'Each man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

'Artists are tricky fellows sir, forever shaping the world according to some design of their own'
-- Jonathan Strange, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Wednesday 5 December 2012

MERLN - Cybersecurity

The National Defense University's impeccable Military Education Research Library Network has added a cybersecurity page. As well as general scholarly articles, this page also collates international policy papers on cybersecurity. Here is the Tallinn Manual, created to order thoughts on how international norms may apply to cyberconflict.

Friday 30 November 2012

Saturday 24 November 2012

Hamas in context

Important perspective on  حركة المقاومة الاسلامية and Israel dynamic (here's the Iranian interest); provides a welcome context on the recent conflict, embeds it within a detailed historical trajectory and gives an expert analysis of the Hamas leadership.

Saturday 17 November 2012

Virtual academies

As mobile phone networks expand in Afghanistan and hence mobile phone usage increases, al-Arabiya and the World Service have run a story on a collaboration between teachers in the country and US interests, of which the United States government provided funds. It is a mobile phone called Ustad Mobile (Mobile Teacher). Distributed free to students the phones contain audo-visual lessons on writing, pronunciation and phrases. Women have largely been denied the right to education under the restrictive policies of the incumbent Taliban rule from the middle of the 90s until their fall in 2001. Since then, war has once again ravaged the country, making education less of a priority than security.

Mobile Teacher was developed by an Afghan company Paiwastoon, with US$80 000 of United States aid. The current literacy rate is 12.5 percent for Afghan women, compared with 39.3 percent for Afghan men.

The company managed Nicholas Negraponte's One Laptop One Child programme, in distributing 3000 laptops to women and children in Afghanistan. But mobiles are seen as better - they are cheaper, more mobile, and people are familiar with their operating protocols.

Education is fundamental to the propagation not just of society, but the human race. It is a lofty consideration. We must spend serious time considering the nature of education, its trajectory and what we want it to be for future generations. Perhaps the single greatest loss for mankind was the burning of the library at Alexandria. No-one is quite sure who is to blame. We can never know the loss of such a body of knowledge from antiquity. Often in the surviving classical literature, names and books are referenced which are no longer known to us. Even specific titles evoke our interest today to such an extent that a book and film are made of tomes whose content we can only speculate about. (in this instance, Aristotle's lost volume of Poetics). Such was the dangerous nature of the knowledge therein that the book was hidden in an elaborate maze within a tower.

Perhaps it is not knowledge which is dangerous but instead the limiting of its proliferation. It is an uneasy concept - allowing the global spread of knowledge untrammeled would for example, see Waltz's hypothesis tested that a nuclear Iran would be a safe prospect. But untrammeled, knowledge would lead to greater understanding. The CTC at West Point has made much of al-Qaeda's primary source material available, translated, online. The result has been greater understanding and innoculation rather than a proliferation of English speaking jihadists.

We must consider the nature of online teaching, which is expanding at a great rate. Below are YouTube clips from leading online teaching resources.

Khan Academy (TED talk)





Coursera


EdX


MIT Media Lab

The Future

The future of teaching, if not learning, is the virtual environment. Learning for the foreseeable future may still take place in the classroom but it is not a stretch to see the virtual sphere take over the learning aspects as well as the teaching aspects. Quite what this would entail for the traditional model of paid physical attendance is open to debate but it would in theory place greater emphasis on research as a means to achieve funding. Or, if teaching was available free online, learning would be on a pay-per-submission basis. The Internet is changing the way knowledge diffuses. My niece can now watch the philosophy lectures of Michael Sandel at Harvard whilst in a hotel in Mumbai, a beach in Thailand, a cafe in Paris; course reading lists are occasionally available free-to-view online, meaning that she can, still in Mumbai, read the necessary works and get podcasts of lectures, pdfs or ppts of lecture handouts.

When Victor Frankenstein created a female partner for his male creation, he had to journey across Europe to London with all of his laboratory equipment, in order to consult with the professors in the city who alone possessed the necessary expertise to ensure his success. The length of his time abroad was of such consternation to his sweetheart that she grew angry at the prospect. Today, Victor Frankenstein would flick a switch on his Macbook and Skype with the academics in between breakfast and lunch. No equipment had to be moved, no time abroad considered.

The information flow is not yet fully virtual. Physical movements are still necessary. Over 36 000 Chinese students are in Higher Education establishments in the UK. But this is learning as much as teaching - studying abroad is not solely about excellence in teaching but also about learning - languages, cultural expertise. The virtual academy, as Negroponte notes, is still a teaching tool and not yet a learning one.  

Sunday 11 November 2012

The Anon's Low Orbit Ion Cannon

One of the interesting elements from the "Anonymous: We are Legion" documentary was the Anon's use of the DDOS software Low Orbit Ion Cannon which included the user's Internet Service Provider address in the multiple ISP addresses which denied service to the targeted websites. The software was developed by Praetox technologies but is now open source, hosted on several platforms.

LOIC was used as part of Project Chanology, when Anonymous as a movement emerged, in their actions against the Church of Scientology. The LOIC was used additionally in Operation Payback, in response to organizations' refusals to process donations to WikiLeaks.

That the LOIC logged the user's own IP meant that the perpetrators of the DDOS attacks could be easily identified by the FBI which led to a series of arrests. It brought home the virtual to that of reality and shifted the balance in favour of the authorities because Anon's actions had real life consequences, and as the first wave of perpetrators, it is possible that sentences handed down will be severe in order to deter further and more creative acts against organizations and governments. Some of the offenders are faced with maximum Federal punishments of 15-year jail sentences.

