Government Executive - Authors - Marc Ambinder

Officials: Navigation system failure probable cause of drone crash

Marc Ambinder — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Iranian state television on Thursday showed Iranian soldiers poking at the aircraft, tan in color with scuff marks on one wing. The unmanned aerial vehicle is one of fewer than 10 currently in operation, and its capture represents a major compromise in stealth technology. One thing the footage also showed for certain was that it was still intact and didn't self-destruct as officials had hoped.

An accompanying news story by Iran's official press agency claims Iran had hacked into the drone's navigation system and successfully brought the craft down, one of "many" allegedly downed by Iran as the U.S. intensified its campaign to spy on Iran's nuclear facilities. The CIA and Pentagon declined to comment on the matter, and while officials say there's no evidence the drone was hacked, it's not clear how they would know that.

U.S officials tell National Journal that they lost contact with the drone on Nov. 29, U.S. time, and that it was not clear initially if Iran knew it had crashed. After the link was breached and unable to be restored, the Air Force unit that flies the Sentinels immediately sent a bulletin to the National Military Command Center-a "pinnacle," designating an incident of potentially national significance.

President Obama was briefed Wednesday morning. Other U.S. intelligence assets, possibly including an imaging satellite, were diverted to the search.

Initially, the U.S. considered infiltrating a small recovery element from the Joint Special Operations Command. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the military also planned to destroy the downed plane by missile. But both missions were foiled when Iranian troops found the scene of the crash, which has not been disclosed. Any U.S. show of force would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Iran, an escalation disproportionate to the loss.

U.S. officials are trying not to let too many details out about this supersecret drone. They won't say what type of sensor packages the RQ-170 drone, manufactured at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works in California and tested at Area 51 and over South Korea, was carrying. One reason is that they don't wish for Iran to know precisely what each component does. In theory, the drone can be configured for high-resolution, full-motion video from high altitudes, for sampling and analyzing emissions, for tracking tagged targets on the ground, and for accurate hyper-spectral imaging of buildings and tunnels.

Its stealth comes from its color, which is relatively indistinguishable from the sky at altitudes around 50,000 feet, according to Aviation Week; its radar-refracting paint; its curves and angles, which reflect American stealth technology used since the Gulf War; and possibly for an active antiradar array located in its belly.

It's commandeered by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron, an Air Force unit that operates out of Creech Air Force Base near Area 51 in Nevada.

But for every approved orbit, flight planners design a flight path to ensure that certain curves of the aircraft face away from the known locations of enemy radar. That helps explain why, if the drone deviated from its flight plan, Iran was able to figure out that it had gone down. The lower it glided, the more easily Iranian radar pings could "hear it."

So sensitive are the capabilities and the intelligence missions the drone is used for that the unit physically changes their data computers depending upon their customer-be it the CIA, a Defense Department intelligence agency like the National Security Agency, or other military units.

Several software packages on board are programmed to corrupt themselves if the Sentinel's communications nodes are not properly interrogated at certain points, but U.S. officials don't know which are intact and which aren't.

What worries the U.S. more than the stealth capabilities themselves is the possibility that China will help Iran access the software and figure out how to break the encryption used to protect it. Though codes can be changed, a knowledge of the underlying software logic could jeopardize other sensitive technical collection systems.

The existence of the drone was declassified last year. Its capabilities and missions remain classified at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level, with a Special Access Program controlling access beyond that.

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Drone was gathering intelligence when it went down in Iran, U.S. officials say

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

National Journal on Tuesday. Controllers lost contact with the prized stealth unmanned aerial drone, the RQ-170 "Sentinel", last week over western Afghanistan, said one government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Based on its projected glide path, officials assume it fell just inside the Iranian border. Though the CIA has used the Sentinel to monitor Iranian nuclear convoys before, the precise nature of the mission this time is not known. The Sentinel is the top-of-the-line UAV, with highly sensitive cryptographic and stealth technology. If it indeed reaches Iranian hands undamaged it will represent a compromise in the latest of U.S. stealth technology, said officials with knowledge of the program. An investigation is under way and the rest of the small fleet of classified UAVs have been grounded. They number less than 10 and are piloted by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The drones are thought to be equipped with self-destruct capabilities in the event that they lose contact with their controllers, which is why the U.S. was initially skeptical of Iran's claim to have the drone in custody. The officials didn't say if they knew for certain that the fallen drone had managed to self-destruct. Near Afghanistan's border with Iran, the U.S. operates non-stealth drones called RQ-7s for counter-narcotics missions. But all of those are accounted for, the officials say. Every Sentinel mission must be approved by the National Security Staff in advance of its execution and elaborate measures are used to protect it. The Sentinel achieves stealth due to its wing-like design, high altitude flying and energy redirecting paint. It was created to secretly monitor the proliferation activities of Iran and North Korea. The cryptographic gear on board is state of the art, as are its sensor packages, which include radiation signature monitoring and advanced hyperspectral imaging. ]]>

Why Obama might veto defense bill: It would hurt the fight against terrorism

Marc Ambinder — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

A hot flash in the cold war with Pakistan

Marc Ambinder — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

What happened is still not clear. Because insurgents so often attack Afghanistan from the relative safe haven of Pakistan, the two countries have a border alert system that allows commanders to warn the other side if troops are operating in an area. But it wasn't used this time, perhaps because NATO commanders don't trust the Pakistanis manning border positions, many of whom have ties to militants, not to expose the location of NATO troops. The Pakistani government counters that the two checkpoints where most of the Pakistani soldiers died were well-marked on U.S. maps.

A familiar cycle of recriminations has begun in Pakistan: the press is using the incident to once again question why Pakistan keeps re-engaging with its own ally from hell, the United States, even though the U.S. seems to demonstrate a complete lack of respect for Pakistani sovereignty, much less for the tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers who have been killed fighting a common enemy. Pakistan has shut down supply routes into Afghanistan, about as direct a punishment as there can be. It won't affect the war in Afghanistan much in the short-term, because NATO has several months worth of pre-stocked supplies, a contingency designed to anticipate cyclic breakdowns in the Pakistani-U.S. relationship. Further, it has asked the military and the C.I.A. to vacate Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan, where about half of U.S. military and intelligence activities inside Pakistan are coordinated.

The U.S. government is urging calm, both privately and publicly. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called President Asif Ali Zardari, asking for forbearance and offering an apology. A rare joint statement from the Departments of Defense and State stopped short of apologizing, since NATO hasn't figured out what provoked the shootings, and included a pointed reminder to Pakistan that it is in their "mutual interest" to maintain a relationship.

The backdrop to this incident is what's known in the country as "Memo-gate." Husain Haqqani resigned last week as the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan after being accused of using an intermediary to suggest to the U.S. military that it participate in a coup to enshrine a pro-American civilian government inside Pakistan. Whatever denials come out of Washington, Pakistanis believe it, and the government, which dips into anti-American sentiment whenever it needs a booster shot of legitimacy, has opened several investigations.

Meanwhile here, a chorus of American lawmakers called on Sunday for tougher diplomacy against Pakistan. President Obama has said nothing so far, which is may be the most galling to Pakistan. As much as it pains U.S. officials to admit it, when they step into the shoes of the average Pakistani, there is not much to like about our country. A large amount of the money sent in aid is consumed by the army, which lives well in an otherwise poor country. Strategically, the U.S. seems only concerned about Pakistani vis-à-vis its geographic proximity to Afghanistan and as a stick in the eye of India, with whom the U.S. is establishing a strategic partnership to counter Chinese influence in the region. Pakistan sees itself as a U.S. stepping stone to something else.

