Armchair Generalist

Casual Fridays

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is continuing his U.S. tour, traveling from the White House last week to Florida and then out to the West Coast. It's a shame that he has to get the second-class treatment from the Obama administration. I thought certainly Obama would have enough courage to invite the Dali Lama into the Oval Office. I mean, what could go wrong? Maybe China might get mad and put lead in our toys? poison our food? hack into our computer networks? Oh, wait. They did that.

But His Holiness has a good sense of humor. One thing about being Buddhist, you don't find pride to be a strong characteristic. Here's what he said about his White House visit.

The Dalai Lama repeatedly praised the U.S., and said he liked the informality of Americans, as he stiffened up to impersonate what he described as the more serious British and Japanese. But he said Americans also had a tendency to grow too downtrodden by hardship, as in the current economy.

"Too much demoralized, too much sad is not good," he said.

Dressed in a crimson robe and sandals, the 75-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner sat cross-legged atop an armchair at center stage at Nova.

His Thursday meeting with President Barack Obama was mentioned briefly, saying he spoke of the inherent equality of each person. "You and me, we are same - same human being," he said he told the president. He rubbed his head, saying he had a similar hairstyle to Obama, and pulled his right ear outward to poke fun at one of the president's features.

He's a great man. Brit Hume could take lessons. China gets upset about him visiting the White House? Fuck them. Maybe they need to loosen their grip before they lose control of their society. 

Well That Explains Some Things

I may be one of the few people who liked Battlestar Galactica but had no idea that its plot was heavily based on the Mormon religion.

Specifically, I will argue two things. First, I will perform a reading of the show that highlights the importance of religion to the plot, and argue that Mormon themes – both historical and theological – are integral to the story. The creator of the first BSG, Glen Larson, is a Mormon, and he stayed on as an advisor for the remake, which will be discussed here. The executive producer of the remake, Ron Moore, has stated that he was aware of the Mormon influences in the original series, and that he took that series as “mythos”.
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My second argument in this paper is more ambitious. To the political eye, the coming together of the two civilizations on the show, human and cylon, revolves around alliance politics. Pace Spinoza, however, alliances tend to fall apart once the threat they were formed against has evaporated or the gain it was supposed to realize is in hand. What we are seeing here is something much more, namely the merging of two polities into one. I will argue that this social coming together takes the major (but not exclusive) form of a religious coming together. What forges the new social group is first and foremost a set of practices revolving around the relationship between the here and now and what happens in another dimension, which runs parallel to our own and is also home to our pre- and post-mortal existence. Religion here must be understood not only in the classical, psychological sense going back to Tylor, as “belief in spiritual being”, but socially, as a question of  visiting other dimensions and have one’s view of our own changed as a result (Neumann 2006).

There's more than one site out there explaining the 1980s BSG plot and the modern one's connections to Mormonism. Maybe that's why the modern BSG plot fell apart halfway through. They just got too weird and detached from reality. Religion can do that to you.

It's a Real Puzzle All Right

 The Washington Post reports that Afghani officials are carting out millions of US dollars, European euros, and Saudi riyals out of Kabul and into Dubai. It's a mystery where all the money is coming from... 

The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal.

But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan's thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan.

"All this money magically appears from nowhere," said a U.S. official who monitors Afghanistan's growing role as a hub for cash transfers to Dubai, which has six flights a day to and from Kabul.

Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up efforts to stop money flow in the other direction -- into Afghanistan and Pakistan in support of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Senior Treasury Department officials visited Kabul this month to discuss the cash flows and other issues relating to this country's infant, often chaotic financial sector.

Billions of US dollars flowing into Pakistan and Afghanistan, along with millions of Saudi and European money, fattening up individual pockets instead of repairing Afghanistan. What a great, noble venture we're involved in. 

