So why should you be reading The Captain’s Journal?  Quite simply, because we are finding the obscure information, connecting the dots, and giving you the analysis before it becomes analysis to other analysts.  Let’s go over two cases in point.

USA Today reports on confiscated weapons piling up in Iraq.

Coalition forces have uncovered more insurgent weapons caches in the first six months of this year than the entire previous year, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Monday.
The record number of seizures is due largely to a new U.S. strategy that has moved American forces off bases and into neighborhoods, generating more tips from civilians. Offensives have also disrupted insurgent sanctuaries, Petraeus said.

Uncovering weapons caches are one of several signs of recent military progress, Petraeus said. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will travel to Washington in September to give an assessment of the new strategy in Iraq, which is backed by an additional 30,000 American troops.

“We feel as if we have momentum, tactical momentum,” Petraeus said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

Petraeus cautioned that challenges remain and insurgent groups maintain the ability to carry out large attacks. “I don’t want to paint a rosy picture,” he said.

Uncovering the caches, which can include everything from rockets and surface-to-air missiles to assault weapons and components for roadside bombs, gets weapons out of the hands of insurgents.

It’s also a sign of how prevalent weapons and ammunition are in Iraq. The numbers of arms caches uncovered so far this year is 3,698, up from 2,726 last year, according to the military command in Iraq. “It’s staggering,” Petraeus said.

General Petraeus, not a man given to superlative or exaggeration, says the numbers are “staggering!”  But we have been reporting on this and analyzing it for some time now.  On April 27, 2007, we reported that the Government Accounting Office  informed us as to just how important pre-war planning and post-invasion manpower was to securing weapons:

Unattended Iraqi ammunition depots provide the majority of explosives used by insurgents to attack U.S. and coalition troops with improvised explosive devices, according to a Government Accountability Office report released April 27.

“There’s an unknown number of sites that remain unsecured today,� GAO Director Davi D’Agostino said.

Drawing from after-action reports and input from military leaders, the report blames inadequate Operation Iraqi Freedom planning for the unsecured munitions.

“According to lessons-learned reports and senior level DoD officials, the widespread looting occurred because DoD had insufficient troop levels to secure conventional munitions,� the report states.

On March 2, 2007, we gave you this analysis:

Within the past couple of weeks, the Multi-National Force web site has focused a dizzying amount of attention on weapons caches, including (but not limited to) the following six press releases:

• February 16, 2007
• February 19, 2007
• February 21, 2007
• February 22, 2007
• February 28, 2007
• March 2, 2007

This is of course partially a result of the increased kinetic action as part of the security plan.  But the weapons, in addition to being shipped in from Syria and Iran, were there under the previous regime.

Four years after the Iraq war began, the country remains awash in Saddam-era munitions that provide key ingredients for homemade bombs used against U.S. troops, according to administration documents and military officials.

More than $1 billion has been spent to clear about 15,000 sites of the unsecured weapons. To clear the remaining 3,391 sites, the Pentagon says it needs part of a $1.2 billion request for items to protect U.S. troops in Iraq …

More than 400,000 tons of weapons have been destroyed, and another 19,000 tons have been set aside for the Iraqi army, he said.

“There’s no telling how many soldiers and Iraqi civilians that we’ve saved by the amount of stuff we’re taking off the streets,� Sargent said.

UPI currently has a report on the weapons accounting system being overwhelmed.

WASHINGTON, July 31 (UPI) — An overwhelmed inventory-control system has left thousands of weapons earmarked for Iraqi security forces unaccounted for, a report warned Tuesday.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report Tuesday that concluded a lack of standard procedures had resulted in a lack of assurance that Iraqi forces were indeed getting all of the equipment intended for them.

The situation has resulted in about 110,000 AK-47 rifles unaccounted for as well as thousands of handguns, helmets and bulletproof vests. While the GAO did not determine if the discrepancy meant the weapons were actually missing, it said changes were definitely desired.

“Given the Department of Defense’s request for an additional $2 billion to develop Iraqi security forces, improving accountability procedures can help ensure that the equipment purchased with these funds reaches the intended recipients,” the GAO said. “In addition, adequate accountability procedures can help … identify Iraqi forces’ legitimate equipment needs, thereby supporting the effective development of these forces.”

The report said part of the problem was the use of a spreadsheet reporting system that was quickly overwhelmed by the volume of equipment involved, too few trained logistics personnel and the inevitable data-entry errors.

The Defense Department concurred that more standardization of logistics accounting was needed and said officials were working on beefing up oversight and security.

But on November 2, 2006, we discussed the beginnings of knowledge of this problem:

… in an interesting finding by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, we have learned that there are many missing U.S. weapons in Iraq:

The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons - almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003, according to a report from the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided - less than 3 percent.

Turning to a domestic issue, the New York Times has an opinion piece on radiological terrorism.