And yet this incident will not end the relationship. Pakistan's army, which runs the country, needs its money, and at the same time as it publicly creates a vision of the U.S. as an enemy, relishes the direct contact it has with leaders of the world's most powerful country. Pakistan is playing a significant, unheralded role in semi-secret peace talks between factions on both sides of the border, even as it plays factions against once another, gambling to see who will have influence when Americans leave.

What's needed is probably what will be forthcoming: humility from NATO, a series of hurried and contentious private meetings, and a return to the cold war that, just barely, justifies the interest each side has in maintaining ties to the another.

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Obama keeps 'change agent' mantle in wake of super committee defeat

George E. Condon Jr. and Marc Ambinder — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The question was simple enough: Had the president made calls to any members of the committee in the last 11 days as the deadline for action approached? "I answered this about seven different times yesterday," snapped Carney. "I can do that here again if you'd like. The president put forward a plan mid-September, a highly detailed and comprehensive plan, laying out exactly what he believed the super committee should do...."

Carney's sharp reaction reflects the White House's determination not to let the congressional failure be judged a presidential failure as well. With the 2012 presidential election now less than a year away, Obama is not about to surrender without a fight the "change agent" mantle he wore so stylishly in 2008. His aides know that polls show a plurality of Americans blame Republicans for the failure and a majority accept Obama's solution to the debt problem.

Carney pointedly noted that the failure resulted from "a congressional process." And, in perhaps his clearest terms yet, the press secretary laid out what the White House saw as the president's three roles in that process. First was to "make clear" to the American public, the committee and Congress as a whole both his plan and his vision for deficit reduction. Second was to "rally public support beyond his vision." Third, he said, was to "lead his party to accept the kind of tough choices that the president was asking Democrats to make...."

On all three, Carney argued that the president fulfilled his duties: He did present a plan, he did go to the public and move the polls in his direction, and he did succeed in getting Democrats on the committee to accept things they previously had opposed.

Unlike in the debt-ceiling debacle, when Obama was forced to referee a draw that nearly destroyed both sides, the president does not believe, his advisers have told National Journal, that a direct intervention in these proceedings would have done anything but polarize the process even further.

Because of this, White House aides who saw the need to do damage control after the messy summer debate over the debt ceiling today are confident that the collapse of the super committee will inflict far more harm on Republicans in Congress than on the president. Instead of damage control, they are pressing ahead with the president's jobs program, intent on showing him as the person in Washington fighting to right the economy.

This optimism is fueled by the reality that few Americans outside Washington closely followed or even understood what the super committee was doing and the fact that none of the mandatory cuts triggered by the committee's failure will be seen before next year's election. "They had meetings. Nothing happened at the meetings. Most people didn't even know they were meeting," said Ohio-based Democratic political strategist Jerry Austin. "The news coverage wasn't the same as the summer. It wasn't a do-or-die thing where they had to pass something to save the country from going bankrupt. I don't think anybody paid any attention."

Austin said there is no sign in Ohio that the committee's failure affects Obama's standing there. "I don't think it will be held against him that this committee could not compromise on anything. That's not Obama's fault," he said. To guard against the public focusing on the failure, the White House plans to hammer home the message that Democrats and the president were willing to compromise but ran afoul of Republican intransigence.

"You know the president laid out a plan a couple of months ago and he did a good job of rallying the American people to support that approach," said a senior administration official who talked to reporters at the White House. "If you look at what Democrats on the super committee did, they went very far in terms of their willingness to agree to spending cuts and other savings. So we've seen a lot of movement in our party, and the president's leadership has to do with that."

Outside Washington, Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh also sees little damage to the president from this setback. She is much more worried about bigger things threatening Obama's reelection. "Obama isn't going to be held accountable for Congress but for whether he has been able to do enough to get the economy back on track and get people back to work," she said. "And the way he is going to have to win that argument is by using Congress as a foil, specifically Republicans in Congress." She said he can point to successes in foreign policy and make the point that "when I can act without Congress, I'm successful."

But, Marsh said, Obama still suffers politically for waiting too long to focus on jobs. "They should have started on jobs three years ago. But when they finally did start to do things, not only did the Republicans say no, they said 'hell, no'. And people get that."

She said many voters may be "disappointed" that Obama has not been more of the change agent as promised. But, she said, as long as Republicans in Congress keep blocking him, he gets to keep the label. The problem is that with every failure in his dealings with Congress, the public perception grows that Washington is broken and Obama cannot fix it. It is critical that he keep the spotlight on Capitol Hill as the heart of the dysfunction.

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Obama order will require agencies to better secure classified info

Marc Ambinder — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The so-called "WikiLeaks" executive order has been long awaited by the national security establishment and by the privacy and civil liberties communities. It was provided by the White House to National Journal. The order creates a government-wide steering committee to create and assess information sharing policies across the government, as well as a mechanism to determine whether internal auditing procedures work properly.

PFC. Bradley Manning, who the government believes provided WikiLeaks with most of the classified cables and reports it released, was able to access State Department cables that were not germane to his work as a forward-deployed intelligence analyst in Iraq without being detected.

A new Insider Threat Task Force led by the Attorney General will develop a government-wide strategy to see whether agencies that handle classified information can weed out the malcontents and people whose behavior suggests they cannot handle sensitive information appropriately.

The result will be a beefing up of federal counter-intelligence programs.

The intelligence community has worried about an over-reaction, reasoning that analysts who want more access to classified information to solve a problem will second-guess their own efforts because they don't want to trigger an investigation. The order does not specify how agencies ought to strike this balance, but suggests that each agency should establish policies that incorporate their own internal cultures, bearing in mind that the larger goal is to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Obama's executive order makes agencies primarily responsible for the information they obtain and share.

It also creates a Classified Information Sharing and Safeguarding Office to develop institutional knowledge about best practices across the government. This office will provide staff for the inter-agency steering committee, according to a White House fact sheet.

The executive order is the result of several months worth of a deliberation by a high-level task force formed after of the WikiLeaks disclosure. The government has taken several steps to prevent WikiLeaks-like incidents from happening again, including limiting the number of people with access to removable flash drives in classified environments and commencing a government-wide survey of existing internal auditing procedures.

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Obama issues preparedness goals

Marc Ambinder — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

On Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates this national preparedness strategy, is releasing what it calls the Goal - a list of major identified threats and the type of actions the government can take to meet them. A full copy can be found here, on FEMA's website.

The Goal, obtained by National Journal, relies heavily on cooperation among state, local and federal governments, and boosts the roles and responsibilities of the private sector. It also envisions a change in the way the public views disasters: Americans have to prepare to be resilient.

The general strategy is being unveiled Friday by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate at the National Emergency Management Association Conference in Austin. The policy directive and national Goal will influence all emergency response plans that involve federal assets, and will guide the administration's disaster-related budget requests for years to come.

FEMA identified several major hazards that could pose a significant risk in the years ahead. Many are obvious natural disasters: wildfires, floods and hurricanes. The lengthy risk assessment, which is classified, also found an increased risk from technological and infrastructure failures, from a flu pandemic, from dam collapses, as well as cyber terrorism.

