Tag Archives: war

giants of Cold War era nuclear strategy

This New York Times Book Review article goes through some of the key architects of Cold War era nuclear strategy.

The theories of Cold War defense intellectuals now seem the stuff of a surreal madness that seized Washington during the last half of the 20th century. The core doctrine of nuclear deterrence was Mutual Assured Destruction, aptly known as MAD. It postulated that the best way to prevent a nuclear war with the Kremlin was to build an enormous atomic arsenal that would annihilate the Soviet Union if it dared attack the United States. Effective, yes, but a White House or Kremlin miscalculation would have left millions dead, nations destroyed and the planet reeling.

Albert Wohlstetter, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, was one of the most formidable of the nuclear policy savants. A combative champion of defense spending, he argued that the balance of terror inherent in MAD was unstable. Instead of assuming the MAD standoff would assure a durable cold peace, he feared a Pearl Harbor-like Soviet attack outside the imagined scenarios of defense planners, and he pressed for a nuclear war-winning policy. His ideas coursed through American defense strategy for decades, swaying presidents, attracting acolytes, infuriating opponents and igniting furious debates that ricochet through official circles to this day…

Robin, president of the University of Haifa in Israel, recalls many of the thinkers and baroque theories of the nuclear age. Some attracted national attention at midcentury, including Henry Kissinger, whose 1957 book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” became an unexpected best seller, and Herman Kahn, whose chilling ruminations on winning and surviving a nuclear conflict made him an oracle of the unthinkable. Bernard Brodie, the intellectual father of nuclear deterrence theory, played a pivotal role in shaping Cold War nuclear policy.

civilians in Mosul

The United States and Iraq are planning a major offensive against ISIS in Mosul Iraq. This description in The Week about what is expected to happen to civilians is a bit shocking. If we are doing this to keep civilians from being oppressed, is it really worth it?

About 4,000 Kurdish peshmerga are fighting to retake a string of ISIS-held villages east of Mosul, with support from U.S. warplanes, artillery, and special operations commandos. The main attack is being launched from Qayyarah air base, some 40 miles south of Mosul, where 560 U.S. military advisers, 22,000 Iraqi government troops, and 6,000 mainly Sunni tribal fighters have gathered in recent months. Backed by coalition air support, liberation forces will advance along the Tigris River, clearing ISIS from towns and villages before reaching the city’s edge in early November. Experts say the main urban battle will probably last through December. Much of the battle could be fought street to street and house to house — the winding, narrow streets of Mosul’s Old City are inaccessible to tanks or artillery…

Its [ISIS’s] roughly 5,000 fighters in the city have spent months creating an elaborate network of defenses. IEDs have been hidden underneath roads and in buildings, and five bridges have been rigged with explosives. Residents told Reuters that a 6-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep moat has been dug around Mosul’s perimeter, which will be filled with oil and set on fire, creating plumes of smoke to make it difficult for warplanes to spot targets. To evade airstrikes, ISIS is funneling men and equipment through underground tunnels. Former Iraqi finance and foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari says militants are “shaving their beards to blend in with the population and constantly moving their headquarters around.” The jihadists are desperately trying to boost their numbers: Local men who refuse to take up arms have had their ears cut off, and locals say children as young as 8 have been handed pistols and knives and ordered to spy on citizens…

Relief agencies say the battle for Mosul will trigger a mass exodus: Many of the city’s remaining residents are expected to flee at once, leaving their possessions behind. “We’re facing this enormous tsunami coming at us,” says Lise Grande, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. Coalition forces will have to screen out jihadists from the refugees, and, with some 3.3 million Iraqis already displaced by violence, overstretched aid agencies will struggle to feed and house all of Mosul’s desperate civilians. Says Matthew Nowery of U.S. relief group Samaritan’s Purse, “This is going to be a very large-scale catastrophe.”

So is it worth it? This made my think of Obama’s Nobel speech, where he argues that there is such a thing as “just war”.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war.  The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met:  if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of “just war” was rarely observed.  The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God.  Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations — total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred.  In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent.  And while it’s hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished…

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations.  The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states — all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.  In today’s wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

It also reminded me of Human Smoke, where Nicholson Baker puts forth the heretical view that the human cost of the fight against the Third Reich and the Axis powers itself may have exceeded its benefit.

September 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • The U.S. and Russia may have blundered into a proxy war in Syria. And on a loosely related war-and-peace note, Curtis LeMay was a crazy bastard.
  • The ecological footprint situation is not looking too promising: “from 1993 to 2009…while the human population has increased by 23% and the world economy has grown 153%, the human footprint has increased by just 9%. Still, 75% the planet’s land surface is experiencing measurable human pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense, widespread and rapidly intensifying in places with high biodiversity.” Meanwhile, as of 2002 “we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant.” And finally, 30% of African elephants have been lost in the last 7 years.
  • Car accidents are the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 24. The obsession with car seats may not be saving all that many lives, while keeping children out of cars as much as possible would be 100% guaranteed to save lives. And one thing that would be guaranteed to help us create more walkable neighborhoods and therefore save children’s lives: getting rid of minimum parking requirements in cities once and for all. And yet you don’t hear this debate being framed in moral terms.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Monsanto is trying to help honeybees (which seems good) by monkeying with RNA (which seems a little frightening). Yes, biotech is coming.
  • Some people think teaching algebra to children may actually be bad. Writing still seems to be good.
  • There have been a number of attempts to identify and classify the basic types of literary plots.

cyber warfare

Critical parts of the internet in the U.S. are being systematically probed by foreign government hackers, according to one security expert.

