The Gold Institute for International Strategy is pleased to welcome Honorable William A Chatfield as a distinguished Fellow.

William A. Chatfield became the 11th Director of Selective Service in November 2004, having been nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He was directly responsible to the President for the management of the Selective Service System.

Mr. Chatfield, of Texas, brought to that position more than 25 years of experience working with the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.

He commenced public service as a staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the late Seventies. He then performed in several appointed positions of increasing responsibility in both terms of the Reagan Administration: Department of Defense; Civil Aeronautics Board; Office of Personnel Management; Consumer Product Safety Commission; Department of the Interior; and Interstate Commerce Commission.

From 1987 until his appointment with the Selective Service, he was engaged in governmental relations and public affairs consulting. After leaving public office at the end of the Bush Administration, Mr. Chatfield returned to consulting. The main focus of his practice was in the field of advancing effective healthcare protocols, specifically dealing with our nation’s wounded warrior population.

He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, with 34 years of active duty and reserve service.

Mr. Chatfield joined the Trump Presidential Transition Team in September of 2016. He was the policy lead on VA reform for candidate Trump and a leader on the transition effort for the president-elect at the Department of Veterans Affairs from election day to inaugural day. In the Trump administration, he served as a Department of Defense Fellow for the White House Liaison at the Office of the Secretary of Defense; working with the Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness and the Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, providing liaison with the Defense Health Agency, focusing on the latest protocol for the effective treatment of the wounded warrior community.

In the Trump-Pence 2020 reelection effort, Mr. Chatfield worked with Election Operations, coordinating effective voter participation efforts and providing ballot security measures.

At present, in the private sector, he is advocating for the latest advancements in mental and physical treatment for our nation’s veteran community.

(This article first appeared in Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/israel-joins-arab-club-us-sponsorship-opinion-1628991)

By: Simone Ledeene, senior fellow and Victoria Coates

Last week, a laconic statement from the Department of Defense marked a tectonic shift in Middle East security cooperation, as the United States formally designated that Israel would now be part of the U.S Central Command (CENTCOM). President Donald Trump announced the proposed change on January 15, 2021, and while the escalation of violence in Gaza this spring seemed to put the designation in some jeopardy, it went into effect on September 1, 2021. The initiative to move Israel into CENTCOM is a direct result of the Trump administration-led Abraham Accords normalization agreements between the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed one year ago today on the South Lawn of the White House.

CENTCOM got its name because the Middle East is literally located in the middle of everything. Israel is the most central point in that centrally located region, sharing as it does a maritime boundary with a European country (Cyprus) and a border with an African country (Egypt), as well as boasting Asian neighbors such as Jordan. In the wake of the Abraham Accords and the resultant burgeoning economic and cultural ties among the signatories, the timing is now ideal to develop a similar regional security relationship. This relationship would expand cooperation and improve Israel Defense Forces (IDF) integration with U.S. and partner forces throughout the region. It would also help CENTCOM promote a more holistic and inclusive regional security framework. There would be opportunities to conduct joint military exercises that include the IDF, which would indirectly provide Israel the occasion to communicate with countries that have yet to sign normalization agreements. Additionally, Israel would now be able to assign IDF liaison officers to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa—and, hopefully in the future, to subordinate headquarters across the region.

As events in the Middle East crashed into the American consciousness due to the Iran and Afghanistan crises in 1979, President Jimmy Carter established the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (JTF) as a response mechanism for rapidly unfolding events. In 1983, under President Reagan, that JTF became CENTCOM. Its area of operation runs from the Pakistani border with India to Egypt’s border with Libya. U.S. military regional combatant commands, including CENTCOM, are responsible for the deployment, support and operational employment of U.S. forces in their areas of responsibility, as well as for developing military relationships with allies and partners in their respective regions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan pose from the Truman Balcony at the White House after they participated in the signing of the Abraham Accords where the countries of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates recognize Israel, in Washington, DC, September 15, 2020.

In the course of the 1983 reorganization, Israel, Syria and Lebanon remained part of the European Command (EUCOM), which was established after World War II. At the time, placing Israel under EUCOM made some sense. Israel had existed for just 35 years and had formal diplomatic relations—chilly ones, at that—with only one Arab country: Egypt. All the others refused to recognize or maintain formal ties with the Jewish state. Memories of oil embargoes and the 1970s-era Arab boycott were still fresh, and it seemed only prudent to consider “diplomatic sensitivities” by making CENTCOM the U.S. military’s interface with the Arab world. EUCOM provided assistance to the IDF and conducted joint exercises and contingency operations with the IDF and America’s NATO allies.