Though the government has many plans and directives to respond to emergencies, coordination and resource allocation remain largely ad hoc, something that several presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have struggled with.

The Goal gives the Homeland Security Department, which still is vexed by questions about its mission, more direction, a road map to its own future, as it is the federal agency in charge of emergency preparedness.

As of today, the Goal is a just 28-page document, written in dry, bureaucratic language, with several classified annexes. Translating it into action will require heavy lifting from Congress, which may find its own priorities different from the executive agencies that must flesh out the strategy.

Obama's advisers say they have a "whole of government" approach to disasters, want to spend money more efficiently and with less of a direct emphasis on combating terrorism without strategic planning. The document breaks down mission areas, like responding to a disaster, into categories, like public warning, information sharing, operational coordination and community resilience. That last concept is a hobby horse of Fugate's.

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FBI, intel agencies investigating terror threat to New York, Washington

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama was briefed on the threat on Thursday morning, the White House said. Two U.S. officials briefed on the intelligence say a tip was received from an area rich with terrorist training camps in Pakistan that several men had entered the United States within the past few weeks with the intent of detonating explosives in cars in Washington and New York City.

The officials said that there was no corroborating information and would not say whether the threat was picked up by a U.S. source or was provided by a foreign government.

"The United States government has already significantly enhanced its security posture in advance of the 9/11 anniversary to protect the country against possible terrorist threats," a White House official wrote in an e-mail. "Nevertheless, the president directed the counterterrorism community to redouble its efforts in response to this credible but unconfirmed information."

Police in both cities were briefed this morning, but the two departments already were on heightened alert because of the impending anniversary.

"As we always do before important dates like the anniversary of 9/11, we will undoubtedly get more reporting in the coming days," Matt Chandler, a Homeland Security Department spokesperson, said in a statement.

"Sometimes this reporting is credible and warrants intense focus, other times it lacks credibility and is highly unlikely to be reflective of real plots under way. Regardless, we take all threat reporting seriously, and we have taken and will continue to take all steps necessary to mitigate any threats that arise."

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Analysis: Why Obama may stall the debt talks

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The two principals in the debt-ceiling talks, President Obama and House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, began talking on Monday with the same deadline: August 2, when the federal government will default on its debt. But Obama's clock is running slower. And that means his leverage may ultimately be greater if he waits for several weeks before making a deal.

Obama's political apogee will be in late July, when, if there's no deal, the bond market will begin to panic, leading interest rates to rise and the stock market to fall. That's when the public will begin to understand what happens when the U.S. can't make its payments to creditors. That's when the president can use his bully pulpit to call for an adult conversation.

That's why Republicans want the White House to focus on vote counts right now. What combination of policies will exceed the necessary threshold for passage in the House and the Senate? Boehner is willing to concede that a debt-ceiling deal based on Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan may not get 218 votes. And Republicans have already conceded that they're willing to cut significantly from defense appropriations to get them.

What Boehner would like the White House to concede early is that its effort to, say, end oil-company subsidies, raise taxes on individuals making $500,000 and up, or curtail sugar and ethanol tax breaks, would also fall short. If the vote were tomorrow, he'd probably get a higher spending-cut to deficit-trigger ratio from Democrats, too. He'd get close to $2 trillion in real cuts over 10 years.

Boehner's bottom line: real spending cuts that exceed the amount by which the debt limit is raised looks reasonable today. Since a large minority of his conference does not believe that the August 2 date is real, Boehner's aides insist that it's foolhardy to think they are any more likely to accept revenue raisers (including getting rid of tax breaks) as the weeks go by.

But Obama knows that vote counts in the absence of the crucible of crisis will differ when Wall Street, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other traditionally Republican interests begin to nervously walk lawmakers out of their partisan garrisons.

And he's betting that Republicans, having learned that his team is on nimble feet when it plays close to the edge of the cliff, will concede more up front than they did in December, when only the threat of a government shutdown (darn it, the Smithsonian would be closed!) loomed as the existential sword of Damocles. The longer Obama waits, the more Republicans will privately panic, knowing that their leverage decreases steadily as the weeks go by -- and exponentially at the turn of August.

Republicans have succeeded in turning Washington's orientation toward spending, but they probably aren't willing to blow that credibility if the endgame comes down to either a government default or an end to subsidies. That's why, in private, Republicans want the discussion to begin with the president getting inside Boehner's head: What can the White House offer to allow Boehner to get enough of his Republicans to go along, anticipating that Democrats will need at least a third of their caucus or more to reach the threshold? After last year's election, overconfident Republicans assumed that Obama would not be able to broker any deal, with demoralized Democrats retrenched and the public having markedly signaled their distaste with Washington. They were wrong then and they're trying to be more careful now.

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President sides with Gates over Petraeus on Afghan plan

Yochi J. Dreazen and Marc Ambinder — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Obama's prime-time address Wednesday night offered little indication of the heated behind-the-scenes battle over Afghanistan that consumed the president and his war cabinet for much of this past month. The debates pitted White House aides wary of the war's high costs and uncertain progress against a high-profile general who brought Iraq back from the brink of defeat several years ago and was confident he could do the same in Afghanistan if given enough time. This account is based on interviews with multiple officials with direct knowledge of the internal deliberations.

Petraeus had sold then-President George W. Bush on the Iraq surge and helped persuade Obama to overrule some of his closest advisers -- including Vice President Joe Biden -- and deploy 33,000 new troops to Afghanistan in December 2009. When it came time to decide when those troops would come home, however, Petraeus suffered a rare defeat. Obama rejected the general's proposal to shift large numbers of troops to eastern Afghanistan in order to mount an expansive counterinsurgency campaign there. And the president was ultimately unwilling to budge from his belief that the surge troops needed to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next year.

Gates, meanwhile, will retire from public service next week with another big bureaucratic win under his belt. During the initial Afghan surge debates in the fall of 2009, Gates was similarly successful in mediating between the White House and the uniformed military. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. war commander, had joined Petraeus in arguing for deploying as many as 80,000 new troops to Afghanistan to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum. Biden, backed by other civilian aides, wanted to deploy 20,000 new troops and adopt a far narrower mission than McChrystal and Petraeus wanted. Gates ultimately crafted the winning compromise: a surge of 30,000 troops paired with a commitment to begin withdrawing the forces 18 months later. Gates's compromise is the reason the first surge troops will begin leaving Afghanistan in July.

As word of the Obama's decision reached Petraeus's allies, word of the commander's disapproval reached the White House. Two military officers with close ties to Petraeus said in separate interviews Wednesday night that the general disagreed with Gates's compromise proposal and had not endorsed the drawdown plan. A third military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid publicly criticizing the president, said of the White House: "No one is talking about succeeding or winning... the phrase [Wednesday night] was bringing this war to a 'responsible' conclusion. I'm not really sure what that means."

