As the missions and budgets for U.S. Special Operations Command steadily expand, a new official history (large pdf) looks back at the origins and development of SOCOM.

“Since its creation in 1987, USSOCOM has supported conventional forces and conducted independent special operations throughout the world, participating in all major combat operations,” writes SOCOM Commander General Bryan D. Brown.

The new account, prepared by the SOCOM history office and obtained by Secrecy News, describes in new detail the major SOCOM operations of the past two decades up through the present.

“After 9/11, the first SOF [special operations forces] counterterrorism operations were not conducted in Afghanistan or even in the Middle East, but in Europe,” the SOCOM history notes.

“In late September 2001, U.S. SOF learned that Islamic extremists with connections to Usama bin Laden were in Bosnia. SOCEUR forces quickly put together Operation RESOLUTE EAGLE to capture them. U.S. SOF surveilled the terrorists, detained one of the groups, and facilitated the capture of another group by coalition forces. These raids resulted in the capture of all the suspected terrorists and incriminating evidence for prosecution and intelligence exploitation.”

Other operations, like the battle of Tora Bora, were admittedly less successful.

“The fact that SOF came as close to capturing or killing UBL [Usama bin Laden] as U.S. forces have to date makes Tora Bora a controversial fight. Given the commitment of fewer than 100 American personnel, U.S. forces proved unable to block egress routes from Tora Bora south into Pakistan, the route that UBL most likely took.”

See “United States Special Operations Command, 1987-2007,” SOCOM History and Research Office, MacDill Air Force Base, April 2007 (143 pages in a very large 32 MB PDF file).

The Government Accountability Office prepared a detailed critical profile of SOCOM (pdf) in 2006.

“The Special Operations Command is comprised of special operations forces from each of the military services. In fiscal year 2005, personnel authorizations for Army special operations forces military personnel totaled more than 30,000, the Air Force 11,501, the Navy 6,255, and the Marine Corps 79,” the GAO reported.

“From fiscal year 2001 through fiscal year 2005, funding for the Command increased from more than $3.8 billion to more than $6.4 billion,” GAO said, and it is only projected to rise through 2011.

But recruiting and training special operations forces to meet expanding mission requirements will be a challenge, the GAO concluded.

See “Special Operations Forces: Several Human Capital Challenges Must Be Addressed to Meet Expanded Role” [GAO-06-812], July 2006.

See also “Army Special Operations Forces” (pdf), U.S. Army Field Manual 3-05, September 2006, obtained by Secrecy News.

In a heated debate April 16, the Senate failed to achieve cloture on the FY2007 Intelligence Authorization Act, leaving it open for further amendment today.

One of the points that now seems beyond debate, however, is the need to disclose the total intelligence budget figure.

“The chairman [Sen. Rockefeller] and I have agreed it makes sense … to declassify the top line number of the intelligence budget,” said Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“I have talked with leaders in the intelligence community and I said: Does that cause you any problems? They said: No. It is only when you get below that. Were you to go down the slippery slope of disclosing amounts going into particular units or particular programs of the intelligence community, you give away vital secrets,” Sen. Bond said on the Senate floor.

“This body has twice gone on record and was stated by the chairman and the 9/11 Commission has recommended disclosing the overall number so that the people of America will know whether we are continuing to support the intelligence community adequately, whether we are supporting it with the kinds of resources needed,” he said.

“In our [proposed] managers’ amendment, we took out a [requirement for a] study that would purport to look at the possibility of declassifying further details, other than the top line. We both agreed that should be out,” Sen. Bond said.

See the full debate and the list of pending or proposed amendments to the FY 2007 Intelligence Authorization Act here.

Despite the intelligence community acquiescence noted by Senator Bond, the White House remains opposed to any disclosure of intelligence budget information, according to an April 12 policy statement (pdf).

The role of air and space power in U.S. military operations was addressed in a newly updated U.S. Air Force publication. See Air Force Doctrine Document 2, “Operations and Organization” (pdf), 3 April 2007.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has just released a somewhat perfunctory “2006 Annual Report of the U.S. Intelligence Community” (pdf), dated February 2007.

The Center for American Progress has published the transcript (pdf) of a March 30 program on “Ensuring Congressional Access to National Security Information,” linked (under Resources) from this page.