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.

The attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what the company’s total defenses are. There are many different ways to launch a DDoS attack. The more attack vectors you employ simultaneously, the more different defenses the defender has to counter with. These companies are seeing more attacks using three or four different vectors. This means that the companies have to use everything they’ve got to defend themselves. They can’t hold anything back. They’re forced to demonstrate their defense capabilities for the attacker…

Who would do this? It doesn’t seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It’s not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes — and especially their persistence — points to state actors. It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US’s Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.

the U.S. and Russia are at war

It’s kind of donned on me slowly that the U.S. and Russia are at war. We have military forces operating in the same places inside Syria, in support of opposite sides in that war. We have the ability to stop the fighting at any time by negotiating directly with each other. The only thing we are not doing is intentionally targeting each other’s forces directly. The idea that we are both there fighting a shadowy third side that we both oppose defies logic to me. This is getting more and more dangerous. Still, I’m glad it is being discussed in the Security Council which seems like the right venue.

U.S. Central Command admitted Saturday that airstrikes conducted that morning by American-led forces unintentionally hit Syrian government targets instead of members of the Islamic State.

“Coalition forces believed they were striking [an ISIS] fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike,” Centcom said. “The coalition airstrike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military.”

Following the announcement, which threatens the recent U.S.-Russia cease-fire deal, Moscow called an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, criticized Russia for the meeting request, and Moscow in turn bristled at her slam. The mistake has potentially big ramifications because Russia and the United States support opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, though both oppose ISIS.

 

Curtis LeMay

This article in The Daily Beast has some terrifying quotes from Curtis LeMay, who massacred hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Japanese civilians in World War II and almost started World War III in 1969.

  • “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”
  • “When the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb and yet didn’t have any stockpile—that was when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.”
  • “My solution would be to tell the North Vietnamese that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.”

August 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Bokashi is a system that essentially pickles your compost.
  • There is an unlikely but plausible scenario where Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, could become President of the United States this fall. Speaking of implausible scenarios, I learned that RIchard Nixon made a serious attempt to pass a basic income bill in 1969.
  • Here is a short video explaining the Fermi Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens. Meanwhile Russian astronomers are saying there might be aliens.

Syria as a proxy war

Jeffrey Sachs says the war in Syria has morphed into a proxy war between the U.S., Saudi Arabia and allies on one side, and Iran and Russia (and the Syrian government) on the other side. He also says the U.S. role is much larger than the public has been led to believe, and the media is not doing its job of asking questions.

the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times finally reportedon a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama’s orders, provides organizational support and training…

Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America’s allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported…

The stakes of this war are much higher and much more dangerous than America’s proxy warriors imagine. As the US has prosecuted its war against Assad, Russia has stepped up its military support to his government. In the US mainstream media, Russia’s behavior is an affront: how dare the Kremlin block the US from overthrowing the Syrian government? The result is a widening diplomatic clash with Russia, one that could escalate and lead – perhaps inadvertently – to the point of military conflict.

Obviously, the U.S. and Russia are massive nuclear powers. Iran may have nuclear weapons, and rumor has it Saudi Arabia has a nuclear arsenal ready to go in Pakistan. So in addition to the human tragedy unfolding, the risk of World War 3 appears to be a real one here.

intelligence?

According to TheWeek.com, the “Turkey coup attempt was a surprise in diplomatic and intelligence circles, says House Homeland Security Committee member“.

Is this a rare lapse by the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment? No, if you believe Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Using mostly primary sources and declassified government documents, he makes a surprising but very strong case that the CIA was never very good at spying. This is why major historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 have caught our government completely by surprise, and why we have had trouble competently prosecuting wars from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. The government and military just don’t have an accurate picture of what is going on or an understanding of the complex cultures and conflicts they are dealing with, and it leads to disaster. The CIA is pretty good at buying intelligence from allies that are good at spying on their neighbors, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, South Korea, etc., which explains our strong ties to many of these countries. So it is not too surprising that if something is going on inside one these countries itself, we would not be the first to know.

June 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • Coral reefs are in pretty sad shape, perhaps the first natural ecosystem type to be devastated beyond repair by climate change.
  • Echoes of the Cold War are rearing their ugly heads in Western Europe.
  • Trump may very well have organized crime links. And Moody’s says that if he gets elected and manages to do the things he says, it could crash the economy.

3 most hopeful stories

  • China has a new(ish) sustainability plan called “ecological civilization” that weaves together urban and regional planning, environmental quality, sustainable agriculture, habitat and biodiversity concepts. This is good because a rapidly developing country the size of China has the ability to sink the rest of civilization if they let their ecological footprint explode, regardless of what the rest of us do. Maybe they can set a good example for the rest of the developing world to follow.
  • Genetic technology is appearing to provide some hope of real breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
  • There is still some hope for a technology-driven pick-up in productivity growth.

3 most interesting stories