The initial set of Afghan discussions had been marred by a series of leaks that infuriated Obama and led the president to accuse his military advisers of trying to box him in politically. Earlier this year, as the administration began to gear up for the withdrawal debate, Gates and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon sent out word informally that any leaks would be interpreted by the president as insubordination and as an attempt to improperly influence public opinion. The approach paid off: The withdrawal debate occurred almost completely out of public sight, with few details leaking and neither side making their case in the press. The second debate was also far shorter than the first had been. The president and his war cabinet held three meetings in the White House situation room over the past two weeks, with Petraeus laying out his troop withdrawal recommendations early last week, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The debate effectively boiled down to a matter of months. Petraeus agreed that 10,000 troops could be safely withdrawn this year, but he wanted to keep some of the remaining 23,000 troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2012 and to have the flexibility to extend some of their tours into early 2013 if conditions deteriorated, according to officials with knowledge of the deliberations. Obama's civilian advisers, pointing to intelligence assessments showing that the U.S. had killed 20 of al-Qaida's top 30 leaders in the region, wanted the final 23,000 surge troops to leave Afghanistan next spring, with the last of the forces returning home roughly around March.

For nearly two weeks, neither side budged. Petraeus made it clear he opposed beginning the drawdown during the summer, traditionally the time of Afghanistan's most intense fighting, according to an official familiar with his thinking. The general wanted his successor, Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen, to be able to move troops from southern Afghanistan, where coalition forces have pushed the Taliban out of many of their former strongholds, to eastern Afghanistan, where conditions have been deteriorating for months. Such a move would take time, and Petraeus argued that the surge troops should be kept in Afghanistan through the end of the year to ensure they had enough time to mount a full counterinsurgency campaign in eastern Afghanistan.

Obama's civilian aides pushed back hard, arguing that all of the troops could safely leave Afghanistan by next spring because of the successes of the stepped-up counterterror push inside both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gates, who felt the spring 2012 timetable was far too aggressive, proposed keeping the remaining surge troops in Afghanistan through next spring as a compromise. Obama ultimately chose-as he did during the surge debate-to side with the veteran Defense chief.

John Nagl, a retired Army officer with close ties to Petraeus who wrote the military's counterinsurgency field manual, said in a written statement that Obama's way forward gives "commanders impressive flexibility this year by linking the withdrawal of the first 10,000 troops of the surge to the year's end. But he inexplicably removed all such flexibility next year by requiring the remaining 23,000 surge troops to be withdrawn by the summer of 2012-necessitating their removal from combat at the height of the fighting season."

Nagl, who is now the president of the Center for a New American Security, said he believes "this problem of untimely diminished capabilities can be overcome by the commanders on the ground, yet opens questions about the nature of the calculus."

Petraeus, for his part, will almost certainly be asked about his views of the withdrawal plan when he testifies Thursday before the Senate panel considering his nomination to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The commander is known for his diplomatic skills, and it's not clear if he will be willing to publicly discuss any of his recent disagreements with the White House. Petraeus, who will retire from the military to assume his new post at the CIA, will need to decide whether to once again play the part of the good soldier.

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Obama will announce Afghanistan troop decision on Wednesday

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama on Wednesday will reveal how quickly he plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, an administration official said Monday night. The White House had no further details.

Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, would endorse a presidential announcement that the 30,000 troops committed as part of a 2009 surge to the country would be back home by end of 2012, military and administration officials told National Journal earlier on Monday.

Formally, Petraeus wants to withdraw one brigade combat team of about 5,000 troops by the end of the year, and another 5,000 by the spring of next year. But mindful that the political environment in the U.S. and in Congress has turned sharply against the war, Petraeus is aware that the extra brigades he inherited cannot remain in place through 2014, when control of the country's security is scheduled to be officially turned over to indigenous Afghan forces.

Petraeus is expected to be confirmed as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency by September. He wants his successor, Lt. Gen. John Allen, to keep the extra brigades operational as long as possible. If they stay in the theater until the end of 2012, their force presence would equal the duration that troops surged to Iraq spent there.

Petraeus will spend this week in Washington, participating in deliberations with the White House and members of the National Security Council. Leon Panetta, the current CIA director who is expected to be confirmed shortly as secretary of Defense, is playing a particularly influential role in the discussions, officials said. Panetta has not endorsed a particular course of action, instead urging the president to be guided by intelligence assessments.

A senior administration official said that President Obama has not decided what to do or say. "He is reviewing many inputs, of which [Petraeus's] is a very important one," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the matter freely.

Obama's goals for the war remain roughly the same as they were in December 2009, when he told an audience of cadets and officers at West Point that he aimed to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" al-Qaida's terrorist network by preventing a resurgence of the Taliban and by training Afghan security forces to fill the gap.

Several Obama advisers hoped success of U.S. counterterrorism efforts outside of Afghanistan would allow the president to expedite the slope of troop withdrawals beginning in July.

Obama, the administration official said, does not "disaggregate the CT and COIN debates in a reprise of the 2009 narrative. We see both parts as enabling each other, and in addition to seeing key counterterrorism successes we also see very important successes in terms of stopping the Taliban momentum and building up the capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces."

Intelligence assessments of al-Qaida's network based on information collected at Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan suggest that leaders of the terrorist group were increasingly frustrated that, because of U.S. Special Forces' disruptive activities and CIA drone strikes, operationalizing plots was becoming quite difficult. "We found a lot of evidence of stuff that was supposed to happen and never got to where it needed to go, and then lots of incoming messages wondering why things didn't happen," an official briefed on the intelligence said.

And U.S. officials say the intelligence shows a backlash against the newly appointed al-Qaida leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for being unable to develop a secure and independent courier network to execute attacks.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that 20 of 30 top leaders of al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been killed since Obama took office.

The upshot is that the capacity of al-Qaida has been significantly degraded, and even if the troop withdrawal pace is slow at first, an official said Obama will have to find some way to acknowledge this fact.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on Sunday the "war weariness" among Americans, but he said that "the president's responsibility, and I have seen this in his predecessors, is to look out for the long-term national security interests of the United States. He has to have a longer view."

And the Taliban remains a problem. Although weakened, it remains a destructive force in many parts of Afghanistan. Discussions with dissident Taliban leaders about joining the Afghan government are still at a nascent stage. A too-rapid early withdrawal could give more aggressive Taliban elements the incentive to punish those engaged in diplomacy.

There are no indications that Obama plans a rapid course correction. His advisers think Americans will give the commander in chief the benefit of the doubt. Still, it will be useful during an election year to point to large numbers of troops coming home. Even Republicans like Mitt Romney, once a stalwart of the party's hawkish wing, have indicated that they see the current war as one being fought for Afghanistan's independence, which the U.S. should step away from.

There are also limits as to how quickly troops can be turned around. And administration officials said that it would be unwise to withdraw those troops training Afghan security forces in the middle of their terms.

Obama will announce his decision soon. Guidance about the timing of the announcement is expected later this week. The relative proportion of troops devoted to counterterrorism and to anti-weapons proliferation will probably increase as other combat troops are redeployed home.

There are about 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan now, along with just under 50,000 other NATO troops.

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Gen. Petraeus would endorse 30,000 troops home by end of 2012

Marc Ambinder — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Obama's goals for the war remain roughly the same as they were in December 2009, when he told an audience of cadets and officers at West Point that he aimed to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" Al Qaeda's terrorist network by preventing a resurgence of the Taliban and by training Afghan security forces to fill the gap.

Several Obama advisers hoped success of U.S. counterterrorism efforts outside of Afghanistan would allow the president to expedite the slope of troop withdrawals beginning in July.

