Fred Leland on Homeland Security Television-Active Shooter

This is very very good, and I highly recommend it.

Don

A collaborative effort of Homeland Security Television and Law Enforcement and Security Consulting, Inc produced a new training video, Are Police Officers Ready For The Next Generation of Active Shooters?

HSTV explores law enforcement’s preparedness for the Next Generation of active shooter threats. Featuring law enforcement training expert, Fred Leland of Law Enforcement Security Consulting Inc., you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

You can view the two part program that starts this Sunday night, January 31st 2010 at 7PM at HSTV and

www.lesc.Net . Part 1 Active Shooter 2.1

The evolution of active shooter response and the problems that must still be overcome.

Part 2 Active Shooter 2.1

The art and science of active shooter response.

We look forward to your feedback and comments on part one of the series.

Stay oriented! Fred

Haiti Reality Check-AAR by former Marine…

From my good friends Chuck Spinney and COL (USMC ret.) G.I. Wilson.  A bottom up solution to disaster relief, leaders on the ground making things happen without all the overhead.

Attached is an important eyewitness assessment of the current situation in Haiti. It was written by William McNulty, William McNulty is a Sgt in the Marine Corps Reserve and when he was a Cpl he already had a MA in John Hopkins…..William has no burning desire to be an officer let alone a LtCol…William likes being accountable, responsible, and getting things done without a whole of PC and fanfare. I am very blessed to know him and like most Marine enlisted I would go with William anywhere… long live the Irish !.  S/F  Col. GI Wilson USMC Ret

William is a volunteer member of Team Rubicon, a self-financed and self-deployed group of former Marines, soldiers and health care professionals currently providing emergency relief in Haiti. (see web site at http://blog.teamrubiconhaiti.org). McNulty paints a grim picture of condition in Haiti and especially, as he puts it, “… the impotence of western power to deal with disasters/emergencies;for either out of lack of compassion, political correctness, or because the institutions set up to take care of emergencies are so overburdened with layers of bureaucracy that they are ineffective.”

Haiti Reality Check

William McNulty Former Asst Team Lead Team Rubicon January 24, 2010 http://blog.teamrubiconhaiti.org/2010/01/deputy-tl-mcnulty-aar-pulls-no-punches.html

Crushing Haiti, Now as Always

The not so reverend Pat Robertson recently claimed that the disastrous Haiti earthquake is God’s payback for a pact Haitian revolutionaries made with the Devil in order to get his help in evicting their French masters early in the 19th Century. Thank you Pat, it is indeed comforting to know that God works in mysterious ways that could be misconstrued as racism by lessor minds … but before invoking the comforting morality derived from Pat’s self-referencing ability to commune with the Almighty, it might be useful to consider the possibility of some not-so-comforting albeit less mysterious reasons for Haiti’s unending misery, including the more prosaic motives of naked greed and the exploitation of mankind’s better angels. Here is Patrick Cockburn’s take on one set of secular possibilities.

Weekend Edition January 15-17, 2010

When Haitian Ministers Take a 50 Percent Cut of Aide Money It’s Called “Corruption,” When NGOs Skim 50 Percent It’s Called “Overhead”

Crushing Haiti, Now as Always

By PATRICK COCKBURN Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick01152010.html

No Exit

FEBRUARY 01, 2010 ISSUE THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE http://amconmag.com/article/2010/feb/01/00006/

No Exit America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well.

BY ANDREW J. BACEVICH

President Obama’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan earned him at most two muted cheers from Washington’s warrior-pundits. Sure, the president had acceded to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. Already in its ninth year, Operation Enduring Freedom was therefore guaranteed to endure for years to come. The Long War begun on George W. Bush’s watch with expectations of transforming the Greater Middle East gained a new lease on life, its purpose reduced to the generic one of “keeping America safe.”

