Doug brought this up, and it got me to thinking. So far, thanks to Doug’s work and a little snooping around that I have done, we have come up with a ‘guess-timate’. We think it is the combined information gathering program that has taken advantage of some of the latest technological advances out there. Specifically Data Mining.
The thing about all of this, is that integrating intelligence gathering and creating networks is not a new thing. But extremely fast technologies that are able to process all this information coming from the various elements of the network is. And the algorithms designed to seek out patterns and stuff, is the same kind of technology that you see in today’s search engines, like Google. That is what is new about this war.
So putting it all together, and creating a high speed, bad guy finding ‘machine’ could have a major impact on the war effort. But who knows, it could be something crazier and more fantastic. I still think the best weapon out there, is the brain of the fighting men and women, and the leaders that have to implement these strategies and carry out these missions. -Head Jundi
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Secret killing program is key in Iraq, Woodward says
* Story Highlights
* Program likened to WWII-era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb
* Author discloses the existence of secret operational capabilities in latest book
* National security advisor disputes Woodward’s conclusion about the Iraq surge
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.
The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would “get people killed,” Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.
“It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,” Woodward said.
In “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.
National security adviser Stephen Hadley, in a written statement reacting to Woodward’s book, acknowledged the new strategy. Yet he disputed Woodward’s conclusion that the “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was not the primary reason for the decline in violent attacks.
“It was the surge that provided more resources and a security context to support newly developed techniques and operations,” Hadley wrote.
Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote that along with the surge and the new covert tactics, two other factors helped reduce the violence.VideoWatch Bob Woodward explain the strategy »
One was the decision of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order a cease-fire by his Mehdi Army. The other was the “Anbar Awakening” movement that saw Sunni tribes aligning with U.S. troops to battle al Qaeda in Iraq.
Woodward told Larry King that while there is a debate over how much credit the new secret operations should get for the drop in violence, he concluded it “accounts for a good portion.”
“I would somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II,” he said “It’s a ski slope right down in a matter of months, cutting the violence in half. This isn’t going to happen with the bunch of joint security stations or the surge.”
The top secret operations, he said, will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement.”
While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.
“The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed,” he said. “It’s not news to them.
“If you were a member of al Qaeda or the resistance or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” Woodward said. “It is very dangerous.”
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Here are some ideas floating around out there.
Wired Danger Room Says-
I’m going to make a wager about what I think Woodward is talking about, and I’ll be curious to see what Danger Room readers have to say. I believe he is talking about the much ballyhooed (in defense geek circles) “Tagging, Tracking and Locating” program; here’s a briefing on it from Special Operations Command. These are newfangled technologies designed to track people from long distances, without the targeted people realizing they are being tracked. That can theoretically include thermal signatures, or some sort of “taggant” placed on a person. Think Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Well, not so many cameras, maybe.
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Michael Ware of CNN Says-
John Roberts: What do you think of what Woodward is saying?
Michael Ware: Let’s say that these “fusion teams,” as they’re being called, have come into effect. The first thing to say is, “Well, about time.”
On the ground you’ve seen the lack of coordination as the left hand of one agency is not with the right hand of another agency within the American effort. But by and large, to suggest that anything like this being done now has been the major reason for the decline in violence is a bit rich.
I mean, the U.S. subcontracted out an assassination program against al Qaeda way back in early 2006. And this was conceded by the then-chief of military intelligence in Baghdad and by [U.S.] Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad himself. That’s what broke the back of al Qaeda.
Then when America put 100,000-plus insurgents on the U.S. government payroll, including members of al Qaeda, that not only took them out of the field, but it also let them run their own assassination programs against the Iranian-backed militias.
Roberts: So it sounds like assassination was a real part of the program here, but was that the only thing that worked? What about the addition of these troops and these neighborhood stations that were set up? Did it all kind of work together?
Ware: It does work together. But the key to the downturn in violence that we’re seeing now is not so much the surge of 30,000 troops in itself
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Doug’s Network Says-
– Woodward’s “secret program” is not one superweapon, it is a network of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) platforms, and data base analysis techniques borrowed from law enforcement and enhanced for counterinsurgency. Patterns of bad guy activity and networks become visible, our door-kickers hit a node, exploit what they find within hours and go hit other nodes, every night, for weeks, forcing the bad guys to do things they’d rather not, exposing even more nodes, gathering more data for the data base, more laptops for exploitation.
All this relentless door-kicking is tough on the door-kickers. We needed more of them. Thus The Surge.
-I suspect the “Secret Weapon” is the database operations that synthesize all forms of data into some sort of graphical portrayal of connections. In short, datamining applied to warfare.
Or, perhaps it is a bunch of freakin’ dolphins with freakin’ lasers mounted to their heads.
-Here’s my uninformed speculation concerning the innovation about which Woodward is so tight-lipped: it involves social network analysis. Through trial-and-error, data mining, number crunching, modeling/simulation, and multiple information sources, our guys have figured out how to identify (with a very high degree of certainty) the key node in an otherwise loosely connected and shifting network. That is to say, they know much more now about how to identify the particular SOB whose absence would cause the most damage to the network