Intelligence assessments of Al Qaeda's network based on information collected at Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan suggest that leaders of the terrorist group were increasingly frustrated that, because of U.S. Special Forces' disruptive activities and CIA drone strikes, operationalizing plots was becoming quite difficult. "We found a lot of evidence of stuff that was supposed to happen and never got to where it needed to go, and then lots of incoming messages wondering why things didn't happen," an official briefed on the intelligence said.

And U.S. officials say the intelligence shows a backlash against the newly appointed Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for being unable to develop a secure and independent courier network to execute attacks.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that 20 of 30 top leaders of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been killed since Obama took office.

The upshot is that the capacity of Al Qaeda has been significantly degraded, and even if the troop withdrawal pace is slow at first, an official said Obama will have to find some way to acknowledge this fact.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on Sunday the "war weariness" inside the country, but said that "the president's responsibility, and I have seen this in his predecessors, is to look out for the long-term national security interests of the United States. He has to have a longer view."

There are also limits as to how quickly troops can be turned around. And administration official said that it would be unwise to withdraw those troops training Afghan security forces in the middle of their terms.

There are about 97,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan now, along with just under 50,000 other NATO troops.

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White House Afghan review unlikely to alter slow drawdown

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It's safe to say that Gen. David Petraeus will not present President Obama with a proposal to significantly reduce the footprint of the U.S. military forces in Afghanistan. Correspondingly, Obama doesn't see the need for a major course correction, even though he is impatient to end the war.

The general, in Washington for his CIA confirmation hearings, will provide input important to the White House's pending Afghanistan strategy review, the results of which are due in July. But unlike past deliberations, which were carried out quasi-publicly through leaks and speeches, this one will be short, efficient, and largely quiet, White House officials said. There will be few formal meetings and very little public markers of decision points. Petraeus is reportedly hand-carrying his recommendations, has yet to share them with major flag and general officers, and has not committed them to an electronic format, lest they leak.

Within the next few weeks, Obama will announce his decision about the pace of the transition. A small interagency review has already finished its work, which will provide the broader context for Petraeus's recommendations.

A White House official said that Obama has not yet decided whether his order will apply to all 130,000 NATO troops in the region, whether he will adjust the withdrawal pace to account for predicted surges in violence over the summer, or whether he will simply announce that a certain number of troops will return home by a certain date. Although some advisers had hoped that the significant progress made against al-Qaida in the past several months would allow Obama to accelerate the withdrawal, the president himself has not indicated that he is yet ready to take this gamble. (If he is, he has kept it to himself.)

Politically, justifying a more rapid drawdown in the wake of bin Laden's killing would make sense, as the stated goal of the war is to rout al-Qaida and prevent the Taliban from establishing a sanctuary for the terrorist network to regrow. As many members of Congres -- including Republicans -- regularly note now, Pakistan seems to be more of a haven for al-Qaida than Afghanistan. The budget crisis is forcing Republican hawks to take a second look at the billions spent monthly to fight a nebulous enemy in Afghanistan.

Obama ordered 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in late 2009 after taking a deep dive into the strategy pursued by President Bush. He is now confident that his strategy is the correct one, advisers say, even if the public continues to doubt it, and even though it is hard to articulate. Congress, for the most part, is likely to support the president's recommendations, even though support for the war itself is waning. Petraeus remains an iconoclastic figure and will provide cover if the president's chosen withdrawal pace is conservative.

At West Point in December 2009, Obama laid out two main goals under the broader mantle of disrupting, defeating, and dismantling al-Qaida. Coalition forces would arrest the Taliban's momentum and rigorously train the Afghan National Security Forces, holding them to a series of benchmarks and reducing attrition. Obama also disaggregated the Taliban from al-Qaida, and diplomats began a slow, often-secret reconciliation process with established Taliban tribal factions. The surge allowed the coalition to focus on populous provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Obama will refer to these goals and assess progress toward them, framing them in the overall context of a full transition in Afghanistan by 2014. But even that definition is in question. It remains uncertain whether the majority of troops will be rebased by then, or whether 2014 is the starting point for a real transition.

Assessing progress is complicated. As National Journal's Yochi Dreazen reported, 2011 may turn out to be the deadliest year on record for Americans in the war. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who sees classified and unclassified metrics on the capability of Taliban forces, doesn't seem to be sanguine in his latest report. While coalition troops have killed record numbers of Taliban fighters, discovered large weapons caches, and meaningfully enhanced both security and civil governance in certain parts of the country, the Taliban and allied forces like the Haqqani network in the Paktika province, remain potent, destabilizing forces. The insurgency has not expanded, in Cordesman's assessment, but neither has it been seriously degraded.

In April, Petraeus's staff concluded that the International Security Assistance Force "still does not fully understand the regenerative capacity of the insurgency."

As for the second main challenge - that of building a government to transition to in 2014, metrics are few, although the U.S. continues to insist that it is making progress.

But testifying before Congress, the new American ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, noted that "[e]normous challenges remain: governance; rule of law, including corruption, which undermines economic growth and the credibility of the Afghan state; narcotics; sustainable economic development, including adequate employment opportunities, increased revenues along with the capacity for the government to provide basic services, such as education and health care."

Public opinion in America turned against the war last year and support for fighting it hovers anywhere between 35 and 43 percent, according to polls taken by Pew and by ABC News and The Washington Post in late May.

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National Counterterrorism Center head to leave

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The head of the National Counterterrorism Center is resigning after nearly four years on the job, administration officials confirmed on Thursday. Michael Leiter will step down in July after the White House releases its long-awaited national counterterrorism strategy, which Leiter helped to write.

NCTC, under Leiter's tenure, has become an all-source intelligence fusion shop focused on detecting and preventing terrorist attacks inside the U.S. Leiter is well-regarded by members of the intelligence community and by members of Congress, who have not yet been briefed on his departure, National Journal has learned.

By statute, the NCTC's director reports directly to the president and is responsible for crafting detailed counterterrorism plans. Functionally, however, the NCTC has struggled with its strategic mission, has struggled to break down bureaucratic barriers, and has been at the center of a number of attempted attacks on the American homeland, including the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day, 2009.

Leiter, 41, presides over a staff of 500 analysts, many detailed from the country's 16 intelligence agencies. They collect and distribute information on threats to the homeland and to Americans abroad. The NCTC's Strategic Operational Planning Directorate is headed by a senior officer from the military's Joint Special Operations Command, which executes the nation's counterterrorism missions overseas. But in practice, JSOC and a warning cell in the Joint Chiefs of Staff have written most of the plans.

Leiter plays largely a behind-the-scenes role, serving as a key conduit to Congress, helping to lobby for expanded surveillance and investigative authorities. He was appointed acting director in late 2007 and was confirmed to the position in early 2008. The reason for his departure was not immediately known, although friends say that nearly four years of being the nation's 24-hour point person on terrorism was not easy.

On balance, Leiter is seen as shrewd and effective, but he's had to deal with long-standing bureaucratic inefficiencies. On Christmas Day, 2009, those came to a head, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to set off a bomb on board Northwest flight 207 over Detroit. It quickly emerged that the CIA had received a tip about Abdulmutallab's radicalization from his father, and had passed on to NCTC, which was not able to piece it together with other intelligence indicating a possible Yemeni-based, Pakistani-trained threat to the homeland. Complicating matters, at least perceptually, was Leiter's decision to take a long-planned vacation with his young son immediately after the bombing attempt. Leiter has a network of champions inside the administration, who noted that he volunteered to give up his vacation and stay on the job if needed.