Yemen: Opening A New “Front” in the Long War Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts

Yemen: Opening A New “Front” in the Long War Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts by Chuck Spinney

Recent events like the Fort Hood Massacre and the bungled attempt to fire bomb the airliner bound for Detroit have focused attention on and encouraged our escalating intervention in Yemen, which has been taking place quietly, as if Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were not enough to keep our strategic planners and stretched out military forces occupied. Our reactions to events in the so-called Long War on Terror suggest an aimless spreading of effort throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. This aimlessness brings to mind a comment General Hermann Balck, a highly decorated German officer in WWII, made to a small group of reformers in the Pentagon in the early 1980s.

The subject was Operation Barbarossa, or Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Balck pithily dismissed the German strategy shaping that invasion with the words: “Nicht Schwerpunkt.” Balck was saying there was no focus or main effort to the German invasion, and without a focus, there was no way to harmonize the thousands of subordinate efforts. The result was a spreading of effort that led to eventual overextension as can be seen in the following map. Now the Eastern Front of WWII is very different from the ridiculously misleading label of a Central Front in the Long War on Terror. But the idea of schwerpunkt is germane to both efforts, and the US is showing all the signs of spreading and over extending its efforts which accompany a nicht schwerpunkt. This is no small thing.

As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed in his famous briefing, Patterns of Conflict, the idea of a schwerpunkt is central to organizing all effective military operations. It is far more than a simple question of concentrating forces. According to Boyd, the idea of a “Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.”

Now this is a very compressed statement, pregnant with information, and based on a lot of research, but it nevertheless makes it self evident that there is no comparable unifying medium in America’s Long War on Terror. Our failure to form a schwerpunkt is just as much a prescription for paralysis and defeat by a thousand cuts in a guerrilla war as it is in a mechanized conventional war between standing armies.

Gaza War: A Tactical Success, Strategic Draw, & a Grand Strategic Disaster

The American strategist and military reformer Colonel John Boyd argued that nations and groups should shape their domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies so that they:

• pump up one’s own resolve and increase one’s own solidarity,
• drain away the resolve of one’s adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion,
• reinforce the commitments of allies to one’s own cause and make them empathetic to one’s success
• attract the uncommitted to our cause or makes them empathetic to one’s success
• end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts

These criteria are the essence of grand strategy and can be thought of as guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions. And while they make sense logically and intuitively, the difficulty of defining policies that simultaneously conform to and strengthen to all these criteria is equally obvious. The latter challenge is particularly difficult for the unilateral military strategies and the coercive foreign policies like those preferred by Israel or the United States. Military operations and political coercion are often destructive in the short term, and these destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term.

Moreover, the more powerful a country, the harder it becomes to harmonize the often conflicting criteria for a sensible grand strategy. Overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance which, in turn, carry a temptation to use that power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one’s will to others breeds resentment. Thus, possession of overwhelming power increases the risk of going astray grand strategically.

That risk is particularly dangerous when aggressive external actions, policies, and rhetoric are designed to prop up or increase internal cohesion for domestic political reasons. Very often, the effects or military strategies or coercive foreign policies that are perceived as useful in terms of domestic political cohesion backfire at the grand-strategic level, because they strengthen our adversaries’ will to resist, push our allies into a neutral or even an adversarial corner, or drive away the uncommitted … which together, can set the stage for continuing conflict.

With these general thoughts about grand strategy in mind, read the following article by Uri Avnery and ask yourself if Israel’s most recent war in Gaza made sense at the tactical level of conflict?, the strategic level of conflict? … and most importantly, at the grand strategic level of conflict?
Cast Lead 2
by Uri Avnery Antiwar.com December 28, 2009 http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2009/12/27/cast-lead-2/

Did we win? Sunday marked the first anniversary of the Gaza War, alias Operation Cast Lead, and this question fills the public space.