Anons have attacked the Church of Scientology, Mastercard, Visa, government websites amongst other entities and recently had a publicised fall out with WikiLeaks over its pay-per-view bar on new material, which was subsequently taken down. The political character of such a disparate movement is necessarily diffuse and hence the message becomes muddied. Anonymous have released a video decrying Obama's record but with a lack of viable alternatives. Criticism is one thing but offering solutions is something else entirely, and is the necessary next phase of a manifesto.


Tuesday 16 October 2012

Hacktivism

Given the recent claim by Anonymous that they have outed the internet stalker of Amanda Todd, here's a brilliant documentary on the hacktivist collection.

Saturday 11 August 2012

Biddle, Friedman, Shapiro on The Surge

It's controversial, and arguments about it have spilled out on such sites as Kings of War, Line of Departure and Small Wars Journal, so it's worth commenting on when the august journal International Security leads with "Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?"

The narrative is by now familiar. From 2004 to mid 2007 Iraq was violent, then it became relatively calm. Relative calm is just that, relative. The authors do well to note that Iraq today "is no Garden of Eden". Operational execution of suicide bombing has increased in proficiency to the extent that detonations now invariably cause deaths between 50-100 people in the country. Police stations are still highly desirable targets.

So what of the surge? It draws argument because of the concatenation of circumstances and the various narratives at play. It was the start of population-centric coin en masse; FM 3-24 had been published in December 2006. So COIN doctrine was necessarily foregrounded in US policy circles as having reduced violence from 2007 onwards.

David H. Ucko wrote an article in PRISM, the NDU's journal in which he considered factors at play in the reduction of violence in Iraq in 2007, but this new article by Biddle et alia is by far the most comprehensive examination of the matter using declassified Significant Activity charts (SIGACTs) to provide a quantitative aspect to the analysis.

The conclusion? Quite mainstream. The surge itself is an insufficient explanation as to the violence reduction witnessed, rather it remains the most likely answer that it was a dynamic between the Awakening of tribal units coupled with the increase in manpower afforded the US military on the ground. Indeed, as regards academic debate on the influence of the surge, Biddle et alia decide that "Our analysis, however, suggests a mixed verdict." Which points to the problem of human variables and the insufficiency of current quantitative analysis to examine such variables. We can only try and Biddle at alia's article is the best attempt yet to assess the surge.

Sunday 15 July 2012

12 months in the life of a phosphate-mining stock

If phosphorus is the next major-power resource war then phosphate mining stocks will see a considerable rise in their value across a given time period from this point hence. Thus I will choose four phosphate-mining company stocks and I plan to evaluate their price and their trajectory in approximately twelve months hence. This goes against current market opinion that suggests stocks are a sell after a period of stagnant potash prices. Also, if you've been following the blog, the last post noted the existence of Gaussian distributions in modelling, see here also the Hubbert peak theory as a Gaussian distribution. Some commentators have applied it to phosphate prices, hence expecting a sharp fall over the coming year.


Put simply, I am arguing that war is the continuation of economics by other means. 

1. The Mosaic Company (Current 55)


2. Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan inc. (Current 43.78)




3. Intrepid Potash (Current 23.58)








4. Allana Potash Corp (Current 0.55)

Wednesday 13 June 2012

The End of Order and the Last Online Gamer

A few years back an American friend of mine who was a student of ancient history, in particular the Roman Empire, wanted me to play Civilization II, an online turn-based game. She told me that it was her wish to flirt with, and then conquer, some of the greatest leaders of the ancient world. When I probed further, she named Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. She said that the only way to rule the world with decency was to take over all of it and rule as a benevolent dictator. Incidentally, she was a varsity cheerleader and a big fan of Peter Heather. Which reminds me that I've been meaning to pop to Prof. Heather's department and get him to sign a book for her, and then I'll post it. Two of her other heroes were Plato and also Pink.

Anyway, huffingtonpost.co.uk had a story this week and it makes good reading for individuals involved in the military-industrial complex and indeed, proponents of maintaining armoured divisions in the face of no known threats. One man has been playing CivsII for ten years. He's got to 4000A.D. and well, it's a state of never-ending war. Only three civs are left, Vikings, Celts, Americans (hardy fellows, each). They've been in a state of perpetual war for 1700 years. Yes, I'm sure I just heard Martin Dempsey's heart skip a beat.


The player wanted his America to remain a democracy but could only control it through (I presume Stalin-esque) communism. Wars were nuclear and continually fought for control over resources. In 4000A.D., most of his money went on tanks. Tanks.

The story went viral. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder commented on it. The plan now is to take over the entire world and act as a benevolent dictator. 'Democracy had failed' one user posted. Quite. There are some pertinent issues here - nuclear war, resource war, unstable political systems and perpetual war. These themes are constant in the news, no wonder the story went viral, in 4027 A.D., the user is engaged in a scenario that's a plausible, real future.

It makes you think. I just blogged on Phosphorus as the next big power conflict. It makes me ask, when would you use nuclear weapons? If you look at Cuba, generally regarded as the closest two nuclear powers have come to launching nuclear strikes, the necessity to launch a nuclear strike wasn't there. Robert McNamara in the incredible documentary/interview Fog of War, makes it known that the US saw that if the Soviets could climb down whilst saving face, there was a way out.

Resource war makes a climbdown unthinkable. If your population is starving and hence rebelling, you have to go to war against an external other in order to secure resources. In short, both you and your population not only want, but need, a nuclear strike.

How soon? Look at a population growth chart from 10, 000 B.C. to 2000 A.D.