Leiter promised aggressive changes after that failure. Instead of cutting 80 positions, which had been on the drawing board, Leiter fought to keep his staff and reorganized the NCTC to be more responsive to threats to the homeland.

Some Leiter critics complain that he lacks a firm understanding of the ideological threat posed by al Qaeda and specifically the threat doctrine espoused by elements of radical Islam. But Leiter has an ally in the president's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, and in Denis McDonough, the president's deputy national security adviser and longest-serving national security aide.

Leiter, a Navy veteran and a 2000 graduate of Harvard Law School, was a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. He then became a federal prosecutor, focusing on terrorism cases.

He also worked on the Robb-Silberman commission on weapons of mass destruction and in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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Former Obama Secret Service agent running for senate in Maryland

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Daniel Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent whose recent assignments included a posting to President Obama's protective detail, has decided to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland as a Republican.

At an agency that stresses the silence and political neutrality of its agents, Bongino's announcement is raising eyebrows. It's not unusual for federal law-enforcement agents to run for office after they retire, but the Secret Service frowns upon former agents who make sudden turns to politics. The agency has fought to give presidential protective division agents legal standing to keep them from testifying about high-level conversations they overhear, lest they lose the trust of the commander in chief.

Bongino is seeking the Republican nomination to take on freshman Sen. Ben Cardin , D-Md. Bongino's Twitter account calls him a "Conservative Republican Candidate for the U.S. Senate" and directs visitors to a campaign website that is offline.

In a press release announcing his candidacy, Bongino said that he left law enforcement "because of political leaders making decisions which are making America a follower and not a leader in the global economy."

His campaign chair will be Brian Murphy, who unsuccessfully sought Maryland's Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2010 and was endorsed by the tea party and Sarah Palin. On Murphy's Facebook page, he writes that Bongino "saw firsthand the impact of well intentioned but fatally flawed government programs" as a "child in New York City."

Bongino has spent most of his career in government. He was a New York City police officer for four years before joining the Secret Service. He spent 12 years protecting presidents, candidates, and world leaders, advancing overseas trips, standing post, and investigating financial fraud. He transferred off Obama's detail six months ago and spent the past five months working out of the agency's Baltimore field office. He resigned earlier this month and started his own security consulting company. While an agent, he cofounded a mixed martial arts accessory company called Friction MMA.

"In my career, I've seen the effects of failed policies on citizens in our inner cities. I've had the honor of traveling to 27 countries with the Secret Service. And the common theme in every country is a line around the block at the US Embassy," Bongino is quoted in his campaign release. "America is an extraordinary place. But our citizens must be given a chance to compete in the world economy. It is an ideas economy, and we know what works and what doesn't. This is an 'open-book' test, but politicians insist on trying systems that either have already failed in other countries, or are in the process of failing."

Americans "are being held back by our government," he says.

Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb is a former Secret Service agent, but he spent five years as an aide to then-Gov. Frank Keating (R), himself a former special agent for the FBI, before joining the agency, and several years elapsed between his official Secret Service duties and his first successful run for office.

The Secret Service declined to comment on Bongino's planned candidacy.

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In Joint Chiefs choice, Obama sees an independent but loyal soldier

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 26 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It's safe to say that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the officer expected to be nominated by President Obama as his next Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman next Tuesday, did not expect a new job offer so soon.

After all, Dempsey had just settled into an E-Ring billet as the new chief of staff of the Army-and been given a mandate to transform the force into a leaner, more agile, more flexible multipurpose war-fighting machine. The American military is turning away from the type of wars that infantrymen like Dempsey were trained to fight and toward a future battle space where the Navy and Air Force, given their instant global reach, will find their skills needed more.

But Dempsey is the highest-ranking Army officer available for a job that has not been filled by a black-and-gold-clad soldier since 2001, when Gen. Hugh Shelton retired. Since then, an Air Force general, a Marine general, and two Navy admirals have occupied the post. Dempsey is among a number of American general officers who earned their stars in battle. He is a classmate and close friend of Gen. David Petraeus, who has been nominated to take over the Central Intelligence Agency.

Though every president wants a top military adviser he can explicitly trust, the White House is aware that the officer who fills the position has to be seen as an independent advocate for the armed forces, someone who is capable of saying "that's not my view" when the rest of the president's staff says "yes it is." At the same time, the incoming chairman has to be copacetic with Obama's policy goals-a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, budget cuts across the services, and the implementation of the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." Dempsey fits the bill. He's not known as being Obama's favorite general, something that, in retrospect, might have been most harmful to the chances of Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the current vice chairman and the presumed front-runner until this weekend.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, nominated to succeed Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, will make force modernization a priority, officials have said. The military community correctly interprets that phrase to mean that Panetta will face significant pressure from the White House to hold defense spending constant and begin to cut it, in real dollars, after 10 years of big increases. Panetta's deft hand with Congress, which will have to endorse all but the smallest of alterations, will come in handy.

Dempsey surprised some colleagues by stating in a memo to his troops in April that the Army "will not present any unfunded requirements" to Congress for the next budget cycle. In practical terms, that means that Dempsey will not ask for more money in the near term. He called it a "fact of life" that the Army needs to understand as it struggles to "adjust our global posture in line with the country's strategic requirements, and to provide our soldiers with the most effective equipment and training available." Those members of Congress whose districts were counting on money for items like more Patriot missile batteries might object. That's why Dempsey's imprimatur will be useful for Obama, especially since no one has accused him of being an administration insider. (Dempsey did promise to fight for future funding should the need arise.)

A career infantry officer, he commanded Old Ironsides-the Army's fabled 1st Armored Division-in the early stages of the Iraq War and later served as Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq and commander, NATO Training Mission-Iraq. Before assuming the mantle of Army chief of staff in April, he was the military's training and doctrine chief. In Iraq, Dempsey was not among those senior officers who objected to sharing mission space with special-forces troops, and he is on friendly terms with the incoming head of the Special Operations Command, Vice Adm. William McRaven, whose special-forces orientation has influenced Obama's thinking on military matters considerably.

White House officials would not confirm the choice on the record, and those who would speak on the condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the president said that there would be no formal word of the appointment until the president was confident that relevant senators, Democratic and Republican, were comfortable enough with the Dempsey pick to ensure a smooth confirmation. The timing is critical because the next chair's confirmation hearings would be scheduled for this summer, just as the administration finishes its review of the Afghanistan war and begins a long-anticipated drawdown of U.S. troops.

The White House did not seem prepared for the news to leak. This much is clear from the fact that the members of Congress usually given courtesy notices by the administration, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., had not been consulted as of Wednesday. On Saturday, Obama notified Cartwright that the job would not be his. That day, word began to leak out that Dempsey would get the nomination.

On Wednesday, before dinner with Queen Elizabeth II in London, Obama spent a few private moments with the military officer who, putting aside military and congressional politics, would get the job: Adm. James Stavridis, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe.

A scholar-solider of the first rank, Stavridis is known as a revolutionary thinker, a flag officer with bold ideas and a fine command of history, and a student of politics. Where he ends up will be important to the morale of the Navy. Some prominent fans of Stavridis's bristle at the suggestion that his two interviews with President Obama did not go well, and an administration official said such "gossip" was "nonsense."

