BayonetBrant:

I'm still trying to figure out how to figure this out.

I spent two months in 08 listening to the drumbeat for CIDNE---the magical all-purpose elixir. Then, it gets to Iraq, and needs to be populated---it's like a GIS system with no shapefiles. Then the population problems.... Then the transitional control problems (iraqi turnover?). Then....

Now, we move to a new, and no doubt, very expensive mapht. Go figure?

Starts to sound like USAID. Why solve a problem if you can just let a contract.

OK. OK. HT is the way forward. Wasn't that the message a few years ago? So where's the result?

OK. It's complicated, and will take many years (strategic patience). Ok, but where's the path, what's the schedule? How many years? Who has the plan?

Is it so complicated that we can't have a plan until later?

It always seems to come back to the same old anthropological/tribal stuff but no hard data, no focused background information. Tactics. Tactics. Strategy requires something else.

I had a few interactions with people involved in the big review. Like MG Flynn describes, they were looking for normal and typical hard data, and nobody had it---fortune telling.

Then the double-barrels from UN and CSIS (Cordesman: Winning battles, losing the war). All of them need something more than: "It's complicated!"

And not just for us, but for the Afghans. A colleague send me the news about the 4 kids killed today; 80 injured. Real and focused answers are needed by everybody else. Or the mission will not be able to continue. (Just the facts of life).

I truly hope that Fixing Intel means more than "do more of what we have been doing."

Was it a call for something different, or just do the same better? Was it a path to better answers: How to be ahead of problems rather than just reactive?

I guess that's what we'll find out soon enough.

Steve