In 2004, however, President George W. Bush moved Syria and Lebanon to CENTCOM, and Israel alone among the countries of the region remained in EUCOM. This encouraged the unfortunate perception that Israel is somehow separate, or different, from the rest of the Middle East. Major threats to Israel were, and are, within CENTCOM’s boundaries—specifically, those from Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. Israel’s airspace is also under CENTCOM’s area of operations, including assets involved in detection, suppression and prevention of missile threats in the broader Middle East. The situation has become increasingly awkward, as the European Union is now significantly more anti-Israel than the Arab world; during the 2014 escalation of violence in Gaza, for example, EU complaints about Israel and advocacy for the Palestinians complicated an already-thorny situation. Given that Israel now has full relations with four Arab countries and is developing additional relationships in the region, the Trump administration concluded it was no longer necessary to maintain the fiction that Israel is somehow in Europe. It therefore initiated the process that came to fulfillment on September 1, 2021.

The consequences of President Joe Biden‘s recent chaotic and catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan, which is also part of CENTCOM’s area of operations, may take a generation to fully comprehend. But even in this bleak context, the restructuring of CENTCOM to incorporate Israel stands out as a beacon of hope that, thanks to the Abraham Accords, American national security interests in the Middle East may yet be salvaged—and, if properly supported and encouraged, even strengthened in the future.

Victoria Coates is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a former deputy national security advisor for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council staff.

Simone Ledeen is a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Policy and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

(The article first appeared in the Tennessee Star: https://tennesseestar.com/2021/08/15/exclusive-erik-prince-blames-afghanistan-debacle-on-cosplay-national-security-apparatus-that-believes-their-own-bs/)

By: Neil W. McCabe, Media Fellow

The Founder of the Blackwater private security firm and the author of a comprehensive plan to save Afghanistan by shifting the country’s security to private contractors and away from the American military told The Star News Network on Sunday he warned U.S. diplomats the government of President Ashraf Ghani would fall before Labor Day.

“I told a number of ambassadors in the region there; they should expect a collapse of Kabul by Labor Day, and I said that back in April, based on when the U.S. air pressure, when the Air Force really stopped bombing, when that threat largely disappears, then the Taliban would be able to group and mass as they have done, and then they start blowing up cities,” said Erik Prince, the Navy SEAL veteran and national security entrepreneur.

“It’s a very predictable outcome that all these smart people in the military didn’t pass that kind of information off the chain of command so that the president even last month makes as dumb a statement as he does,” Prince said.

“We have a cosplay national security apparatus that sits and talks to itself into believing their own B.S., and sadly, the Taliban are feeding into us at the end of the bayonet right now,” he said. The term “cosplay” is defined by dictionary.com as “the art or practice of wearing costumes to portray characters from fiction, especially manga, animation, and science fiction.”

“This is not rocket science, but it’s a failure of imagination,” he said.

“It’s a failure to look at history to see what’s worked by our conventional military leadership and utter an abysmal failure,” he said. “The Afghan army has lasted a couple of weeks. The government built by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan lasted four years after the Russians pulled their forces out, four years not two weeks.”

Prince said once Taliban forces started rolling up provincial capitals, they could not be stopped by the Afghanistan government.

“The continued Taliban victories have certainly given them a very key element in the military success, and that’s momentum,” he said. “It certainly caused a lot of paralysis. When that momentum causes fear amongst the defending population and a few links in their chain suddenly disappear, they lack the resiliency, and so it all goes apart quickly.”

Kabul falling as it did will have a long-term negative impact on America’s reputation, he said.

“It will have second and third-order effects because everyone that thinks that they’re an ally of the United States is going to look at us today,” he said. “The United States walked out of there, like a bad one-night stand, and: ‘They just left us hanging.’”

In 2017, Prince presented a comprehensive plan to senior military and diplomatic leaders in Washington, which would have private military contractor personnel take over the Pentagon’s advise and assist mission with Afghanistan’s security forces.

The plan was rejected in favor of a mini-surge of 8,400 additional troops to Afghanistan proposed by National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Harold R. “H.R.” McMaster and backed by Vice President Michael R. Pence approved by President Donald J. Trump in August 2017.

According to Politico, McMaster rehearsed his presentation with Pence while blocking Prince from meeting Trump to make his pitch.

The purpose of the McMaster plan was to create a permissive environment for U.S. forces to leave the country in the hands of Afghanistan’s security forces as Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters continued to resist the U.S.-backed regime.