Educating the Media on Chem Demil

It's always shameful when one sees the Associated Press reporters distorting the Army's record and efforts to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with environmental laws and international agreements. But it's more shocking when supposedly unbiased science journals such as Scientific American pick up the story and regurgitate it without any objective analysis. The latest "scandal" revolves around the Army's Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives (ACWA) project's proposal to "blow up" chemical munitions at Pueblo Chemical Depot in order to both address the issue of leaking mustard rounds and to start reducing the stockpile prior to the start of operations of the neutralization facility (expected somewhere around 2016).

Although the U.S. military has been working with Defense Department contractors for more than a decade to develop technology that could neutralize its chemical arsenal without the need for detonation, the Associated Press recently reports that the Army is now proposing the use of explosives to destroy some of the 125,000 weapons being stored at chemical depots in Colorado and Kentucky. This might speed the process some, but the Army acknowledges that it will still miss the 2012 deadline set by Congress in 1997.

Not surprisingly, residents in and around the Army's Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Ky., are nonplussed with the military's proposed approach, saying that blowing up these weapons would be even worse than a previous plan to burn them at high temperatures, according to the AP. The residents want the military to revert to its original proposal of mixing the toxic chemicals with water, bacteria or other substances that neutralize the poison and then carting them off to a hazardous waste dump.

The Army's plan to reduce its chemical weapons arsenal by blowing up part of it is less a matter of an expedience than an admission that the military hasn't found a better way of dealing with the problem. "I wouldn't say [detonation] provides much acceleration," Kevin Flamm, the Army's program manager for neutralization operations at Pueblo and blue Grass, said during briefings in December, according to the AP. Although the Army wanted to find an alternative to blowing up its chemical weapons, Flamm says, "Frankly there isn't any other technologies we've found that can eliminate these weapons safely and environmentally friendly in the time frame we're looking at."

Oh where to begin. Well, we could start by saying that the U.S. military HAS a safe and efficient way to eliminate its chemical weapons without detonation, it's called incineration, and it's been very effective at five other chemical stockpile sites. Yes, of course the Army is going to miss the 2012 deadline (which oh by the way, Sen. Mitch "I luv Blue Grass" McConnell had extended to 2017), but that's due to Congressional direction (fueled by environmental activists) that forced an immature and unprecedented neutralization technology (in terms of being used on an industrial scale as opposed to lab bench) onto the Army. But the media's ignorance of the chem demil history is old news.

When the ACWA project office proposed detonating some of the mustard-filled munitions, it was not proposing open-air explosions or open-pit burning as the AP article suggests, nor was it suggesting replacing the neutralization plant being built at Pueblo. It was talking about using a proven, mature process called Explosive Destruction Technologies (EDT) to make the time between today and when the facility opens more productive. This process involves placing a munition inside of a detonation chamber with explosives, cracking the munition and draining the agent, and capturing any gases that are released as a result of the operation. The Army has successfully used this process to deal with "non-stockpile chemical munitions," i.e., those abandoned chemical muntions that turn up from time to time at formerly used defense sites. It's particularly safe when used on munitions that aren't fuzed (like those at Pueblo).

The typical approach to dealing with leakers at the chemical storage sites is to just overpack the munitions in a larger container. But since state and local officials at Pueblo have obstructed the Army's attempts to quickly destroy the munitions at their site by insisting on a neutralization technology that is going to create millions of gallons of waste water that has to be treated prior to releasing it into the environment, the disposal process has been delayed and the number of leakers continues to grow. Using the EDT at Pueblo would at least reduce the danger of leakers and begin reducing the stockpile while the construction of the neutralization facility continued.

Now the EDT process is not quick. It's not going to result in the Army's meeting the 2012 deadline. It's not the technology you would want to use to do the entire stockpile, because it's single munitions at a time, and from that viewpoint, while it's a safe process, it's not efficient. But it would begin the process of increasing the safety of the workers and the community by decreasing the number of chemical munitions. So why are the Luddites in Pueblo's community up in arms, consciously ignoring what the Army is telling them? Easy. It's because of the money. For every munition that is destroyed through EDT, that's less money that will go to the Pueblo community because it's speeding up the time when the Pueblo Chemical Depot will be closed. When the depot closes, then the local jobs go away and the federal emergency response funds dry up. And make no mistake, the idea of Pueblo closing scares the shit out of them.

