Tag Archives: war

What a Dick!

Ouch, doesn’t this seem just a bit harsh? Well, maybe for anyone who is not named Dick Cheney.

in retrospect it is hard to say that Cheney’s decisions were anything but deeply prescient, and one thing is certain: The invasion ended Islamic terrorism and did not create a civil war that ironically allowed al-Qaida to flourish in an area where it had no prior presence, ultimately begetting an even more dangerous and inhumane splinter group called ISIS that continues to threaten American lives to this day.

Many speakers at Thursday’s event commented on the unique courage demonstrated by Cheney’s willingness to commit thousands of young American soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines to death or permanent incapacitation abroad despite his admission that he intentionally avoided military service when he himself was a young man during a time of war.

Cheney was also praised for his ethical decision not to arrange for a company which had very recently paid him tens of millions of dollars and in which he had “a continuing financial interest” to become one of the largest beneficiaries of United States federal spending in Iraq. One can only imagine the repercussions if he had actually done something like that.

Here’s to Dick Cheney!

 

I was inverted…

From the BBC:

A Russian jet fighter that intercepted a US Air Force reconnaissance plane on Friday did so in an “unsafe and unprofessional manner” over the Baltic Sea, the Pentagon has said.

It says the fighter performed a barrel roll plane over the American plane.

Wait, does this sound familiar?

Donald Trump and Blowback

I still won’t dignify Trump’s (or any politician’s) appeals to bigotry or science denial for a second, but I found myself pausing to consider some of the foreign policy ideas he mentioned in his recent New York Times article. No, not his support for nuclear proliferation in Japan or South Korea, of course. That is insanity. If the world has to have nuclear weapons (which I don’t accept, other than in the very short term), it makes much more sense for a very small number of responsible (?) parties to keep them under lock and key and agree to protect others. In fact, one of the diabolical things about nuclear weapons is that relative to their destructive and strategic power they are incredibly cheap compared to conventional weapons and boots on the ground. It is the enormous number of boots on the ground in places like Japan and South Korea that it may be time to reconsider, and mainstream politicians are generally not willing to stand up to the military-industrial establishment and bring that up for discussion.

I have recently been reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson. A key point he makes is that the United States propped up dictators and conservative governments around the world during the Cold War, often subverting popular democratic movements, and this led to a lot of resentment. Japan and South Korea are two of his examples. He says that the United States controls a huge area of the island of Okinawa, entirely rent free (and contrary to Trump’s claim that other countries don’t pay anything, another example of his not bothering to check his facts assuming that his supporters won’t bother either), and that this leads to a lot of resentment among the Japanese population to this day. In Korea, he claims that the CIA actively subverted democratic movements in favor of military dictators that proved to reliable Cold War allies. An even more surprising claim I had never heard before was that the South Korean military regime was actively pursuing nuclear weapons early on, and that the North Korean nuclear program was initially a response to this. Later South Korea agreed to give up its program, while North Korea obviously has not. Anyway, the focus of Johnson’s book is actually the 1990s, the period between the end of the Cold War and the book’s publication in 2000, when the U.S. had a chance to dial back its military footprint around the world, tone down the resentment, and chose not to.

So the U.S. probably could pull back its boots-on-the-ground military commitments in Japan and South Korea, stay engaged with these countries through trade and diplomatic channels (another area I was surprised to find myself nodding my head slightly while reading Trump’s interview). These countries are rich and powerful enough to take care of themselves to a large extent. The U.S. Navy, Air Force, and nuclear umbrella could still get there pretty quick to support them if needed.

If we did that, what are the odds of a country like Japan taking a militaristic expansionist turn again? That doesn’t seem too likely in Japan’s case. But the rest of the world could monitor and stay engaged through trade, diplomacy, and organizations like the United Nations Security Council. At the end of the Cold War, the Security Council seemed to be the body that was going to defend national borders. Rather than complicated, entangled groups of allies that could become ensnared in world wars, the simple story was that if one powerful country took aggressive action against a neighbor, all the other powerful countries in the world would suddenly become an alliance against it. Aggressive war would be futile. This would justify each country having a capable military, but no country has to devote an enormous chunk of its economic and social energy to weapons and the capability to commit violence as the United States has over the past 70 years or so. It’s a simple and naive story I’m sure, but not as naive as a purely pacifist approach, and an ideal to work towards.

“why we lost” Iraq and Afghanistan

Daniel Bolger is a retired U.S. general who has written a book about why he thinks the U.S. lost these two wars.

Why exactly did American military leaders get so much so wrong? Bolger floats several answers to that question but settles on this one: With American forces designed for short, decisive campaigns, the challenges posed by protracted irregular warfare caught senior officers completely by surprise.

