CIA tour-de-force

I just finished Berntsen and Pezzullo book "Jaw Breaker", in one setting if you like real life CIA ops it is a Great read.
I was surprised on many levels, first it seemed to be a bit of a cluster f**k, but I mean that in the best possible way.

CTC looked at the OPs requirements and called experts to cover them and gave leaders the ability to pull additional men as they needed.
So we have a group of experts for a 5 paragraph meet to review and assign titles/positions and responsibilities.
A group of experts that may never have worked together before or even didn't know each other before the meet.

I kind of expected off the shelf highly trained experts that have drilled and drilled together like the SWAT teams you see on TV.
And the CIA really believes in cross training. And they are expected to work with and fit into a SEAL. or LURP. or DELTA FORCE team; tomorrow, never having worked with them.

The CIA team brought assets the other teams don't have ie, Intel sources and money and lots of it if needed.

Team Juliet Forward for example had the ability of the CIA, and USA military forces including the Air Force.
A small team or 4 to 7 could take on a thousand Taliban.
While the teams capabilities exceeded my expectations they also were not cutting edge.
They had to setup and take down their com link, it was not mobile.

The desire for Political Correctness also a handicap, but in the Information/Propaganda WAR of al Qaeda also makes it all important.
From Gary's perspective it was also " old boy " heavy, as changes seemed to be made for career decisions rather than just Victory considerations, but those were on the down hump.

I was surprised they didn't have real time satellite surveillance 24/7 for Afghan during the ops.
They had Biny driving around in this huge convoy and never hit it and didn't know where it was all the time. And al Qaeda retreating over or out of the mountains without having an AC-130 pounding the hell out of them every step of the way?

The video links between forward bases and C&C were few and far between if available at all.
I expected everybody to be in video com all the time.
And the inter service competition could have cost lives, very little but some none the less.
I would have added 2 more components, anthropologist, and an Information officer, with a thousand bots to feed him with OSINT about anything, warlord's bios, connections, posts, photos
history, tribe connections, Maps from virtually every library in the world, even a Google 3D look at all forward teams deployment locations... etc.

It was AMAZING to watch it all come together in real time in the book. They were really making WAR history doing something that had never been done before with equipment and men that had never been synced together. And the back 40 did a tremendous effort at keeping it all supplied, ( they even managed a American horse saddles for the team ) air cover most of the time every where. Simply amazing coordination of service forces and foreign non regular forces and hooking up with indigenous Intel sources in a tour de force of Military power. The like of history has never seen before. The coordination and cooperation of the services with the Intel agency was a force multiplier beyond expectation. And all are to be commended for their professionalism and expertise.

But they were missing one weapon, the Internet.

If I had been running the show there would have been a secure web site, and wiki which every team would reoprt to, and everyone would have the helmet cams for
live actions or future downloading. This would allow Gary to get a real time look at everything without having to make "phone calls". And give the Military and Intel services a place for input, and Intelligence. Bios of warlords for example and input of personal experiences with the Warlords for example.
Maybe even insert trackers for targets on a real time map,
And a realtime zoomable map with actions, combat and locations of forces with feeds from live real time satellites, drones and troops in the field.

Now I know all these abilities are available in bits and pieces, but have never seen them function togther as a unit. And there IS the security available to keep this Intra net secure world wide.

The CIA is not Internet friendly, the CIA tip line is a abysmal failure, try writing something in a doc or even in note pad and paste it into the Tip web site, no go, it won't take the
"Note pad" formatting.

The CIA almost seems WWW aversive, afraid of the net.

The Internet in this case would be a tremendous force multiplier. for the Service.

But even without the www the CIA did the impossible job taking a country by force without an Army, and way below expected costs.

No agency in the world could have done it.
Genius work from professionals.

Thanks Guys

Gerald
Anthropologist, ad Magnum
( Where can I get a signed, hard cover of his book? )
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