WAKE UP PEOPLE!!-Top 10 Reasons to Kill Senate Health Care Bill

I got this from a friend who works on budget issues in Congress, and he/she assured me the reasons are accurate — that is all I know, but if true, this list would explain Insurance stock just rose to all time highs. We are getting taken for a big ride. As my friend Al Gill says, “they are strip mining this country!” Here is a great example of corruption and selfish service. Remember Health Care begins with you and how you eat and working out moderately at least three times a week, not with the bloated government. The Senate bill isn’t a ” starter home,” it’s a sink hole. It needs to die so something else can take its place. It doesn’t matter whether people are on the right or the left — once they understand the con job that’s about to be foisted on them, they agree. That’s why Harry Reid and President Obama are trying to jam it through as fast as they can, before people get wise. So email the list to your friends and family, tweet it and spread the word.

Don

Best Describes our Nation Today-Tiger Woods Person of the Year!

The below article best describes what is wrong with our nation today! I agree totally with it. We love facades, pretty faces, glowing resumes-filled with fancy places with degrees, and work experiences all over the globe. As I keep saying, “Where have all the leaders gone?”  You want real leaders, then you got to be able to take the hard truth, and mostly the hard fixes. Until we do that, we will continue to go down the drain, slowly, but surely. Of course, I provided recommendations on how to fix it in a column a year ago. I will look for the post and then update it.

Have a great Christmas otherwise.

Don

December 20, 2009OP-ED COLUMNISTTiger Woods, Person of the YearBy FRANK RICH http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20rich.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

AS we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon. The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt.

Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down.

Great article by Lt. Fred Leland Coffee and Conversation

Take it from me, this stuff also applies to Soldiers and Marines fighting 4GW right now and in the future. Fred and I work a lot together to cross over lessons learned between law enforcement and the military.

From Fred Leland:

 I started a new weekend morning series on my web-site called Coffee and Conversation: Trying to get the guys in law enforcement and security to think more about conflict and how to prevent or resolve it, with more than just the gun and physical force. The Tactical Decision Maker: The Devil’s Definitely in the Details is the latest (posted this morning) of 4 in the series I started a month ago.

http://lesc.net/blog/coffee-and-conversation-tactical-decision-maker-devilrsquos-definitely-details

Honored by Brave New War author and future expert John Robb…

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/

DON VANDERGRIFF: On Adaptive Leadership Posted

15 Dec 2009 10:29 AM PST

Obviously, warfare and conflict in the 21st Century present new challenges. It’s not only hideously complex, mercurial, and lightning fast — it’s an environment where missteps or brain dead actions of an individual or small group can unwind the work of an entire Army within hours. The solution to these challenges isn’t achieved by: automating new layers of oversight/controls on individual behavior or hermetically sealing off the organization’s members from the outside world or developing ever more complex doctrines that appear to solve every contingency.

Instead, the answer is to train leaders to think adaptively.

* So, how do you accomplish this? How do you train leaders to think adaptively?

** The best answer I have found so far is found in the work of Don Vandergriff.

He’s done more deep thinking and generated more experience actually training adaptive leaders than anybody else.

Here’s some links to his work on the topic:

First, his books:

The Path to Victory America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs

Raising the Bar Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War

Manning the Future Legions of the United States Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions

Here are some articles that use his adaptive leadership training methodology.

Assembly Article: No Approved Solutions for Asymmetric Warfare (Foster)

OBTE: Defining the Aim Point for Reconnaissance Leader Training

* I could go into a long explanation for why this is so, but frankly Don does a better job than I would. ** I consider adaptive thinking is a requirement for all 21st Century organizations — corporate, military, agency, NGO, or insurgent . Even further: the best organizations make adaptive thinking a requirement for ALL of its members.

Here’s his contact info for more info:

DONALD E. VANDERGRIFF (MAJOR US ARMY RETIRED)

MAVERICK LEADERSHIP LLC

CELL: 571-229-0962

EMAIL: vandergriffdonald AT usa.net

WEB: http://www.donvandergriff.com