Most analysts believe that about 10 people would die from radiation poisoning after a dirty bomb attack. Others believe that the only people likely to receive a lethal dose of radiation from a dirty bomb would already be dead from the blast. A perfectly feasible terrorist attack using the ingestion, inhalation or immersion of radioactive material, on the other hand, would be almost certain to kill hundreds. We call attacks of these kinds I-cubed attacks (for ingestion, inhalation and immersion). Such attacks can be sneaky, unaccompanied by a flash and bang …

The analysts’ favored isotope for a radiological terrorist attack has been cesium-137, which emits very energetic gamma radiation capable of traveling many yards in the air or penetrating lead shielding. Cesium is a nasty chemical. Even its non-radioactive form is highly poisonous.

Fortunately, it’s hard to kill a lot of people with an ingestion attack. Contaminating a reservoir, or even a water main, is ineffective because the radioactivity is quickly diluted, and most water is not used for drinking or cooking. Contaminating agricultural products is similarly difficult. But there are ways, if the terrorist group has enough material and access to the right kinds of facilities, to contaminate food directly.

An inhalation attack, sometimes called a smoky bomb, would use radioisotopes that can be burned, vaporized or aerosolized, and in a confined space could contaminate the air and be inhaled. Isotopes like polonium-210 that emit alpha particles are particularly effective because they can kill either quickly by radiation poisoning or slowly by causing lung cancer. Terrorists could also use something like an insecticide sprayer mounted on a truck to disperse, for example, a polonium compound dissolved in water.

An immersion attack, which would drench victims with a radioactive solution, could kill with only a small fraction of a teaspoon. Just a few drops of contaminated water on the mouth are enough to cause radiation poisoning. The first instinct of somebody soaked with water is to wipe his face, which transfers the isotope from hand to mouth. Even if the victims avoided getting any water inside their bodies, the solution would cause severe radiation burns.

I-cubed attacks are enabled by the easy availability of comparatively large alpha-emitting sources (sources 10 percent the size of a lethal dose can be bought with a specific license) and by the fact that cesium-137 is normally supplied for use in cancer therapy machines, hospital blood sterilizers and elsewhere in industry as a water-soluble powder, the most dangerous possible form.

Water-soluble cesium chloride should be taken off the market immediately. Cesium-137 can instead be supplied embedded in glass. In addition, very large cesium sources are used in places like hospitals. They should be replaced by powerful X-ray machines, which can deliver the same energy radiation in substantially the same quantities.

Cesium-137 is not the only isotope that radiological terrorists might use. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes that alpha-emitting isotopes like polonium-210 and americium are adequately regulated, but we believe that the quantities supplied without a specific license should be reduced by about a factor of 10. In all cases they should be supplied in hard-to-weaponize forms. The regulatory commission has not been diligent in checking the bona fides of applicants for licenses for large sources of any kind, but thankfully this is being changed.

In the United States, commercial users lose about one radioactive source a day — many large enough for I-cubed attacks — through theft, accidents or poor paperwork. One of these is recovered perhaps every two days, either because the radioactive materials are voluntarily returned or because of good detective work. Many of the losses occur because license holders are negligent. Criminal penalties should be enacted, as they are for some other hazardous materials, to allow prosecution of license holders in the most serious cases.

On July 6, 2007, in Dirty Bombs and Proper Control of Radioactive Material, we covered radioactive sources, their loss, and government efforts to locate these lost sources.  We also discussed aerosolization of radioactive material and the tactic of using confined spaces to cause high specific activity (or concentration) and thus high internal doses to the victims.  And just to be technically correct, Cs-137 doesn’t emit a gamma.  It decays by beta emission to Ba-137m, which emits a relatively low energy gamma (0.662 MeV) compared to some isotopes (greater than 3 MeV).

This remains the most significant tactic, the others paling in comparison.  Still, Michael Fumento and I have agreed on the issue of weapons delivered in this manner.  Similar to the juvenile chlorine attacks in the Anbar Province several months ago (which ceased when the insurgents learned that they weren’t very effective), a radiological attack of this sort would yield far fewer casualties than simple random firing of an automatic weapon in a shopping mall.  Its primary goal would be to instill terror and fear (of course, firing an automatic weapon in a shopping mall would do that as well).

Discretely delivered radioactive materials, however, especially alpha emitting radionuclides such as actinides, are a different story (such as being surreptitiously placed in food stuffs).  Also, actinides can be created without the assistance of formally approved suppliers.  See the account of the radioactive boy scout who fabricated a crude breeder reactor in his garage (and also see here).

Innovation and hard work amount to just about everything, the boy scout found out.  And in that vein, while we do not supply you with the vast quantities of easily digestible material that some other Military bloggers do, we hope that when you stop by The Captain’s Journal, it is an enlightening and worthwhile read.  Our aim here is to give you the analysis before it becomes analysis to other analysts.