Despite the machinations of McMaster, Prince said he was able to get his plan to Trump and others, but he could not overcome the national security bureaucracy’s inertia.

“What I recommended in very clear written terms to President Trump, to H.R. McMaster, to Mattis, to the CIA, was a specific plan to give a, call it a skeletal structure support, to the Afghan forces to give them some resiliency they could depend on at a very cheap price compared to the cost of all the U.S. active-duty presence and very, very expensive logistics,” he said.

The three elements of the Prince Plan: Mentors, Air Power and Logistics

Prince said the first part of his plan was to break the cycle of constantly changing U.S. military partners assigned to work with Afghanistan’s military units with teams of military veteran contractor personnel attached to each Afghanistan battalion for three to four years.

The Hillsdale College graduate said he based his plan on the lessons learned from the successful long-term mentorship of U.S. special operations personnel provided to Afghanistan’s commandos.

“The only part of the Afghan army that’s demonstrated a willingness and ability to fight is the Afghan commandos because they were trained by the U.S. special operations counterparts, and that worked,” he said.

“All I was doing in taking the mentor model to the Afghan army is replicating what’s worked with the Afghan commandos, that being attaching, would have been 36 men mentor teams so that they had enough so that whenever that Afghan battalion was deployed somewhere, there would be enough,” Prince said.

“These mentors would make sure the key enablers were provided leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, and logistics expertise,” he said.

Because of the constant nine-month rotation of U.S. military units and personnel, he said there is no follow-up over time and no time for proper bonding between the mentors and their charges.

In effect, he said that each rotation had become its own new war with new people and new tactics.

“We’ve had 33 rotations at least,” said the former SEAL officer, who left the service upon the 1995 passing of his father Edgar D. Prince, an engineer and industrialist, whose businesses included die-cast machines and auto parts.

“I would have contracted guys that would have gone and stayed in the same area for three and four years,” he said. “They go in for 90 days, come home for 30. Back in for 60, home for 30.”

The goal is to create tactical stability, said the author of “Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror” about his groundbreaking creation of the private security industry.

“Always rotating to the same unit in the same terrain, so they get to know the area, Prince said. “They know who’s good, who’s bad, but the Afghan unit members see them, trust them, brothers in arms,” and that would have, I say with 100 percent assurance, the mentors, in place, attached, living with, training with, and fighting alongside that entire Afghan conventional army, would have greatly enhanced their willingness to fight, especially when the second part is provided and that being air power.”

Prince: Airpower means tactical support, medical support to fighters on the ground

“I would have provided 90 aircraft. I used to have 50 of my own aircraft in Afghanistan doing support for the U.S. forces,” said the native of Holland, Michigan. “Doing food, and fuel, and movement, and medevac, surveillance, et cetera, providing those aircraft that show up reliably with no excuse.”

Prince said as a private company with a no-fail contract; he could have provided air support for the entire country.

“We would have provided close air support on 30-minute notice from anywhere, from the bases we would have staged, to anywhere in the country, so from a maximum of 30 minutes lag time between someone calling for help, having aircraft with the ordinance, overhead and ready to go,” he said.

Prince said he would train each of the private contractor military mentors as joint terminal attack controllers, or JTAC, technicians capable of talking to aircrews with targeting information and other data from the ground.

One of the reasons the regular Afghanistan soldier was under-motivated to fight was the lack of battlefield casualty care, he said.

“To one year, three years, 10 years ago, you were seven times as likely to die if you’re an Afghan that got wounded,” Prince said.

“Afghan soldiers just lost confidence in the whole system because their supply wasn’t coming, their pay wouldn’t show up, they wouldn’t have food, and worst of all, they wouldn’t get the ammunition,” he said.

A tragic example of this was the Taliban’s June 16 ambush and massacre of 24 Afghanistan commandos and five local police officers in Farah Province. No aircraft were sent to help, rescue, resupply or medevac the men as the insurgents pinned them down.

“They were slaughtered after running out of ammunition,” he said. “They begged and pleaded, calling for help, calling Kabul news media, T.V. stations, begging for someone to help them, and no one came. That’s how you destroy the morale of an army, and that’s why it collapsed so quickly. This is really basic stuff.”

Prince Plan would have professionalized military logistics in Afghanistan

“The third part of the deal is combat logistics support,” he said.

He said that part of that would be using modern bookkeeping to find the ghost soldiers and take them off the books.

“You heard rumblings about the massive theft of pay, with the ghost soldiers, like a 100,000-plus, completely named, listed on the employment rolls, but not really people showing there, because the senior officers were skimming the pay, all the way up to Ghani,” he said.

