25 May 2010
VPD
(View of Camelback Mountain from Donovon’s Steakhouse, Phoenix)
I was sitting in the kick-off session yesterday in the vast hall. The lights were down, and the convention planners had caused massive speakers with gigantic sub-woofers to be hung from the ceiling high above, and the air actually moved with the rock music they had selected as a sound track to build enthusiasm.
What with the three time zones between the moment and home plate for most of the attendants, it had to be loud.
It was much more like going to the movies than gong to a meeting- you know those whooshing sounds like rockets that precede important announcements? I could actually feel them press against my skin in the chill conditioned air.
There were some important administrative remarks from the Convention organizers. They are a private concern that makes a profit out of packaging these vast meetings. They used to be organized by the Government, and were in scale with the amount of imagination applied.
It is really different when the private sector produces these events. The petite woman whose image was projected on a dozen screens around the hall explained that there were 2,000 registered attendees and 250 exhibitors, which would make this one of the biggest in the long series of conventions.
Having walked the exhibition floor, I think the booths are smaller and the air more desperate than in former years.
Everyone knows the air is coming out of all this frantic activity, even as we have kids out there engaged in a desperate fight.
The embattled Government leader of the worldwide enterprise introduced the Director- an Army guy- and apologized for the fact that there had been a change of plan. The General was not present in person, due to emerging requirements back in Washington.
I wondered if Korea was going to melt down again, and not for the first time in my life, thanked my lucky stars I am done with that problem, at least in person.
The General suddenly appeared, sixteen feet tall on the screens that flanked the empty podium.
He is a compelling and plain-spoken man, and I enjoyed his address, which was mostly about how important it is to share information across the community. You would think we would have that right by now, unless you are close enough to know what is actually going on, but the General gave me a little hope.
I shivered a little in the coolness as the General blinked off.
Next up on the agenda was the G2 of the whole Green Machine, a three star career intelligence officer who is both thoughtful and blunt as a board. His job was to explain how the Army is getting to the right mix of intelligence support across the spectrum of conflict- from force-on-force on the lower right hand corner to the strange twilight insurgency on the upper left of the fancy PowerPoint slide.
The G2 had some slides, let me tell you. PowerPoint is the main battery in the Pentagon arsenal these days. The colors don’t cost a thing unless you try to print them, or send them to someone in a HumVee with limited bandwidth.
Apparently we have had it wrong, or something. What the G2 said fixes it is something called “F3EAD.” I had to lean over to the guy next to me to decipher. "Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze Disseminate," is what he whispered back after going to the browser on the smart phone he was supposed to have turned off to avoid knocking out the VTC link in the auditorium.
I scratched my head in the darkness. That acronym used to be something we called “TPED,” or, Tasking, Production, Exploitation and Dissemination, which was the Intelligence Cycle in a nutshell. Somebody's Legion of Merit hung on the new acronym, which I do appreciate, since it conveys the fact that there is something you are supposed to do with intelligence, which brings in the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) component of how you get the stuff to exploit, and then fix the target so you can atomize him or her and finish that part of the cycle.
I have been in this business for a long time, and I confess that there was a time when visually pleasing destruction (VPD) was one of those satisfying moments in the intelligence cycle, but I find after looking at cities that were leveled I find it a little troubling, even if the cool secondary explosions means that you got it right and bad people will not do bad things with what they were carrying.
The PowerPoint slides were compelling. Given the cutbacks in the company budget, I had to leave the auditorium after the General summed up how this all works with an Army that is an endless loop of deployments to fight in inhospitable placed against an apparently implacable foe.
I wondered a little about Korea as I walked into the exhibition hall. I have no idea how that would work if we wind up in a shooting match with those idiots in the north.
They live on the lower right of the PowerPoint slide, and that is where the General’s grand scheme runs into some real resources, and the F3ED required to get the VPD is really expensive.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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