The AP article is full of distorted and sensationalistic statements. The mustard munitions don't hold "the nastiest compounds every made," the EDT process doesn't "put the safety of the citizens below the politics of diplomacy," the Army is not asking to "use explosives to destroy all 125,000" munitions, and it's very hard to see how blowing up munitions inside of a detonation chamber "would be worse than burning them." This news coverage is pretty shameful stuff, and despite the Army's very transparent process and constant attempts to engage the public on this issue, the message is constantly distorted by the media and unscrupulous activists.

In other news, the Army's Chemical Materials Agency, which is now focused on chemical weapons storage and operating the incineration plants, is doing very well, thank you. But that's not "news."

Ridiculous Costs for Modern Warfare

 This week's DefenseNews is chock-full of interesting stories, but its front page article caught me off-guard. "US Missile Too Pricey for Irregular Warfare: Army Precision Fires Review Calls for Cheaper Option." Ends up that the Precision Attack Missile (PAM), a five-foot long rocket that is intended to put a 12-pound warhead on a moving target up to 40 kilometers away, cost $466,000 per missile. Now if the Army buys a lot more, the price might go down to $304,000 per missile. Is that insane or what?

What a shock, then, that the Army has some misgivings about using such a weapon system in an irregular warfare environment. What the hell happened to tube artillery? Did the Army pack them away with horse and saber units? 

Of course, the Army PEO for Integration defends the system as necessary. "The PAM, unlike other missiles in the current inventory, can use semi-active laser, GPS and IR to engage targets. The PAM also supports laser-designated, laser-anointed, and autonomous operation modes. The total NLOS-LS system is also easily deployable with a small logistics tail, giving the commander the ability to conduct precision fires from remote, hard-to-reach locations such as many forward operating bases are in today." Oh, and the Army doesn't have to rely on the Navy or Air Force if it has such high-tech precision munitions. 

In comparison, the Multiple Launch Rocket System will cost you $100,000 for 80 kilometers range. An Excaliber guided artillery round will cost you $48,000 per munition. So who was smoking dope when they approved the NLOS-LS? COL Pat Lang has a guest write a good post on indirect fire and its role in COIN operations. You have to wonder, though. Maybe  SecDef Gates pulled the plug on FCS too slowly. Way too much gold-plating going on in defense acquisition.

It Always Leads to This

John Arquilla, the inventor of the term "netwars", suggests that the military needs to get cheaper, smaller, and smarter. It's not an entirely original idea, but he points out some obvious challenges to getting a better military.

The greatest problem traditional militaries face today is that they are organized to wage big wars and have difficulty orienting themselves to fight small ones. The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U.S. Army only ten. The Navy has just 11 carrier strike groups, and the Air Force about three dozen attack aircraft "wings." Almost 1.5 million active service members have been poured into these and a few other supporting organizational structures.

It is no wonder that the U.S. military has exhausted itself in the repeated deployments since the 9/11 attacks. It has a chronic "scaling problem," making it unable to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers. Add in the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better (the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less), and you get massive approaches to little wars.

It's an interesting discussion. I don't see this paper as supporting a shift to COIN operations, but rather recognition that the military's basic inertia is still fueled by a Cold War mass-production, attrition-based philosophy. Despite all the doctrine that we espose, it's still "throw a lot of shit at the enemy until they give up." The US military's use of the art of warfare hasn't really kept up with the times, and the acquisition costs inherent in that philosophy are now killing us.  I kept nodding my head, right up to the last page, when he hit Sigger's Law.

Is such a shift feasible? Absolutely. Big reductions in the U.S. military are nothing new. The massive demobilization after World War II aside, active forces were reduced 40 percent in the few years after the Vietnam War and by another third right after the end of the Cold War. But the key is not so much in cutting as it is in redesigning and rethinking.