Here's a shorter time period, 1750 A.D. (1 billion) to 2050 A.D. (10 billion). The Civ player noted the world population peaked in 2000 A.D and then fell sharply due to war and famine.


In fact, the second graph is very much the first half of a Gaussian function, or normal distribution - a bell shaped curve found in many aspects of nature. Which makes the Civ II model even more pertinent. What does this mean for Academia? If Huntington's Clash of Civ's thesis was the debated argument of the first decade of this century, it seems that Garrett Hardin's Lifeboat ethics will be the debate of the next decade.

Nuclear weapons, resource poverty, unstable political systems. Makes you wish for a varsity cheerleader who's happy to act as a benevolent global dictator.

The BBC did a little piece on the Civ story, here.

Thursday 24 May 2012

Animated Foucault and Deleuze in conversation

Love this. YouTube animation of the infamous conversation between Deleuze and Foucault from 1972 included in Bouchard ed. (1977). The "Comments" aren't your usual YouTube fare.


Monday 7 May 2012

Phosphorus: The Next Big Power Conflict

There's a scene in Alan Moore's famous comic book (he resented the term 'graphic novel') between the Batman and the Joker, in the rain, at a deserted funfair. The Joker is walking around and he says:

"Do you know what triggered the last World War? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors!'

The joke is on us. National provisions for populations means safeguarding citizens right to consumerism will create resource conflicts around minerals necessary for foodstuffs. Crazy.
The historical accuracy aside, seemingly small controversies can escalate provided there is enough momentum already gained between the antagonists. Simply put, even telegraph poles can be the straw that caused the camel to go to war.

Phosphorus is critical to phosphate fertilisers, themselves critical to 'global food security' says The London Times in a feature on food miracles (a great summary of the problem and history is here at Business Insider). The richest supplies are in Morocco and China and the latter is now less eager to export it than it used to be. Moreover, that 'India is already almost one hundred percent dependent on imported phosphorus' shows the possible antagonisms that could arise over access to minerals.

China has a plan. The plan is to secure resource access globally. To safeguard resource access, it will develop its military, in order to combat US military hegemonic status, should the US confront it over resources. The United States may assume that China is developing its military in order to assert regional authority but it is something much more precise: China understands that the rise of the Asian populations and their consumerism will lead to turbulence in terms of resource access. Whilst America has spent the last ten years engaged in military confrontation to ensure physical security, China has been engaged in soft power offensives aimed at resource security.

The idea is simple: secure resources for your population and your nation survives. Given the nuclear status of China, conflicts will only erupt at the local level, hence China needs high end military technology and cyberintelligence.

China is already resource wealthy. It possesses supplies of most minerals necessary for US manufacturing, for example. C. Robert Taylor argues that US domestic phosphorus supplies will be exhausted in 15-30 years and that this resource, not oil, will then be the key security factor in US foreign policy. Taylor notes that:


Morocco and China hold 60 percent of the world’s known phosphorus reserves while the U.S., South Africa and Jordan hold most of the rest.
Wisely, China, “has imposed a 100 to 175 percent tariff to curtail phosphorus exports, yet the U.S. continues to export to China. Troubling, ain’t it 

Food is key. The reason is obvious. You don't have to kill to survive. You don't have to consume luxury goods to survive. You don't have to have three foreign vacations a year to survive. You don't need to upgrade your home entertainment system to survive or even buy Homeland Series 1 on DVD boxset to survive. But you do have to eat. And if you think that's far fetched, look at what happened to global markets in April 2012 when the cost of Spring Onions and Cabbages in China soared.

Wednesday 25 April 2012

Cry Havoc, and let loose the forces of Anonymous

Of course, it makes good sense.Some individuals or groups are collaborating as Anonymous and hacking sites containing sensitive data. Earlier this month it launched DDoS attacks against the UK Home Office's website.

So of course, it makes sense. Earlier this month Anonymous launched attacks against Chinese sites. Its "Anonymous China" twitter feed proclaimed, "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible." And provided those who accessed it information on anti-censorship programmes.

So of course it makes sense. The American government has been the main target of Anonymous so its important to stress a new, more malicious enemy.

So of course, it makes sense. China's hunger for corporate espionage is harming America, claimed Richard Falkenrath, Former Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to the White House. Right wing conspiracy theorists see the RQ-170 drone lost over Iran as being brought down by a Chinese cyberunit, or more generally, just the Chinese.

So of course it make sense. Adam Segal, writing April 20, 2012 in Foreign Policy, argues Anonymous should attack five key Chinese websites. It's not us, it's them, is Segal's tone - China has the really good secrets. 

Sunday 22 April 2012

Afghanistan end-game

Much has been written and talked about regarding what the end game in Afghanistan looks like. Today the US and Afghanistan have finalised their strategic partnership arrangement.


Very much it's reminiscent of the CCCP's withdrawal from Afghanistan when it continued to give massive financial aid to shore up the regime, successfully. When the aid stopped, the regime was toppled.


The NYT reports:

However, the United States is already anticipating that it will make a substantial contribution toward paying for Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014 and is searching for contributions from its NATO partners. The amount is not settled but a figure of $2.7 billion a year has been under discussion.  There would be additional foreign aid for civilian fields.


Which is similar to the Russian's annual aid back in the early 1990s. Not so much nation-building, as regime-propping. Offshore balancers are in the ascendency in terms of fashionable thought and with good reason after the confused aims and utopian ideals cited in the Iraq and Afghan invasions. 