Since there aren’t enough soldiers — having “outsourced defense to the willing,” the American people stay on the sidelines — the generals asked for more time and more money. This meant sending the same troops back again and again, perhaps a bit better equipped than the last time. With stubbornness supplanting purpose, the military persisted, “in the vain hope that something might somehow improve.”

Toward what end? Bolger reduces the problem to knowing whom to kill. “Defining the enemy defined the war,” he writes. But who is the enemy? Again and again, he poses that question, eventually concluding, whether in frustration or despair, that the enemy is “everyone.”

Well, if you can’t figure out who you are fighting or why, it is not likely that you will ever be able to say you accomplished your objective. These were really wars fought for no obvious reason, and blowback may only be starting. Hopefully lessons were learned.

ghost fleet

I’m a sucker for hypothetical future war books. I don’t know why I find them so fun. Obviously I would not find it so fun if this actually happened.

From Amazon:

What will the next global conflict look like? Find out in this ripping, near-futuristic thriller.

The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a twenty-first century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace. The fighting involves everything from stealthy robotic–drone strikes to old warships from the navy’s “ghost fleet.” Fighter pilots unleash a Pearl Harbor–style attack; American veterans become low-tech insurgents; teenage hackers battle in digital playgrounds; Silicon Valley billionaires mobilize for cyber-war; and a serial killer carries out her own vendetta. Ultimately, victory will depend on blending the lessons of the past with the weapons of the future.

Ghost Fleet is a page-turning speculative thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October. The debut novel by two leading experts on the cutting edge of national security, it is unique in that every trend and technology featured in the novel — no matter how sci-fi it may seem — is real, or could be soon.

The gold standard, for me, will always be Clancy’s 1986 Red Storm Rising, which was about a hypothetical U.S.-Soviet Union War. He tried to pull an encore of sorts in 2001 with The Bear and the Dragon, but it just wasn’t that great. A similar hypothetical U.S.-China war novel is 1999’s Dragon Strike, by Humphrey Hawksley, which was a little better than the Clancy version even though Clancy invented the genre (and you wonder if Clancy read Dragon Strike before he published his novel, or maybe had already written the novel and was annoyed someone beat him to the punch with similar subject matter).

One more future war novel I found interesting and thought provoking was Deep Sound Channel by Joe Buff. In that one, yet another German-led axis of evil arises. The novel focuses on the hypothetical use of nuclear weapons in fairly limited and tactical ways in naval and submarine warfare.

Maybe I like these books for the chance to put my petty everyday concerns and irritations in perspective.

Jeffrey Sachs vs. the CIA

Jeffrey Sachs does not like the CIA.

The public has never really been told the true history of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Starting in 1979, the CIA mobilized, recruited, trained, and armed Sunni young men to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA recruited widely from Muslim populations (including in Europe) to form the Mujahideen, a multinational Sunni fighting force mobilized to oust the Soviet infidel from Afghanistan…

By promoting the core vision of a jihad to defend the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) from outsiders, the CIA produced a hardened fighting force of thousands of young men displaced from their homes and stoked for battle. It is this initial fighting force – and the ideology that motivated it – that today still forms the basis of the Sunni jihadist insurgencies, including ISIS. While the jihadists’ original target was the Soviet Union, today the “infidel” includes the US, Europe (notably France and the United Kingdom), and Russia…

Blowback against the US began in 1990 with the first Gulf War, when the US created and expanded its military bases in the Dar al-Islam, most notably in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s founding and holiest sites. This expanded US military presence was anathema to the core jihadist ideology that the CIA had done so much to foster.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “violence is never the answer”. There are always bullies and thugs out there who will take advantage of you if they know you won’t defend yourself. But in the longer term, I think the answer to violence is always to find a way to de-escalate. People, particularly young men, need economic opportunity, and their legitimate grievances need to be identified and addressed. These are the root causes of most violence. After you figure out these two things, you can also think about how to alter any cultural norms that make violence seem okay, and limiting access to weapons. Finally, you can round up the remaining handful of hard core thugs and bullies if there are still some out there. All this is as true on the streets of an American city as it is in the Middle East. Note how both the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” have gone about this in exactly the reverse order from what I just suggested – start with a violent military or law enforcement approach targeting a whole class of people, go after the weapons, and blame the culture. All this is great for business if you are part of the military-industrial or police-court-prison-industrial complex. If we address the root causes – legitimate grievances and lack of economic opportunity – at all, we tend to give them the least attention and funding.

Armor

Remember when you read Starship Troopers, and found that it wasn’t quite the book you thought it would be? But then you decided even though it wasn’t the book you thought it would be, it was a pretty good book, maybe even better than you thought it was going to be, and you forgave it for not being the book you thought it was going to be. Well, when you start reading Armor, you think it is going to be the book that you thought Starship Troopers was going to be. About half way through, you decide it is not the book you thought Starship Troopers was going to be after all, but it is a good book in its own right, maybe better than the book you thought it was going to be, which was the book you thought Starship Troopers was going to be.