The politicization of the Department of Justice, the erosion of professional values and the state of Freedom of Information Act policy were discussed with unusual candor by Daniel J. Metcalfe, former director of the DoJ Office of Information and Policy, in an interview with Tony Mauro of Legal Times.

NASA secretly paid $26.6 million several years ago to the families of the astronauts who died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle accident, reported Jim Leusner of the Orlando Sentinel on April 15.

In confronting the threat of terrorism, what would it mean to win? And how would one know?

Terrorist and counterterrorist forces may both believe that they are succeeding in their goals. And depending on their specific objectives, they may both be right.

“Progress may be defined differently by the terrorists and those who oppose them,” according to a recently updated report of the Congressional Research Service (pdf). “Hence both can claim progress, and both can be correct in their assessments.”

So, for example, “Western policymakers often tend to define success by the absence of attacks. When the shooting or bombing stops, for example, that is viewed as success. Yet terrorists sometimes define success in terms of making governments expend limited resources trying to defend an enormous number of potential targets.”

Assessing progress by focusing on those factors that can easily be measured may mislead policymakers.

“A common pitfall of governments seeking to demonstrate success in anti-terrorist measures is overreliance on quantitative indicators, particularly those which may correlate with progress but not accurately measure it, such as the amount of money spent on anti-terror efforts.”

With the growing realization that the threat of terrorism is a distinct problem from the war in Iraq, a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to counterterrorism may soon become possible.

“As terrorism is a complex multidimensional phenomenon, effective responses to terrorism may need to take into account, and to some degree be individually configured to respond to, the evolving goals, strategies, tactics and operating environment of different terrorist groups.”

“Although terrorism’s complex webs of characteristics — along with the inherent secrecy and compartmentalization of both terrorist organizations and government responses — limit available data, the formulation of practical, useful measurement criteria appears both tractable and ready to be addressed.”

The Congressional Research Service does not make its publications directly available to the public, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See “Combating Terrorism: The Challenge of Measuring Effectiveness,” updated March 12, 2007.

Some new or newly updated products of the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include the following (all pdf).

“National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: Legal Background and Recent Amendments,” updated March 20, 2007.

“Navy Force Structure: Alternative Force Structure Studies of 2005 — Background for Congress,” April 9, 2007.

“Enemy Combatant Detainees: Habeas Corpus Challenges in Federal Court,” updated April 6, 2007.

“Opening of the International Tracing Service’s Holocaust-Era Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany,” April 5, 2007.

The Department of Defense has issued several noteworthy new policy Instructions on intelligence and national security matters, including the following (all pdf).

“Joint Reserve Intelligence Program (JRIP),” DoD Instruction 3305.07, March 27, 2007.

“DoD Counterintelligence (CI) Training,” DoD Instruction 3305.11, March 19, 2007.

“Minimum Security Standards for Safeguarding Chemical Agents,” DoD Instruction 5210.65, March 12, 2007.

“Today, following over a year of coordinated effort among the Intelligence Community and the Department of Justice a bill is being submitted to Congress to request long overdue changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” according to an April 13 fact sheet (pdf) on the proposed changes issued by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The text of the proposed legislative changes to FISA, with a section by section analysis, may be obtained here (pdf).

“If S. 372 [the FY 2007 Intelligence Authorization bill pending in the Senate] were presented to the President, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill,” according to an April 12 Statement of Administration Policy (pdf). Among the bill’s intolerable provisions, the Statement said, are the fact that it would require public disclosure of the annual intelligence budget total.

When Secrecy News gained unauthorized access to a restricted U.S. Army manual on visual identification of U.S. and foreign aircraft, we supposed that it was just one more case of unnecessary and inappropriate secrecy.

But it turns out to be something worse than that, since the document (pdf) contains a surprising number of technical errors.

The dimensions given in the Army manual for the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle are wrong, the Entropic Memes blog astutely noted. And the entry for the B-52, among others, is likewise incorrect.

“Please,” Entropic Memes exclaimed. “If they can’t get the details of one of their own systems correct, how much faith can you have that they got the details of anyone else’s systems right?”

In this case, the secrecy of the Army manual was not just an arbitrary barrier to public access. It also “protected” numerous errors that may make the document worse than useless.