So where are we? When Russia left Afghanistan, it ranked 170 out of 174 in the UNDP's Human Development Index (Barakat, S. (2004). Reconstructing war-torn societies: Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (p.7)).


In 2001 in ranked 89 of 90 in a UNDP Human Poverty Index using various indicators. In 2006 it conspicuously did not feature on the numbered tables, being considered in separation to that with other states lacking enough data. In 2011, it ranked 172 out of 187 (Democratic of Congo was in last place, probably justifying even greater faith into the theory of Resource curses now that globalization has opened up the world's resources to all markets). There can be no doubt, given the numerous documentaries that have emerged, that Western forces went there to do good, to nation-build, to conduct counter-insurgency. But this was war, with resistance, and there was never a post-conflict setting, never a time when the resistance had subsided to such an extent that nation-building could begin. Defence won out over offence. 

Monday 9 April 2012

Psychological and physical traumas after Iraq and Afghanistan

Dignity comes in many forms. Lt Col. Tammy Duckworth lost her legs in a helicopter crash which came under RPG fire in Iraq. She is the current Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs in the United States Department for Veterans Affairs.

In November 2012 she will stand as the Democratic nominee for the 8th Congressional District of Illinois, standing against conservative Republican Joe Walsh, having stood and lost for the 6th Congressional District in 2006.

Duckworth is standing on a platform of strong social cohesion, especially protecting Medicare. She has made the point that there are hidden costs to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Advanced battlefield aid has meant the return of many combat troops that would not previously have survived their injuries. The accelerated use of IEDs in both theatres amplified the injury rate.

Liberal democracies have a duty of care to their returning service personnel. Costsofwar's (Part of The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown's Watson Institute) research concludes:


  • Over 6,000 US troops have died, as have 2,300 Pentagon contractors
  • Over 550,000 disability claims have been registered with the VA as of fall 2010
  • Nearly 70,000 allied troops have been wounded
  • A RAND study screening of returning troops found 26 percent likely had some kind of mental health condition.
  • Toxic dust exposures in theater have been associated with high rates of respiratory, neurological, and cardiovascular disease in returning troops
  • The middle class is somewhat overrepresented, the poor and the very wealthy underrepresented among the casualties[1]

550, 000 disability claims in a population of 311, 591, 000 people represents a disability claim of 0.176% of the population. Which means that as a result of the war on terror, 176 in every 100 000 have filed disability claims in the United States. These are hidden costs.

But more difficult to gauge, assess, treat and hence reintegrate soldiers are psychological traumas. In the Canadian film "Passchendaele", there is a general sense of the inhumanity of war, that men cannot prepare for its horrors, and that, also, bodies becomes twisted into shapes by explosions that are incomprehensible to the human mind. The documentaries are starting to emerge on Iraq and Afghanistan that deal with this explicitly. The three-part documentary series by the British Broadcasting Service, Our War, is one such attempt, which incorporates a large percentage of footage shot by the troops themselves and only recently released by the Ministry of Defence (first, second, third).

Though politicians may be desperate to draw a line under Iraq and Afghanistan, as the two theatres of the War on Terror that incorporated substantial troop deployment, the media may come to delve deeper into it as the picture of what the aftermath actually looks like becomes clearer. A Daily Mirror investigation concluded that mental health problems in the UK military stood at 2, 510 in 2010, and those with severe PTSD, at 185. These are diagnosed mental injuries. It seems probable that given the machismo culture of front line military forces, any mental problems would be preferrably self-medicated.

The war on terror as a name and venture is soon to be confined to history but the hidden costs will still be very much a part of our liberal democracies for decades to come. Identifying this, and giving voices to those who have important things to say, such as Tammy Duckworth, will be vital to the relationship between civil society and our armed forces in the coming decades.

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Iran (4)

David Shorr at thebulletin reviews Trita Parsi's 'A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran'. The book is welcome in drawing attention to the myriad actors involved in pulling Obama in different directions and proving central to his consideration in dealing with Iran.

Meanwhile, Joseph Wouk runs a Debka story that is interesting in an of itself. The content is absolutely unverified but does state that after the RQ170 crashed in Iran, Obama has cancelled all drone flights over the country, relying solely on satellite relays. That led the israelis to try and fit a drone with the necessary imaging but the drone crashed and the Israelis haven't proceeded, with the accompanying loss of data being received on sensitive installations.

Yahoo! runs the story that the Israelis and US agree that Iran does not currently have a bomb, but that's good news for the Israelis, who can hence argue that they can go in without a nuclear reprisal.

Without continuous drone footage of the installations, there's going to be much less of a granular understanding of the sites, couple with the loss of the RQ170 there are going to be so many unknowns involved in a strike, which might also play into the hands of the republican nominee (israelis running wild on Obama's watch). So Obama will press stridently for diplomacy.

Saturday 17 March 2012

Iran (3)

The role of narratives in establishing norms have become a central consideration in policy formulation, accelerated by the past decade of a war against terror, and what exactly that might mean, and how exactly language has shaped policy.

Two articles have now considered the effect of the media debate on policy formulation with regards to Iran. Stephen Walt in FP and Benn in the generally left-of-centre Haaretz (thanks to Nina for the latter link).

With the discourse shaped towards "not if but when", the next development will be post-conflict planning discourse, without the conflict having yet occurred. In that way, societies will start to live with the idea of the conflict. Then when it happens, it's simply a part of the normative framework of the foreign policy.