“The third part of this is a combat logistics element to keep the food, fuel, parts, ammunition flowing reliably, and as low a corruption loss as possible, certainly different than what’s been done over the last 20 years,” he said.

“The great error of the U.S. is thinking that they were going to empower Afghans and dropping these many resources into a 90 percent illiterate country with endemic corruption,” he said.

Prince said American bureaucrats failed to set up left and right flanks to corral the corruption; then, the American officials gave up on corruption altogether.

“I guess the laziness caused people to say: ‘Oh yeah, they can handle the whole thing. Just turn it over to them, give them the checkbook,’” he said. “The reality would have said: No, we’re going to be very, very limited, defined things, and we can reevaluate that, and we can do this on a cheap, small footprint approach and not the very big, expensive, DOD approach that we had the last 20 years.”

Prince Plan based on the East India Company model

Prince said he modeled his plan on England’s East India Company’s success and its stewardship of India. It developed its commercial interests in India with a concession from the crown.

“Everything I laid out in this plan is based on 250 years of successful security operations by the East India Company in the South Asian continent, building local units with a few expats attached, like a 5 percent expat ratio,” he said.

Most Americans only know the East India Company as the company which owned the ship full of tea attacked by the Sons of Liberty in the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Yet, despite this chapter of the American Revolution, many colonial leaders supported a proposal to the British Parliament to give the American colonies the same independence inside the British imperial system the East India Company enjoyed.

In fact, the American flag is a direct lift from the flag of the East India Company.

Prince Plan would have fostered the development of natural resources

Prince said the linchpin of his plan was the development of Afghanistan’s natural resources made possible because of his plan’s security.

According to a 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report, Afghanistan’s natural resources include gold and strategic metals, such as copper, chromium, lead, zinc, and cobalt.

The Navy SEAL veteran said there is also oil.

“All the fuel, diesel fuel that the U.S. burned in Afghanistan, largely came from Greece on a big DLA, Defense Logistics Agency contract,” he said.

“It came down the Suez by boat, through the Red Sea, all the way around to Karachi, and then it got on a truck and trucked all the way up into Afghanistan with a massive tolling regime in place,” he said.

“There’s definitely an investigation that should be done there, as to all the people that got paid for moving that fuel. That’s why the fully-loaded costs per gallon of fuel for U.S. forces in Afghanistan were $250 per gallon,” he said.

“The disgusting thing is the Russians actually drilled oil fields in the north of Afghanistan,” he said.

“They explored, they drilled, they proved, and then they properly cemented the wells when they left,” Prince said. “All those wells are still sitting there and the U.S. military, or a private operator, could have drilled it, put it in production, slapped a $100 million refinery there and provided all the hydrocarbons needed for the entire country, including the U.S. military, for a tiny fraction. That thing would have paid for itself in probably four months, 20 years ago, and would have provided significant employment and other secondary electrical applications.”

The businessman said he knew a local Afghani who tried to reboot the old Russian wells.

“An Afghan friend of mine was the local partner, and he was exasperated because he could never get the right people to engage on it,” he said. “Ghani and Karzai were so damn corrupt that the other subsequent licensing was always held up because it was always asking for a greater bribe.”

Afghanistan’s oil resources are not widely known. Still, its copper deposits are both well-known and readily exploited—and the mining jobs would have pulled Taliban fighters off the battlefield, he said.

“Another example is Mes Aynak that is basically a mountain of copper; it’s about 50 kilometers south of Kabul,” he said.

“They have been mining copper there for more than a thousand years, and you could have put that in production and employed 10,000 Taliban because the Taliban was paying around $10 a day,” he said.

“You could have paid them $12 a day, given them picks and shovels, mined copper profitably, and sucked an entire infantry division’s worth of Taliban manpower away from them.”

– – –

Neil W. McCabe is a Media Fellow at the Washington D.C. based Gold Institute for International Strategy, a foriegn policy and national security think-tank. He is a Washington-based national political reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. In addition to the Star Newspaper, he has covered the White House, Capitol Hill and national politics for One America News, Breitbart, Human Events and Townhall. Before coming to Washington, he was a staff reporter for Boston’s Catholic paper, The Pilot, and the editor of two Boston-area community papers, The Somerville News and The Alewife. McCabe is a public affairs NCO in the Army Reserve and he deployed for 15 months to Iraq as a combat historian.
Photo “Erik Prince” by Miller Center CC2.0

The Gold Institute for International Strategy deplores the actions of the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat – Democratic Union Party) on June 20th, in closing the offices of Kurdistan 24, the premiere source of information from all regions of Greater Kurdistan.

