly than most counterinsurgents, I might add). But he said there is “great reason for optimism,” stemming from “the nature of the insurgency.” The Taliban’s experience in power proves it is “not credible as a political entity now.” Polling data and anecdotal interactions prove the Afghans “don’t want the Taliban back,” and only time they acquiesce to them is when they have no credible alternative. For years, as the Taliban and associated insurgent groups gathered strength, that “was not met by increasies in Afghan national security forces in strength levels or in coalition forces.” Counterinsurgency, he allows, “is not a game in which we play catch-up ball.” The key, McChrystal said, is to get ahead of the game.

Whether that will convince Pingree or anyone else is unclear. But McChrystal appeared eager to engage the question respectfully.

This is not an identical situation to Iraq. Eide says humanitarian services won’t be interrupted — how can he promise that? — and he’s also leaning on Karzai for anti-corruption measures by leveraging the prospect of a U.N. pullback. So perhaps he’s turning the attack into an advantage.

Here’s Naylor’s four-stage breakdown of the program:

• The first is a “strategic framework” that links the “critical stakeholders” from the national down to local levels and that has the flexibility to capitalize on fleeting opportunities to reintegrate insurgents in communities, “or if there are particular individuals that require targeting,” [Col. Chris] Kolenda said.

• The second is “shaping and messaging, [which] deals with both lethal and non-lethal targeting to help set conditions for these initiatives to take place at local levels,” he said.

• “The third piece is community mobilization,” Kolenda said. “All problems in Afghanistan, or at least all social local problems, are solved at the community level. And so enfranchising communities with ownership in local governance, local security, localized development, will help bring communities together and help create the pressure and attraction to bring young men back into peaceful existence.”

• The fourth component is “individual and group demobilization,” which involves creating mechanisms that enable individuals and groups who wish to stop fighting “to be reintegrated and become productive members of society,” he said.

The basic idea, which Fred Ikle would recognize, is to give people dignified ways to stop fighting. It appears to have buy-in from the Afghan government, but it’s a bit hard to tell if the NATO military command is the force pushing the reconciliation effort forward.

Iraqi insurgents use palm groves like this one to make conventional warfare difficult for U.S. forces. (army.mil)

Just as President-elect Barack Obama’s key defense aides conduct a policy review at the Pentagon, a new report from the Center for American Progress lays out a progressive agenda for both military policy and defense budgeting for the next several years.

The report largely embraces the tenets about the future of warfare put forth by a rising generation of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners emerging from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It explicitly mentions the military’s “decisive effort to capture the lessons learned in both theatres,” referring to recent doctrinal publications like the counterinsurgency and stability operations field manuals. “You’ve got to give priority to irregular warfare,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan Pentagon official and leading contributor to the report.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Just as important, the report, “Building a Military for the 21st Century,” singles out obsolete or cost-ineffective weapons platforms for elimination. On its chopping block are the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor, the Air Force and Marine Corps’ Osprey helicopter, among other programs. Writing that the defense budget requires precision and prioritization, the report’s authors urge that the military slow the pace of the Army’s sprawling Future Combat Systems modernization program and most missile-defense programs. They estimate a savings of nearly $25 billion over four years from their proposed cuts and reductions — and rejects the idea, embraced by Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, that the U.S. ought to permanently allocate at least 4 percent of its gross domestic product to defense spending.

The principal recommendation from the Center for American Progress is that a comprehensive defense policy requires a clear set of priorities — something the Pentagon never had during the Bush administration, when military spending ballooned and few programs were cut or slowed down. (A notable exception is the Army’s crusader artillery system, which former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slashed on the merits and to assert control over the Army.) Prioritization requires an argument about what the threats of the near-future look like. And there, the report endorses much of the counterinsurgency agenda. “It is increasingly likely that, in this post-9/11 world, U.S. troops will more frequently be assigned to non-traditional warfare tasks, including both kinetic and non-kinetic counterinsurgency operations, rather than full-scale conventional wars with near-peer competitors,” it states.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a former speechwriter for Gen. Richard Myers, a recent chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and a former aide to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), said the proposal is in line with Gates’ stated emphasis on irregular warfare. Now a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Eaglen said she approved of the report’s focus on irregular warfare, “as long as it’s not a zero-sum game” with conventional military capabilities. “We can’t acquire [irregular capability] at the expense of conventional ones, but we can certainly do more in the arena of irregular warfare,” she added.

While the report says the U.S. must retain “full-spectrum” capabilities — meaning the U.S. should maintain its expertise in conventional warfare while expanding its competence at unconventional warfare — it urges realism in understanding that the U.S. does not face major conventional threats. “[I]t is unrealistic to continue training primarily for a conflict with a peer or near-peer competitor given the threats we currently face,” the report states. “Unnecessary expenses already overburden the defense budget, and the next administration will be responsible for making the necessary trade-offs to confront these challenges.” The authors propose retaining the capability to rapidly deploy troops to one major conventional theater of conflict.