So the next discussions will be on how Iran will respond - will it use Hezbollah and can it. Will it act in Hormuz? Will it start an energy war? How will this affect the internal dynamics of the country? It's a little early for history to repeat itself, but expect some analysts to suggest that the nation will rise up once Israel and American take action against the nuclear installations which are the property of a tyrannical regime.

Also, Ahmadinejad is getting sidelined after his support base was weakened in parliamentary elections for the majilis earlier in the month. Hardliners are now in place.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Iran and Media-disseminated Evidence

Satellite images of key installations may be all too familiar. Colin Powell's 'worst day' at the United Nations (a former aide, Col. Wilkerson called it the 'lowest point' in my life), pointing to images to show evidence of ongoing Iraqi WMD programmes are still fresh in the memory.

But among several media outlets that run a recent satellite "bust" on Iran was USA Today, under the headline, Satellite images indicate Iranian nuke cleanup. "Possibly" the cleanup was to erase traces of the testing of a nuclear trigger. All the diplomats cited were accredited to the IAEA.

The BBC reported on British Prime Minister's visit to Washington. One pundit asserted that the Israelis wouldn't act against Iran without US support, and that Obama wouldn't act without Cameron, which shows a wonderful Anglocentric worldview. The NYT reports Cameron will join Obama in calling for diplomacy not war.

Obama does want to proceed through multilateral intiatives when venturing into foreign policy and many pundits argue that Israel doesn't have the ability to take out Iran's nuclear installations unilaterally. According to some sources Netanyahu made a request for weaponry from the US during his visit including bunker-busters, allowing Israel to increase the window of time it had before commencing a strike, which would give diplomacy more time. The article does not say whether the request was granted.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post is working on the when not if premise, in running a story that Netanyahu won't attack Iran before his wife gets to see Madonna.

We are living, after all, in a material world.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Top Gunning

Article from David Sirota at the Seattle Times on the military-entertainment complex.

The image of the military has been recalibrated during the war on terror. Cameraphones linked to the internet have led to various perspectives on the conflict being disseminated globally, instantaneously. And the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen a uniformed professional coalition fighting an unseen, highly motivated enemy using assymetric tactics.

The tactical aspect of the war on terror may be best remembered by history for the rise of the IED as a space-denial weapon. This week saw six British deaths from a blast in Afghanistan. At least five of the six had only deployed on 14 February 2012.

It's a re-evaluation of soldiering, in that they never got to face an enemy, that suggests the Western militaries will face a hard time reinvigorating the warrior branding. For how Pentagon see that may be helped, read Sirota's article.

James der Derian has also written over the years on the rise of the military-media machine.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Iran Strike Norm (2)

Foreign Affairs have a debate chaired by Jonathan Tepperman (thanks to Nina for drawing my attention to this) on the pros and cons of attacking Iran which is available to watch here. True to CFR form the debate is non-partisan and each side are given fair due. The debate came on the back of Kroenig's popular (in the sense that it was at one point the most viewed) article in Jan/Feb 2012, Time to Attack Iran.

Yahoo! News ran the headline, "On Iran, Obama assails Republican candidates for ‘beating the drums of war’". In fact, Obama didn't assail them for beating the war drum, only for beating the drum without really understanding what the beat meant. As the article notes:

"Some of these folks have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk," he said scornfully at his first White House press conference of 2012, but "those folks don't have a lot of responsibilities. They're not commander in chief."
"The one thing that we have not done is: We haven't launched a war. If some of these folks think that it's time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be," he said. "Everything else is just talk."

That's mainstreaming the notion of attack. It also gets Iraq and Afghanistan out of the foreign policy discourse and back to American high tech military action.

Tepperman during the CFR debate also draws attention to a piece that first appeared in an Israeli security-related blog, Debkafile, that Russia have upgraded a Syrian surveillance station, in order to give it greater detection capabilities over Israeli airspace. David Fulghum in Aviation Week asserts that Syrian installations, particularly early warning systems, and in Lebanon are key to the Iranian problem. Air defence, supplied by Russia, is of such a level in Syria that arguably the most influential US General, James Mattis, head of CENTCOM, said, when considering assisting the Free Syrian Army, that these defences meant any strike against the Assad regime's forces would be difficult.

And there is a very big intelligence call to make. Iran has been after the S300 Russian air defence system, for some time:


With Russia apparently not willing to supply it, Iran came into some leverage with the captured RQ-170 sentinel drone. Why does it want the S300 air defence? Because it is capable against stealth aircraft and cruise missiles. Exactly the method of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear assets. It was reported in Russian media in 09 that Iran had shifted its hopes to a Chinese replica system but the RQ170 would prove valuable for both China and Russia, the former having a rapidly expanding drone capability.

Meanwhile, diplomacy aimed at inspections to assess use and capability is being renewed.

Internal tensions run high in Iran. It shouldn't be thought of as a homogeneous state, united its anti-American rhetoric. It has a tech-savvy youth - bloggers, tweeters of the facebook generation - and in this regard identify with their Western counterparts. Massive resource wealth handled so very badly by the ruling entity will lead, inevitably, to revolution. Any outside intervention will coagulate the state against the aggressor and set back the internal change.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Normative expectation of attack on Iranian nuclear facilities

There have been several diplomats speaking recently about the possibility of an attack upon Iran's nuclear facilities. This is less war-mongering, more generating a normative expectation of an attack. By the late Summer, this discourse will have become dominant. An autumn air strike will be expected and anticipated. There's an article on this at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald, which makes much the same point.