The measure, taken without notice or explanation, casts doubts on the commitment of the administration of Rojava to elemental freedoms, the very freedoms the Kurdish people have fought tirelessly for decades to obtain.

Indeed, this is the second time the offices of Kurdistan24 have been closed, despite the PYD’s assurances that it seeks a “democratic solution that includes the recognition of cultural, national and political rights, and develops and enhances their peaceful struggle to be able to govern themselves in a multicultural, democratic society” for Rojava. Censorship of the press and persecution of ideas does not seem the proper vehicle to reach those lofty goals.

Around the world, many look to Kurdistan 24 to obtain first hand, unbiased reporting of events in all four Kurdistan regions in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey, and we view its censorship as a troubling development, made more serious by the subsequent closing of the Semalka border crossing.

We hope that these ominous events do not herald a new era of authoritarianism returning to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and look forward to the free society Syrian Kurds have fought so valiantly to obtain.

PR Contact: Shana Forta
Email: Sforta@Goldiis.org

Washington, DC — June 16, 2021 — The Gold Institute for International Strategy is pleased to welcome Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Simone Ledeen and retired NYPD Detective Investigator Mark Black as senior fellows. Ms. Ledeen’s extensive experience in the Middle East, at DoD and Treasury and Marc Black’s long-time focus in counter-terrorism, intelligence division and computer crimes will undoubtedly add greatly to the Institute’s impressive roster of fellows as well as our work and influence globally.

Simone Ledeen is a strategic influencer of complex, long-term initiatives and plans with global impact. Through her work, Ms. Ledeen has shaped the thinking of the nation’s senior-most leaders, including Members of Congress, other U.S. government officials, and partners abroad, on matters of defense, finance, telecom, and transportation. She is a trusted collaborator leveraging vast networks and superb communication skills to achieve multi-phased program development and implementation across industries.

Ms. Ledeen has served in various U.S. Government and business leadership positions, most recently as the presidentially-appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for Middle East Policy where her leadership of U.S. defense policy spanned Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Her experience on multiple oversees deployments influenced key counterterrorism activities, intelligence collection and analysis, as well as military information support operations involving cyber and disinformation, irregular warfare, direct action, sensitive special operations, and personnel recovery/hostage issues.

Ms. Ledeen’s work has also been shaped by her 20 years of experience prior to appointment with the Department of Defense. She draws on her work as Executive Director at Standard Chartered Bank managing multi-national financial crime compliance; Senior U.S. Treasury Representative to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force; Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; and as a member of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

She is also a Visiting Fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law where she advocates to foster global security and facilitate international business. Ms. Ledeen has an MBA from the Bocconi University School of Management and a Bachelor of Arts degree with from Brandeis University. With a strong intercultural competency having lived several years abroad, she is fluent in Italian and conversational in French, Arabic, Polish, and Hebrew.
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Marc Black served 20 years with the New York Police Department (NYPD), retiring June 2020 at the rank of Detective Investigator. His assignments included:

Counterterrorism Division

Responsible for conducting security and vulnerability assessments (SAVA) and threat assessments on critical infrastructure in New York City. Areas of concentration include houses of worship, utilities, and sports/entertainment venues. Liaison with the Fire Department of New York City Explosives Unit to establish secure logistic routes and venue security of locations which utilize energetic materials. Intermediary with Federal agencies which are working with foreign-friendly nations to establish counterterrorism programs for local law enforcement. Evaluator for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) in New York City.

Arson & Explosion Squad

Investigated major post blast and arson crimes associated with fire and blast fatalities in conjunction with the New York City Fire Department and federal and state law enforcement agencies to determine origin and cause. Examined post blast incidents caused by improvised explosive devices as well as explosive materials illegally obtained by individuals and criminal organizations. Investigated arsons and incendiary incidents to determine origin and cause.

Computer Crimes Squad

Investigated computer crimes and analyzed computer forensic information using accepted law enforcement techniques and technologies. Investigations: Computer intrusions/DOS/computer trespass, identity fraud, child exploitation, Internet scams, and financial crimes.

Intelligence Division

Synchronized communications of international terrorist incidents with New York City Police investigators Overseas Liaison Units. Coordinated crisis management programs through the Fusion Center with the New York City Police Department and federal law enforcement agencies, FEMA, U.S. Military, and Office of Emergency Management (New York City).

Education:

B.S. Business Management, Keene State College

Attended University of Haifa, Haifa Israel

M.S. Transportation Management, NY State University Maritime College

M.S. Security Protection, John Jay College of Criminal Justice