Dempsey was in Washington on Wednesday visiting wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to his Twitter feed. He has also been overseeing Army National Guard efforts to provide emergency assistance to the Joplin, Mo., tornado victims. An Army spokesperson said that no one had been formally offered the job by Obama as of late Wednesday.

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Government fears too much disclosure in bin Laden raid will jeopardize future missions

Marc Ambinder — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The extraordinary interest in the U.S. government's killing of Osama bin Laden has made public an unusually large amount of information about sensitive intelligence methods and the secret units of the Joint Special Operations Command, and not without potential consequences.

Several administration officials, intelligence policymakers, and military planners tell National Journal in interviews that the rich level of detail provided to reporters, even by authorized spokespeople, may compromise the government's ability to conduct a similar operation in the future.

And National Journal has learned that JSOC, which ran the operation, has opened an operational security review to determine how damaging publicly disclosed information might be for future operations. Those reviews are standard, but JSOC will likely be forced to adopt new methods to preserve their sensitive kill-and-capture capacity, senior military and administration officials said, an acute problem because the intelligence being analyzed may require them to conduct similar raids in short order.

Administration officials acknowledge the bin Laden killing as a once-in-a-decade event and recognize as legitimate the media and public's demand for details.

But several revelations have convinced senior administration officials that people with security clearances are speaking too freely. Some blame members of Congress, dozens of whom have been given extensive briefings on the intelligence and the raid.

Among the disclosures causing heartburn: the existence of a CIA safe house in Abbottabad, the use of a sophisticated drone to surveil the compound, and the extent to which the CIA was able to monitor what was happening inside. Though the government hasn't confirmed these details on the record, they've been reported authoritatively enough to be seen as accurate.

When The Washington Post reported that President Obama noted that the loss of a "$15 million helicopter" was worth the capture of bin Laden, the paper was revealing more than it realized:
normal Blackhawk helicopters cost around $5 million. Terrorists and potential adversaries like China now have a dollar figure to help them figure out precisely how the Blackhawk was modified for its stealth mission.

"It's fair to say that this is one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in the history of the intelligence community and the military. They deserve enormous credit," a senior administration official who is concerned about the release of public information said. "And a lot of these agencies, in particular [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] and [National Security Agency], almost never receive the praise they deserve. But, yes, after an important week spent explaining to the American people what happened and why it matters to them, it's time for all of us to go back to keeping the conversations about these topics squarely in the proper classified channels."

Vice Adm. William McRaven, JSOC's commanding general, expected a degree of exposure before the raid but hopes that his command's 15 minutes of fame are over soon, two military officials said. Others say the administration's preparations for the raid were so secret that it could not simultaneously develop a plan to deal with the desire for information once the killing was revealed. Some senior JSOC officers are prepared to deal with a future that includes more openness about their operations.

Before publication, many reporters fact-check potentially sensitive information occasionally agree to withhold details if they are not germane to the story and could jeopardize U.S. troops' safety.

And reporters have been asked not to disclose the names of other parts of the military involved in preparing the SEALs for the raid, and all have been cautioned not to name any participants. Those SEALs who belong to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group are considered strategic national-security assets, and it is a crime to knowingly disclose their names, the same as disclosing the identities of undercover CIA case officers. JSOC counterintelligence officers are increasing their presence in the towns and cities where the SEAL squadrons are based, to dissuade any disclosures.

In Britain, where the military's special missions units, the Special Air Service and the Special Boat Service, are not classified, the security services work largely to keep the names of members of the units out of the media.

But JSOC's existence as the umbrella command for America's special missions units and standing counter-terrorism task forces is classified, as is basic information about its structure. Protecting JSOC's secrecy is expensive. For many, it is vital to national security. But its veil of secrecy may be untenable in an age where every explosion is reported within minutes of it occurring.

Inevitably, some of the information, like the writings in bin Laden's diary, will become public. Col. Roland Guidry (ret.), one of JSOC's founding members and a legend in special operations forces, said he blames President Obama and his aides for the sunlight bathing the SEALs.

"The pre-mission Operational Security was superb, but the post-mission OPSEC stinks," he said. "When all the hullabaloo settles down, JSOC and [the SEALs] will have to get back to business as usual, keeping the troops operationally ready and getting set for the next mission; the visibility the administration has allowed to be focused on JSOC and [the SEALs] will make their job now more difficult."

Guidry said that the "administration's bragging" about details like the existence of the bin Laden courier network and efforts to eavesdrop on cell phones would encourage the enemy to adapt by changing their cell phones, e-mail addresses, web sites, safe houses, and couriers. He also thinks the administration should not have disclosed precisely what types of equipment it found in bin Laden's compound, such as bin Laden's use to thumb drives to communicate.

"Why did the administration not respond like we were trained to do 30 years ago in early JSOC by uttering two simple words: 'no comment'?" he asked.

It isn't clear, however, that the Obama White House is sanctioning these leaks. After two early attempts to give reporters a basic chronology of the events, the White House began to decline requests to clarify details, referring reporters to the Pentagon and the CIA.

One problem is both the Pentagon and the intelligence community still compartmentalize sources and methods differently. For example, it is hard for the CIA to know whether providing a certain detail about the technology a JSOC door-kicker uses to breach a wall would constitute an operational security violation.

The concern about information leakage comes amid one of the biggest information-sharing efforts to date. Virtually everyone with a Top Secret clearance who works in counter-terrorism has access to the "take" from the bin Laden raid. Leading the effort is the Defense Intelligence Agency's National Media Exploitation Center. "We are trying to get as much warning-relevant material out as rapidly and widely as possible," a senior intelligence official said.

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Obama endorses spending, tax targets in budget talks

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

President Obama repeated on Wednesday his belief that any long-term agreement to cut the national debt must include tax increases as well as spending cuts, suggesting that the threat of incremental tax hikes, built into negotiations if spending exceeds a certain amount, will push Republicans to the bargaining table.

Obama made the remarks at a town-hall meeting on the economy, broadcast Thursday morning on CBS's Early Show.

CBS's Harry Smith asked Obama what his chances were for getting Republicans to go along with any sort of tax increase. The president responded that "what we're going to end up having to do probably is to set some targets and say, you know, those targets have to be hit [and] if not automatically, some cuts and tax increases will start taking place."

Obama suggested tax-increase triggers alongside mandatory spending-cut triggers would likely figure into negotiations on raising the debt ceiling; as of August 2, the government will no longer be able to pay what it owes. On Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told Wall Street financiers that his party would not vote to increase the debt limit unless the president agrees to significant actual spending cuts, not just triggers.

But the White House and Democrats have begun to argue forcefully that any incremental budget deal must include a mix of revenue raisers, mostly the discontinuation of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, along with spending cuts.

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., unveiled a draft budget that would raise taxes by one dollar for every dollar of spending reduced.

Obama told CBS that if Republicans knew that tripping wires set on spending would also trigger tax increases, "that will give incentive for us to negotiate and figure it out."

Even as he answered questions on everything from Medicare to the stability of government jobs, Obama spent most of his time discussing the state of the economy. The president said that high gas prices and the housing market remain the biggest headwinds on economic growth.

Obama also conceded that business may be over-regulated.

"There are some legitimate complaints about regulations," the president said. "We've got to do more on simplification, reducing paperwork."