First is Ehud Barak's candid interview in a piece in the the New York Times on January 25. The article gives the sense that the time has arrived. Particularly here:
1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?
2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

And Barak Obama's recent speech to AIPAC (4 March 2012), which probably won't win him friends in the Arab world and will be construed negatively, severely restricting any possibility of progress in his (inevitable) second term on the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire:

"When the Goldstone report unfairly singled out Israel for criticism, we challenged it. When Israel was isolated in the aftermath of the flotilla incident, we supported them. When the Durban conference was commemorated, we boycotted it, and we will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism."

The important section is here:

"Let's begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel's destruction. And so I understand the profound historical obligation that weighs on the shoulders of Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak and all of Israel's leaders.
A nuclear-armed Iran is completely counter to Israel's security interests. But it is also counter to the national security interests of the United States.
Indeed, the entire world has an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. A nuclear-armed Iran would thoroughly undermine the nonproliferation regime that we've done so much to build. There are risks that an Iranian nuclear weapon could fall into the hands of a terrorist organization. It is almost certain that others in the region would feel compelled to get their own nuclear weapon, triggering an arms race in one of the world's most volatile regions. It would embolden a regime that has brutalized its own people, and it would embolden Iran's proxies, who have carried out terrorist attacks from the Levant to southwest Asia.
And that is why, four years ago, I made a commitment to the American people and said that we would use all elements of American power to pressure Iran and prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. And that is what we have done."
[full text here]

Invoking the world serves to develop an international norm that would legitimize a strike against Iran. The strike would be in the interests of the world. Obama is bowing to the inevitable - that an Israeli strike is seemingly certain and now the diplomats are generating a discourse to accomodate that action so that when it occurs, it will seem an inevitable action, and hence the consequences, whatever they should be, are simply a factor that must be accepted. By the Summer, expect more articles like this one from the BBC online, examining how an Israeli strike might occur.

On the issue of Iran, the Saudis interests are very much aligned with Israel's. The house of Saud has seen the encroachment of Iranian influence into the Middle East through Iraq and now the region has seen allegiances become extremely fluid. A nuclear Iran would be able to pursue much more aggressive foreign policy in the region, without risking retaliation. The bizarre reports of an Iranian assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador in Washington, pursued via a Mexican cartel only served to highlight the depth of the mutual emnity. Hence Saudi Arabia will be pushing for action, too. The Saudis could offer to ameliorate some of the shockwaves by increasing oil production after the strike.

Moderate views are being drowned out by a larger, more powerful discourse aimed at establishing a normative preference for military action. And building up the image of Iran as barbaric and powerful similarly serves to add to the normative preference.

Sunday 26 February 2012

James Clapper and the Syrian power vacuum

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for the Arab Spring.

"And the award for best supporting role goes to": James Clapper flanked by Robert Mueller and David Petraeus, 31 January, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, told Congress' Senate Armed Services Committee that al-Qaeda in Iraq could infilitrate the power vacuum in Syria should the Assad regime fall. That, said Clapper, could give AQI access to Syrian WMD stockpiles - known to be at least chemical weapons. That raises quite a security concern for the US as it one again joins AQ to the WMD threat, which has proved resilient and enduring in the American national psyche. After all, it was Saddam and his "links" to AQ, and Saddam's "WMD stockpile" that prompted the 2003 invasion. Before that of course, AQI didn't exist - now it is a well-trained though fractured terrorist entity. Clapper's statement covered old ground and was near identical a statement he gave six days earlier. The Syria comments were in the questioning that came after the statement:

Senator Webb:
[...] We had General Dempsey up here 2 days ago. I asked him a
question about the nature of the opposition in Syria, the question
going not to what the Assad regime would be capable of doing
which, by the way, Director, I thought you laid out in very understandable
specifics, but really what is on the other side of the picket
line. Who are they? How much of this is domestic? How much
of it is foreign? What is the regional dynamic?
And he made one comment. I am going to give you a partial
quote. He said, Syria is a much different situation than we collectively
saw in Libya. It presents a very different challenge in which
we also know that other regional actors are providing support as
a part of a Sunni majority rebelling against an oppressive regime.
We all know this. I think you made some comments about this as
well.
I asked him about the reports in the media last week that al
Qaeda was involved in some of the assassination attempts in Syria.
He would not reject it out of hand. He said he did not know [...]


Director CLAPPER. Let me take a stab at that and then I will ask
General Burgess to amplify or correct, as the case may be.
As I indicated earlier, the opposition is very fractionated. There
is not a national movement even though there is a title of the Syrian
National Council, but a lot of that is from external, exiles and
the like. But there is not a unitary, connected opposition force. It
is very local. It is on a community-by-community basis. In fact, in
some communities, the opposition is actually providing municipal
services as though it is running the community and trying to defend
itself against attacks from the Syrian regime-controlled military.
The Free Syrian Army, which is kind of a blanket, generic name
that is sort of applied to the collection of oppositionists, is itself not
unified. There is an internal feud about who is going to lead it.
Complicating this, as you implied, of course, are sort of the
neighborhood dynamics. The Iranians are very, very concerned
about propping up Assad. So they have sent help in terms of trainers,
advisors, and equipment, mostly riot suppression equipment,
that sort of thing.
AQ. Another disturbing phenomenon that we have seen recently
apparently is the presence of extremists who have infiltrated the
opposition groups. The opposition groups, in many cases, may not
be aware they are there.
We have had the two attacks that you alluded to, the two bombings
in Damascus in December I think it was and then the two additional
bombings in Aleppo, both of which were targeted against
security and intelligence buildings and had all the earmarks of an
al Qaeda-like attack. And so we believe that al Qaeda in Iraq is
extending its reach into Syria.
Complicating all this is—this is another contrast with Libya
where we had one or two or three sites that had chemical warfare
components. It is a much more complex issue in Syria which has
an extensive network of such installations, although to this point—
and we are watching these very carefully—they appear to be secure.
So many complexities here involving the opposition which I am
sure will affect any discussion about coming to some assistance [...]

