After reading a new non-fiction book iWar:  War and Peace in the Information Age by newspaperman Bill Gertz, OpenCdA wonders if when it comes to information warfare awareness, President Trump and some of his designated appointees aren’t light years ahead of many of the Clinton-Bush-Obama straphangers that are now finding themselves being spun off the Washington merry-go-round.

Trump and his Tweeter machine are driving the national skews media nuts with his conflicting and ambiguous answers to their failing attempts at gotcha questions.  It was a short drive for the rabidista Hillary Clinton worshippers at ABC, CNN, MSNBC,  and of course Bezos’ Bozos at the Washington Past.

Gertz’s book is a remarkably readable account of the information war to which the United States has been subjected since after World War II.   His book astutely shows how several recent US presidents including Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama haven’t just been ignorant of information warfare;  some of them were seemingly in denial of its existence.  Reagan may have had the best understanding of what the Soviets were doing with it to undermine our national security.

President Trump not only seems to get it, but he also seems to be using it himself to keep the skews media and our international adversaries confounded.

That’s not to suggest that he doesn’t take the existence and continuing threat of information warfare seriously.  Clearly, he does.  In fact, he may take it more seriously and have a more intuitive understanding of it than any of his predecessors.

Gertz’s book is fascinating reading.   It’s no doubt just coincidental that not long after comp’d copies were delivered to Foggy Bottom, Ft. Fumble, Langley, JB Anacostia-Bolling, and Ft. Meade, Rolaids and Prevacid were added to the GSA procurement schedule.

We heard it from candidate, then nominee, then President-elect Trump throughout his candidacy:  “Drain the swamp!”  But in the surreal world of Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac, what does it really mean?  Does the new President hate all “government” employees?  What will the remnants of the swamp look like when President Trump pulls the drain plug?

It will probably look like waterlogged mahogany furniture and even emptier $1000 suits than it has for decades.  It is far less likely to look like unfilled JCPenney slacks and shirts and ties or Ross skirts, slacks and blouses.  Most of the folks whose desks and chairs are gray painted sheet metal rather than mahogany, the folks at GS/GM-15 and below, are likely to be high and dry and still have jobs.

To the aforementioned occupants of the mahogany furniture:  Welcome to the whirlpool.

Some Senior Executive Service officials are likely to be retained in the SES, some will be effectively demoted (though that’s not what it’s called in the SES).

Presidential appointees, the folks who “…serve at the pleasure of the President…,”  should have already submitted their resignations. It is customary for appointees to offer to resign when the President who appointed them leaves office.

Some Obama appointees may be reappointed by President Trump.  For example, President Trump said during the campaign that he intended to reappoint Preet Bharara to be the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Bharara had been appointed to that position in 2009 by President Obama, and he has administered that office without evidence of partisan bias.  That is to say, Bharara has gone after many corrupt public officials without any apparent deference to the offender’s party affiliation.

The US Department of Justice Headquarters, often shortened to Main Justice, is one of the large swamps with subsidiary swamps in many of the federal judicial districts.  Until the Senate gets around to confirming Senator Sessions to be the new US Attorney General, here is a list of the designates who will continue to oversee Main Justice.

The delay by the US Senate to confirm Sessions will result in some legal actions being delayed since the US Attorneys in each of the federal judicial districts needs to know what the new boss at Main Justice wants before making representations to the federal courts on his behalf.

Other federal agencies have likely filed similar memoranda which identify component heads.   It is done for continuity of government operations.

On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)  released its unclassified background report entitled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”.

The (U) background report makes it very clear that the Russian Federation government at the direction of President Vladimir Putin mounted an information campaign intended to influence the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election in the United States.

That revelation has provided the breathless headlines for many skewspaper articles and broadcast skews blather which would have us conclude that this has never happened before and that the United States of America has never and would never engage in anything so nefarious as to try and influence who controls other nations’ governments.  Both conclusions are wrong.

Long before the Soviet Union dissolved, it had been using influence campaigns to try and influence western elections.   It hasn’t stopped.  If the incoming cast of Republican clowns think that Putin and his intelligence services (SVR, FSB, GRU) haven’t been laying the groundwork to disrupt the Trump administration using similar and even more aggressive tactics, then those Republicans need to re-read the report and be drug tested regularly. (It’s not only the Russians.  The People’s Republic of China,  the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and several of our allies have the ability and very probably the will to do much worse.)

What the Russians did in the 2016 election campaign was attack the vulnerabilities of several electronic storage media to gather information for their influence campaign.   Those vulnerabilities were known or should have been known to the systems’  administrators.   For the past eight years efforts by the Intelligence Community to beef up counterintelligence (CI), including offensive CI operations, were largely rebuffed by President Obama.

The report offers no evidence the Russians successfully manipulated votes via cyberattacks.

As for any misplaced belief that the United States would never do unto someone else what the Russians did unto us, ask Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the efforts by President Obama and his henchmen at State Department to get Netanyahu ousted in 2015.   Go back even further to the 1973 support by President Richard Nixon for the Chilean coup ousting President Salvador Allende and to the numerous efforts under President John F. Kennedy to remove and even kill Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro.

The links in the first paragraph provide a pretty good primer for those wanting to know more about how the Intelligence Community assesses threats and how it provides information to decision makers.  It also hints at what worked in preventing the Russians from doing what our skews media wish had happened:  actually manipulating the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.