Then you read Enders Game, and The Forever War, and you thought, gee, there sure are a lot of books about fighting alien bugs, or bug aliens, or whatever. And they are all actually pretty good, even though none of them is exactly the book you thought Starship Troopers was going to be. And entertaining as all this is, you really, really hope there are no actual bug aliens out there.

 

November 2015 in Review

What did I learn in November? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-10):

  • The World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Risks Report came out. Some of the top risks are interstate conflict, water crisis, failure of climate change adaptation, unemployment and underemployment. Hmm, that “interstate conflict” items might be what we used to call “war”. And I think there might be one underway right now in the Middle East, which Jimmy Carter says we are getting all wrong. And it just might be caused by the other items on the list. And speaking of war, there is a new book on the Vietnam War aimed at the middle grades, but it seems pretty harsh for that age to me. (-2)
  • I noticed that Robert Costanza in 2014 issued an update to his seminal 1997 paper on ecosystem services. He now estimates their value at $125 trillion per year, compared to a world economy of $77 trillion per year. Each year we are using up about $4-20 trillion in value more than the Earth is able to replenish. The correct conclusion here is that we can’t live without ecosystem services any time soon with our current level of knowledge and wealth, and yet we are depleting the natural capital that produces them. We were all lucky enough to inherit an enormous trust fund of natural capital at birth, and we are spending it down like the spoiled trust fund babies we are. We are living it up, and we measure our wealth based on that lifestyle, but we don’t have a bank statement so we don’t actually know when that nest egg is going to run out. (-3)
  • This crop of presidential candidates is easy for comedians to make fun of. I enjoy it but think it may be a contrary indicator for the health of the country. (-1)
  • Bicycle helmets are not making U.S. bicycle riders any safer. This is why we need streets designed on the European model to be safe for driving, bicycling, and walking. It’s 100% known technology and there can be no excuses! (-2)
  • In current events, we had the awful, shocking terrorist attacks in Paris. I suggested that the long-term answer to violence caused by angry young men anywhere is to understand why they are angry, address their legitimate grievances, and give them productive work to do. Short term, we also have to detect and disrupt any plots involving nuclear or biological weapons, of course, because we can’t afford even one. (-2)

Positive stories (+9):

refugee cities

This post makes a case for establishing cities for refugees rather than “camps”.

Second, the world now has 60 million refugees. That is a number roughly the size of six Belgiums, Hungarys, or Swedens. If they were to create their own country, it would be the size of France. In the face of such staggering numbers, commitments to take thousands or even tens of thousands of people will do almost nothing to alleviate the misery of millions.

Rather than conflating the issues of refugees and terrorism, politicians and policymakers should be addressing each separately. On the question of refugees, Western countries should take in as many as their populations can assimilate, demonstrating a willingness to make good on the universal values they profess for both moral and political reasons.

But the world also needs far bolder solutions than twentieth-century approaches like limited asylum quotas and “temporary” refugee camps. In particular, it is time to embrace the prospect not of camps but of cities – places where up to a million refugees of any particular nationality can live safely and learn how to build a better future.

This reminds me a little of Paul Romer’s “charter cities”. The idea was to create entirely new city states focused on economic growth that people from anywhere in the world could opt into, provided they agreed to certain norms of behavior. I find the idea compelling, although Romer’s attempts to realize it on the ground in Honduras ended up on the rocks. You can argue that Singapore developed somewhat along these lines, although it was not founded based on this ideology (in fact, it was not even founded voluntarily, but just sort of cast adrift.)

Most Dangerous

Here’s a new book on the Vietnam War…for kids ages 10 and up?

a trailer full of corpses, its floor “streaked with blood and brains.” Arms and legs were falling off the rotting trunks, which made it difficult to count how many bodies were in the trailer. The stench was unbearable. So the bodies were hosed down and the trailer tipped to its side, letting, as one witness put it, a “rivulet of blood-colored water” flow outside. A delegation of American military officers passed by, stepping over the blood “to avoid ruining the shine on their boots.”

Age 10, really? I think everyone at some point does need to know that this stuff happened. Not just know it intellectually, but internalize it, try to come to terms with it, and realize it can’t happen again. I remember being shown a movie of piles of Holocaust victims being moved by bulldozer around 7th grade. I don’t remember my emotions at the time but I remember the image vividly 25+ years later. Still, age 10? I’m not sure, maybe high school would be soon enough.

Anyway, should we assume this stuff only happened in the past? In Afghanistan we are hearing about “military age males” and “enemy killed in action”. Maybe not on the enormous scale of the Vietnam era, but it is the same rhetoric nonetheless. And I don’t think most of us are internalizing it, struggling to come to terms with it, or asking what we should be doing to stop it from happening.