Clapper has predicted the end of the Assad regime and has given a substantial statement before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in which he argued that AQ were still potent mainly through regional affiliates (Clapper named AQIM and the Shabaab) were growing in reach and stature:

"Absent more effective and sustained activities to disrupt them, some regional affiliates—particularly al-Qa‟ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Shabaab in Somalia—probably will grow stronger. The result may be that regional affiliates conducting most of the terrorist attacks and multiple voices will provide inspiration for the global jihadist movement.
These regional affiliates will continue to focus on local agendas, but also will pursue international terrorist attacks.
"

Adding to the chord, Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary observed that the AQ spectre made the Syria situation that much more important for America.

The spectre of AQI in Syria demonstrates the fluid nature of the allegiances of non-state actors in the region. At the height of the Iraq conflict, Syria (the Assad regime) was criticised for allowing in foreign fighters to the Iraq theatre. Of course, as Thomas Hegghammer has observed (International Security, Winter 2010/2011), few foreign fighters are affiliated to AQ, though of course AQ leaders want us to believe the affiliated numbers are larger. But AQ and Syria were not in conflict - now the US authorities would have us believe AQI is fighting against the Assad regime.

So why is the tide turning against Assad? Popular discontent is a powerful potion. Hamas have now publicly disclaimed Assad and sided with the rebels. In the light of continuing human rights abuses, Russia and China may feel increasing pressure, if not to act then at least be passive. But the US will consider a power vacuum or an unknown quantity assuming power, or Clapper's "fractionated" power landscape as probably less attractive alternatives to the strongman control of Assad. Better the devil you know. Egypt isn't a particularly pleasant experience for Americans currently. Certainly, there are no pro-American sentiments espoused in Homs nor a particular push for democracy - just a rebellion against continual oppression. It's something that would resonate with us all.

Monday 20 February 2012

A Call to Arms: Greece buys Franco-German Weapons

Interesting article from Independent, that over the last decade, Greece has been one of the top five arms importers in the world, with a population of only eleven million, and that a lot of defence ministers had been bribed, though the article does not provide further details on the latter allegations. The justification is the perceived threat from Turkey.

Which throws up a number of questions - has forced militarisation sunk the Greek economy? has it been forced from within, as a genuine foreign policy concern or has it been forced from a franco-german defence axis keen for foreign markets? And couldn't Greece have made a defence pact with France and Germany, beneath the E.U umbrella, negating such a large defence budget?

The article notes the severity of the arms procurement, for example,

"Even in 2010, when the extent of the financial disaster was apparent, Greece bought 223 howitzers and a submarine from Germany at a cost of €403m"

Historians will examine the budgets of these periphery nations and may well judge that arms procurement was key in melting at least the Greek economy.

But why does it so often play out that nations will escalate weapons procurement, even in the face of severe fiscal restrictions? Think of the military complex and its part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the rhetoric of an external enemy plays well with incumbent politicians. There's a global recession, sure, but that hasn't stopped Putin this weekend from pledging more money for defense. The reason? NATO's proposed missile shield. Putin is strong on foreign policy, hence to identify an external aggressor leads the voter to choose a strong leader. Only then, the leader must live up the rhetoric and pursue crippling and unnecessary defense spending.



Further reading:

Andrew Feinstein, 'The Shadow World"

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Cracks in the Resistance: Homs is not Benghazi

NATO airpower meant that the army, which was still very much under the control of Qaddafi, couldn't move to and around Benghazi, which in turn meant that the city's population could not be brutally suppressed. Logistically, operating from Italian airbases, enough sorties could be flown to drastically reduce the number of army units around the city.

The absence of a UN resolution and the presence of 'great power' politics means that the situation in Homs resembles a Benghazi without NATO intervention. A superb report from the BBC World Service this morning talked of rival resistance leaders, who could not stand one another, see the further reporting from Paul Wood here. It also suggested that the army was showing no signs of disintegrating and still held the monopoly on violence. In Egypt, the army stood to one side, remember.

A further important distinction to be made is the absence of heavy weaponry among the resistance. The army have armour and heavy weapons and hence can control large urban areas more easily. They have cut off likely supply routes so that illicit channels cannot be used to arm the resistance. Which makes Homs the vanguard of the Arab Spring in that it represents a suppressed population resisting by itself a minority ruling entity. And Syria is set to become a net importer of oil within a decade if current trends continue meaning its role as an energy supplier to the West is negligible, meaning it's strategic interest to the West is negligible:

SOURCE
What resonance do the events in Homs have for the West? Little, if media interest is used to gauge appetite. Unless illicit channels are used to coordinate resistance and arm it, Homs will be used by the Assad regime as an example, and history is replete with the teaching of lessons. From Alexander levelling Thebes (after which Athens was shocked into submission), to Michael Leeden saying that, 'every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.' It isn't culture specific. It's the will to power. And the situation in Homs is currently accelerating in its seriousness as a humanitarian issue.

Monday 6 February 2012

Normative bias against ostentation: it's just not cool

It used to be cool to demonstrate wealth: The broadsheets are still alive with articles on superyachts which have attached mini-subs; £100 million London houses; and there is no apparent irony in someone buying an £80 million house being labelled a philanthropist. Bankers who racked up bar-tabs incomprehensible to the average wage earner would make the low-numbered pages of the broadsheets.