But Obama didn't go into what regulations would be simplified or eliminated, saying only that he wanted to reduce the amount of paperwork on loans arranged through the Small Business Administration.

At the same time, though, the president criticized the business community, calling for companies to "step up" and hire workers.

Obama ended the town hall with a hopeful message:

"Just remember," he said, "that we've gone through tougher times than this. We always come out on top."

Katy O'Donnell contributed to this report.

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In raid on bin Laden, little-known geospatial agency played vital role

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The NGA integrates several core intelligence functions. It makes maps and interprets imagery from satellites and drones; it also exploits the electromagnetic spectrum to track terrorists and decipher signatures off of enemy radar. And notably, the NGA is the first intel agency to be headed by a woman: Letitia Long, an intelligence veteran.

Senior U.S. policymakers who do not work for the agency described to National Journal NGA's substantial contributions to the mission.

Read the whole story at NationalJournal.com.

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Goal was to kill, not capture bin Laden

Yochi J. Dreazen, Marc Ambinder, and Aamer Madhani — Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

But there's one option the administration appears to have never seriously considered: taking bin Laden alive.

In an important new detail about Sunday's raid, the White House disclosed on Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed when the SEALs shot him in the head and chest, killing him instantly. The administration said that bin Laden resisted capture, but hasn't suggested in any of its public comments that the SEALs were in any immediate danger when they opened fire on him during their assault on his compound in an affluent Islamabad suburb of Abbottabad.

The SEALs' decision to fatally shoot bin Laden -- even though he didn't have a weapon - wasn't an accident. The administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the discussions. A high-ranking military officer briefed on the assault said the SEALs knew their mission was not to take him alive.

Read the full story at NationalJournal.com

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FBI on war footing after bin Laden's death

Marc Ambinder — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The death of Osama bin Laden and the expectation of a trove of intelligence derived from his computers has caused the FBI to ramp up its efforts to prevent a terrorist attack.

The bureau is "back on a post-9/11 war footing," said a senior counterterrorism official who sought anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press.

Within hours of the president's announcement that the U.S. intelligence community had confirmed the identity of bin Laden's body, FBI officials briefed field offices via secure videoconference calls.

Agents will push ahead stagnant prosecutions as a means of mitigating the potential for lone-wolf terrorists to strike out of frustration or revenge, the official said. Field offices have been authorized to expand their surveillance and monitoring to include hundreds of subjects.

Read the whole story at National Journal.

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The secret team that killed bin Laden

Marc Ambinder — Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Read the whole story at NationalJournal.com.

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Four budget developments you need to know

Marc Ambinder — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

1. Getting to 50 percent.

House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, wants to get at least half of his conference to sign on to a bill to fund the government.

There are at least four factions within the House Republican Conference -- though they overlap -- against the bill as is.

One, mainly the appropriators, is concerned with the level and type of defense spending. The second is concerned with the size of the cuts. They want Democrats to come much closer to the $62 billion in cuts that they've set. The third faction will accept fewer cuts in exchange for a rider turning over family-planning funding to states (and thus taking it away from Planned Parenthood). And the fourth is most concerned about reining in the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions.

From the standpoint of votes, these four factions merge into two: those who want more cuts and those who are concerned about the strength of the riders. The idea being: the lower the number of cuts, the tougher the riders, or the softer the riders, the higher the number.

Boehner worries that if he assents to a bill that does not pull a majority of Republicans on board, he'll lose his job, or his credibility, or his stature. It's in his interest to hold out until the very end.

2. The White House is willing to give a little on numbers.

The Obama team is floating $35 billion in cuts today. The administration is portending doom if the government shuts down, having surrogates brief reporters on the consequences of having 800,000 people furloughed.

3. The White House thinks Boehner has to swallow his pride.

The Republican position is that the White House has to give in on a short-term extension so that Boehner can rally his troops and then accept more cuts.

4. The White House line as to why they won't accept short-term resolutions:

They've come more than halfway, certainty is needed, and "this is not a way to run a government." Also: the longer this goes on there's no telling how the politics of this conundrum will play out.

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Obama signs policy directive on government's emergency preparedness

Marc Ambinder — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

National Journal has learned.

A senior administration official said that congressional committees were briefed on Tuesday night on the Presidential Policy Directive, which bears the title of "National Preparedness." The official said the text would be made public later this week. It is not clear if any annexes will be classified. The directive sets government policy as informed by a National Security Staff review that was completed earlier this year.

According to a summary of the directive given to National Journal, the administration preserves core elements of the Bush administration's emergency preparedness plan, which was released in 2003. It makes Homeland Security grants contingent on performance and on how the Homeland Security Secretary assesses need and the quality of response plans.

But the Obama directive places significant emphasis on an "all-of-nation" "all-hazards" approach to disasters, fusing together the capabilities of federal, state, and local authorities to respond to crises. It refocuses government resources on mitigation-preventing catastrophes from getting worse-and resilience-how communities actively respond to and recover from a major disaster.

An official said that the new policy guidelines were developed in the wake of several disasters, including the H1N1 flu pandemic and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The directive also "instructs the Department of Homeland Security to set up a National Preparedness System," which the summary says "will enable the nation to achieve the goal" of maximum preparedness and to undertake "a comprehensive campaign to build and sustain national preparedness; and an annual National Preparedness Report to measure progress in meeting the goal."

The directive also calls for closer collaboration with the private sector and for better and more effective ways for the government to communicate with communities during crises.

Presidential Policy Directives carry the force of executive orders, but they originate from the National Security Council and can be classified. President George W. Bush issued dozens of orders, many of them without any public notice. Last September, Obama signed a policy directive on global engagement, the first of its kind. It was his sixth. Only the text of his first, which spelled out the duties of the National Security Council, has been released, according to the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks the directives.

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Government shutdown: What ceases, what continues

Marc Ambinder — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Administration officials told National Journal on Wednesday that the following government services could possibly cease in the event of a government shutdown:

Federal Housing Associate's new home loan guarantees may cease. During spring home buying season, this suspension of new issuances could have a gravely adverse effect on recovery of housing market. Private mortgage lenders across the country could suspend new home loan closings as a result of having no assurance those loans will be guaranteed. Some 30 percent of the market is FHA loans.
Small Business Association approval of applications for business loan guarantees and direct loans to small businesses would likely cease, impacting the engines of our economy, which could slow economic momentum.
Internal Revenue Service's processing of tax refunds for paper-filed returns (approximately 30 percent of total), and performance of tax audits, would be suspended.
Operation of E-Verify activities by DHS would be suspended, which could slow down new hiring.
Patent processing will be suspended.
Non-emergency consular and passport operations may be suspended, though this is still under discussion with the State Department.

These services would stop:

All areas of the National Park Service and National Wildlife Refuge Systems will be closed. Limited access to public lands could adversely affect communities that depend on recreational tourism.
Smithsonian Institution and National Gallery of Art would close to the public (although Kennedy Center will remain open, due to significant private funding sources).
District of Columbia: Trash collection would be suspended for first three days of funding lapse. Public libraries (except for security), and a variety of District offices that perform non-excepted functions, including the Department of Motor Vehicles, would suspend operations.

These critical services would not cease:

Social security checks for seniors, people with disabilities and survivors would still go out.
Troops would be able to continue to work.
Critical homeland security functions such as border security would continue.

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