Conversely, exposing the document to public scrutiny may now make it possible to correct its errors so as to fulfill its intended purpose.

Since it was posted on the Federation of American Scientists website 48 hours ago, the Visual Aircraft Recognition manual has been downloaded over seventy thousand times, an exceptionally high rate of access.

Update: “This is not a subject I’ve so far spent a lot of time on, but the entry for every aircraft I’ve looked up in the manual thus far contains errors,” adds Entropic Memes in a new post.

More than 160 U.S. and foreign military aircraft are catalogued in a U.S. Army manual (large pdf) which describes their distinctive physical characteristics in order to permit visual identification of the aircraft in flight.

The manual is nominally a restricted document, marked “for official use only,” and it has not been approved for public release. But a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

Proper identification of aircraft is obviously a matter of military significance.

Incorrectly identifying a friendly aircraft (such as an F-15 Eagle) as an enemy aircraft (such as a MiG-29 Fulcrum) in wartime “could cause fratricide,” meaning the destruction of friendly aircraft, the manual states.

Conversely, incorrectly identifying an enemy aircraft (a Su-24 Fencer) as a friendly one (such as a Tornado) “might allow a hostile aircraft entry into, or safe passage through, the defended area.”

On the other hand, mistaking one type of hostile aircraft (a Su-17 Fitter) for another type of hostile aircraft (a MiG-21 Fishbed) would generally have “no impact” — except “if friendly countries were flying some aircraft types that are normally considered hostile.”

Likewise, mistaking one type of friendly aircraft (an F-4 Phantom) for another (an A-4 Skyhawk) would normally not be a great problem unless “a hostile country was using an aircraft type that is normally considered friendly.”

The manual covers both well-known and relatively obscure systems, but does not include classified aircraft.

Although an earlier edition of the manual was published without access restrictions, the current edition (2006) was not approved for public release.

But as the government imposes publication restrictions on an ever larger set of records, the control system seems to be breaking down at the margins, permitting unauthorized access with increasing frequency.

In this case, contrary to the restriction notice on the title page, the document does not reveal sensitive “technical or operational information,” in Secrecy News’ estimation.

See “Visual Aircraft Recognition,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-01.80, January 2006 (413 pages in a very large 28 MB PDF file).

Update: Entropic Memes points out that there is reason to doubt the accuracy of some of the data in the manual.

The Central Intelligence Agency has released three of its internal personnel regulations in redacted form as part of a defense against charges that it improperly dismissed a former undercover contract employee.

A 2002 regulation signed by then-DCI George Tenet established the CIA Personnel Evaluation Board (pdf), which is “the primary mechanism for reviewing employee suitability and security cases that may result in the imposition of serious discipline, termination of employment, or revocation of security clearances.”

The “circumstances under which Agency employment may be terminated” are described in another 2002 regulation (pdf).

The role of “contract employees” — which are not the same as “contractors” — is described in a third redacted CIA regulation (pdf).

The regulations were disclosed by CIA in response to a lawsuit filed by “Peter B.” (pdf), a covert contract employee who alleged that he was wrongly terminated and was subjected to unlawful retaliation by the CIA.

The CIA replied (pdf) that the CIA Director “has discretion to terminate a person employed by the CIA for any reason and the decision is not subject to review.”

The newly disclosed CIA personnel regulations were characterized in a declaration (pdf) by CIA information review officer Linda Dove.

Almost every day brings forceful reminders of the transience of all human endeavors, challenging us to consider our own mortality and to act with compassion, if we can.

Paul Leventhal, a tireless advocate for the cause of nuclear non-proliferation, died this week of cancer. As president of the public interest Nuclear Control Institute, he was a relentless critic of nuclear policy, a font of new ideas, and a mentor to a generation of younger activists. He is remembered here.

John William Leonard, who also died this week at age 30, was the son of Bill Leonard, the respected director of the Information Security Oversight Office. “He was more than a good son, he was a good man,” said an obituary notice in the Washington Post today (4/11/07, page B8). The notice stated that charitable contributions may be made to the John William Leonard Memorial Fund, c/o Bank of America, 28250 Three Notch Road, Mechanicsville, MD 20659.