Is it cool anymore? Inequality has become very not cool. In the Middle East and North Africa, people are dying to protest against it, and images of them and this continuing protest, regional in scope, national in character, are uploaded to sites such as YouTube and Bambuser. The Western nations are unequal in and of themselves, before we examine how unequal is the distribution of wealth between the North and Global South.

It's not cool to be the one percent of the one percent. Mitt Romney was forced to publish his tax returns. It wasn't cool that he earned so much money yet paid so little tax. The Western politicians are only just catching up. Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have both played the austerity card to attract followers and played it well. President G. W. Bush financed a war by tax cuts for the super-rich; history will judge it as not cool.

But of itself a normative bias, which as we speak is only in its infancy, fragile and susceptible to the whim of larger forces, will not reduce the inequality. Inequality, and ostentation will be hidden, it will be only displayed amongst like-minded individuals, behind gated communities and in playgrounds of the super-rich.

The resistance is mounting. The minimum wage is declining in real terms against rapid rises in food and energy costs. The debt mountain is increasing. Occupy is really only the beginning of some much larger global resistance force seen in the Arab spring, a protest essentially against social inequality under corrupt, self-aggrandizing leaders. As the wealth gap increases and basic services become too expensive, the propensity to violent revolt increases by orders of magnitide. In the UK these squeezed middles had to bail out the financial district. This is the great irony but it points to something very troubling, that the masses, the squeezed middle and below, can create shockwaves of positive or negative impact through their mass action. The internet can coordinate this mass action.

Currently, the affluent pursuit of happiness is not so greatly under threat by the economic climate but we must do everything we can to prevent the situation worsening - austerity, debt reduction, and vastly increased tax rates for the one percent. The bottom percentage who are harsly penalised through taxes then find themselves unable to contribute to the consumer economy. This will never happen to the one percent. A normative perception against ostentatious wealth is important. So be cool.

Tuesday 24 January 2012

Inequality

Here's the embed of the much-discussed October 2011 TED presentation by Richard Wilkinson, "How Economic Inequality Harms Society".



Wilkinson (mini-bio here) is co-author of Spirit Level along with Kate Pickett. The BBC World Service have recently run a brilliant two part report on income inequality (Episode One and Episode Two).

An important part of the report was the level of household debt now exceeding income in many instances - in a consumer society when debt repayments negate any ability to consume, society must start to implode. Capitalism requires consumers to purchase - in the poor sector of society, this has been achieved by accumulating debt because incomes are so relatively small that they cannot afford to do so by any other means. The accumulation of debt has led to a false idea that the economy is still functioning, in fact it has become artificially inflated.

The report examined small businesses which made great profit by catering to the "super-wealthy". But capitalism as a whole cannot be supported by the "much less than 1%". How severe the correction is will depend on how far into the population this debt bubble has gone. Indeed, according to the WEF, the numbers don't add up.

As the debt repayments are no longer met and as the High Street is reduced, public policy will become more conservative. It isn't Orwellian to imagine a near future where there's a cap on the number of children allowed by families on a certain percentage of their income as welfare. This economic puzzle will require severe solutions and we should anticipate what sort of political landscape such a scenario will bring. The Conservative party will move further to the right, but the disenfranchised will either coagulate at the extreme left (as in Occupy) or in the extreme right (as in anti-immigration). Anticipation of the debt bubble bursting is key to ameliorating its impact.

There's a fascinating part of the World Service report: a clip of Gordon Brown in 2007 praising and thanking the City of London.

Saturday 21 January 2012

Lecture and presentation on wireless mesh networking by Tim Kindberg

It was a pleasure to be in the audience for Tim Kindberg's lunchtime presentation yesterday at the wonderful Pervasive Media Studio. The talk was titled Precious Cargo: Ferrying virtual resources physically in crowds. The presentation was a result of Kindberg's six weeks lecturing at IT University of Copenhagen, as a visiting professor there. His co-authored Distributed Systems: Concept and Design is one of the main texts used in programmes there.

Just a few points for consideration I want to list:

The volatility (that is the continual changes to density) of crowds, the asymmetries of knowledge and how this would affect communication.

The ability of drones to act as a conduit to restore lost communications between, for example, a military team and its command station. As early as 2004, miniature UAVs, one developed by the University of Florida, had an 11cm wingspan and flight duration capability of 15 minutes. I imagine similarly that drone development to house a 2.4GhZ disruptor to take down all bluetooth and 3G capability will be in development.

And my favorite - that the new Android 4.0 platform, forthcoming, will incorporate WiFi Direct.

Tim also cited Norbert Weiner's work, 'Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society', originally published 1950.

"I told him to pay his car tax". Met have just won an appeal over use of kettling at G20, 2009 though it's unclear if this tactic would be employed at any protests during 2012 olympics because of the propensity for shocking images and footage to be viewed globally. The question was raised that anti-kettling tactics, including rapid random diffusion in opposed directions, seriously alter the crowd density and positions. There's a sense of extreme innovation from both the crowd and the control sides.

Small Wars Journal article

Small Wars Journal kindly posted an article I wrote on the limitations of COIN and the advantages of using proxies here.

Michael Few is leaving after a year and half as editor of SWJ, during which time his energy and insight have been remarkable. I was especially interested in his co-authored (With Carl Prine and Crispin Burke) recommendations for revisions to FM 3-24. The revision process concerning FM 3-24 is now underway at Ft Leavenworth.