The report advocates increasing the size of U.S. ground forces by 92,000 soldiers and marines, a goal that Obama has said he supports. Increasing the force, the report contends, will allow for specialization of some forces for irregular warfare, including the training and equipping of foreign partner militaries — a favorite idea of John Nagl, a prominent counterinsurgency advocate. It explicitly endorses “slowly” moving the Army away from a brigade combat-team-centric model — in which brigades are trained primarily for combat and less for unconventional tasks like partnering with foreign militaries — and to “carefully review” proposals for increased specialization.

Eaglen disagreed with the program cuts called for in the Center for American Progress’ plan. “You don’t solve the ‘older’ part of the programs by cutting modernization,” she said. “I think that these programs allow the development of unchallenged capability [and] offer numerous benefits to the U.S. military, most notably being primacy.”

The think tank’s proposal — or at least its parameters for refocusing defense priorities — appears to have support on Capitol Hill. John Murtha, the powerful Pennsylvania Democrat who chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee in the House, spoke at a forum Wednesday where the plan was unveiled. “There will be less defense spending” as a result of the economic downturn, Murtha said, although he declined to single out any programs to be cut. He criticized the Navy’s costly vacillation last year over whether to purchase DDG-1000 or DDG-51 destroyers. “We’re trying to buy [ships] at a rate that makes sense,” Murtha said. “You can’t do that when they’re all over the lot.”

Murtha was joined by his Pennsylvania colleague, Joe Sestak, a retired Navy vice admiral who last month won his second term in Congress, in calling for a rebalanced national security strategy. “The No. 1 issue is what is the strategy” that procurement supports, Sestak said. He called for an increased role for the secretary of defense — whom he called “wonderful” — in determining what the different services purchase, to provide a “linkage between strategy and requirements.” Sestak also proposed consolidation of the entire defense acquisitions process, citing a “need to know what [programs and weapons are] common among the services,” through a mechanism like the joint staff, which advises the chairman of the joint chiefs.

Korb said there were no plans to send the report to the Obama transition team, even though the president of the Center for American Progress, John Podesta, is running the transition. “With all our reports, we send to whomever requests them,” Korb said. “John has taken leave here. We have no more entree than anyone else. Obviously, we think they’ll be aware of it, and we’re happy to send them a copy if they request.”

One U.S. servicemember was killed today when an Afghan National policeman attacked a dismounted patrol in Bermel District, Paktika province.

The ANP member opened fire from a tower and threw a hand grenade toward the troops who were returning to a forward operating base.

The remaining servicemembers returned fire on the tower, killing the ANP member.
The name of the U.S. servicemember is being withheld until next of kin is notified.

Remember what I wrote earlier about corruption in the Afghan police? Something that nearly everyone told me in Afghanistan was that the insurgency wasn’t really infiltrating the security services. I wonder if that still largely holds true and this guy had his own “reasons” for murdering one of our troops — or whether the insurgents really are changing their strategy.

The whole thing has been sub rosa, occurring under the auspices of the Saudis for plausible deniability, and not really believed to have been fruitful.

Until now.

It’s a brief item, but The Los Angeles Times reports that the Taliban says the talks are underway:

Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, said the hard-line militants sat with Afghan officials and Saudi King Abdullah over an important religious meal in Saudi Arabia late last month. But he denied that the get-together could be construed as peace talks.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai declined to comment.

Who knows where this will lead.

But if Karzai decides to talk to the Taliban, Washington has no argument against supporting him.

It’s a stark picture of what it’s like to live in one of the provinces used as an infiltration route for insurgents from Pakistan, and where many locals feel abandoned by the Kabul-based government of Hamid Karzai:

* Historically strong reliance on tribal structures
* Traditions of local autonomy, tribal governance and inter-tribal dispute resolution
* Predominately Pashtun composition, with a concentrated Tajik presence in Orgun District
* Historical issues with food security — 96 percent of Paktika families took out a loan to buy food in 2005; 84 percent of Paktika residents had problems satisfying their food needs 3-6 times in 2004
* Low literacy rate (only 2 percent, the second lowest in Afghanistan)
* Low school enrollment rates and low female-to-male literacy ratios
* Heavier reliance on mullahs and other community leaders for information flow compared to other areas (71 percent for Paktika compared to a national average of only 39 percent)
* Heavy deforestation and water insecurity
* Rural composition and reliance on subsistence agriculture, subsistence animal husbandry and labor migration out of the province and out of the country
* Reliance on wood, brush and manure for household cooking and warmth; and lamp oil for lighting
* Lack of electricity (only 1 percent have access to public electricity; only 6 percent access to any electricity at some point in the year)

The portrait of a region ripe for unrest.

A description of a region ripe for unrest.

“Shamrock Red” indicates an incoming medevac, the staff of the base’s media operations center explained. It was unclear if the casualty or casualties had anything to do with the discharge of artillery into the Zambar area to the north. No other information about the medevac was immediately available.