Tag Archives: war

more cold war redux

Here are some more disturbing rumblings of U.S.-Russia confrontation in western Europe. But I also like the quote below by a German foreign minister.

More than 31,000 troops from 24 nations took part in Nato’s Anaconda-16 exercises in Poland, from 7 to 17 June.

The day after they ended, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned Nato against “sabre-rattling and warmongering”, calling for exercises to be replaced with more dialogue and co-operation with Russia. “Whoever believes that symbolic tank parades in Eastern Europe bring more security, is mistaken,” he told Bild newspaper.

where the money goes

I am somewhat familiar with how the U.S. federal government spends its money, but it is still instructive to see it broken down occasionally. Once social security, medicare, and interest are taken care of, the discretionary spending that is left is less than a third of the total. Of that, more than half is military. Veterans’ benefits make up another sizable chunk, nuclear weapons are partially funded under the energy budget, and it is not clear (to me at least) where intelligence and homeland security funding fall, so the real total for military and security is even larger than it appears.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

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.