But what happens if the status quo prevails and the potential of this new round of changes in strategic affairs is ignored or misinterpreted? Failure awaits, at ruinous cost.

The most likely form catastrophe could take is that terrorist networks would stay on their feet long enough to acquire nuclear weapons. Even a handful of warheads in Osama bin Laden's hands would give him great coercive power, as a network cannot be targeted for retaliation the same way a country can. Deterrence will lie in tatters. If there is ever to be a nuclear Napoleon, he will come from a terrorist network.

Oh for crying out loud. Why is it that intelligent analysts so quickly fall into the "oh noes the terrorists will get nukes" trap. The most likely form catastrophe would take is that al Qaeda would continue to use its members to recruit Muslims to attack US forces for the next decade with explosives and modern firearms. The most unlikely catastrophe is a nuclear terrorist incident. But what the hell, read the article, it's interesting.

I'm Afraid of Americans

Join E.B. Misfit, Sek, and me as we mock the stupidity of American officials who want their embassies to be literal fortresses in the wilderness. This Borg Cube is going to be sitting in London.

As Susman unveiled the designs of the Philidephia-based firm of Kieran Timberlake – a 12-storey cube clad in a blastproof glass and plastic façade – it emerged the British jurors believe the Obama administration should have selected a rival design by a Californian designer, Thom Mayne, who won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's version of the Nobel, in 2005. They were overruled by the five Americans on the panel, including former ambassador Clyde Taylor.

Rogers and Palumbo are said to have thought the design was boring and "not good enough to represent one of the great nations in London", said sources familiar with the jury process. By contrast, they considered Mayne's design to be "touched by genius".

After the spat with two of the most prominent figures in British architecture, and both peers, a second diplomatic banana skin looms: the US government has yet to agree with HM Treasury about whether it will pay VAT on the building cost and the $1bn (£650m) price quoted yesterday did not include VAT. Susman said last night talks are continuing.

The embassy is set to become one of the most expensive in the world, cheaper only than America's fortress-like outposts in Baghdad and Islamabad.

From the NY Times: "It’s hard to think of a project, in fact, that more perfectly reflects the country’s current struggle to maintain a welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack." You just want to grab the State Department officials and say, are you stupid? Are you just insensitive to the image that you portray to the people whose country you are visiting? Are you deliberately trying to make people afraid of Americans? And spare not a dime into making this monstrosity a fortress proper, including a moat. It's going to cost a billion dollars, but if it's anything like the US embassy in Baghdad, that's just the starter price. It will cost more than that by the time the drawbridge drops down doors open for business.

Jesus wept.

UPDATE: Prof Walt says, "well, yeah, America will need embassy fortresses if it can't understand that its global ambitions will cause consequences from people who object to those policies." Cheryl Rofer says "boo" also. 

John Yoo Breaks the Asshat Scale

A few political blogs have noted John Yoo, the guy who made torture legal for the Bush administration, also has some thoughts about nuclear weapons.

Look at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. … Could Congress tell President Truman that he couldn’t use a nuclear bomb in Japan, even though Truman thought in good faith he was saving millions of Americans and Japanese lives? … My only point is that the government places those decisions in the President, and if the Congress doesn’t like it they can cut off funds for it or they can impeach him.

Any sane review of Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945 will show that Truman recognized that plans to use the device were already in motion, and he in fact was very deliberate about consulting with scientists, the military, State Dept, and Congress before making the heavy decision to drop the bomb. Yes, this is a controversial topic, but let's not suggest that Truman made a unilateral decision based on his executive authority to conduct this action. And in fact, one of the first things Truman did after dropping the bomb was to tell Congress that it was up to them to create an Atomic Energy Commission and to take over responsibility for nuclear weapons.

Although the idea of the president hitting the red button to launch a nuclear strike is popular for movies, the significant impact that such a decision would entail ensures that makes one hope that this is not a unilateral decision, unless Russian nukes are inbound and our government leadership has only minutes to decide whether to retaliate in kind. So I wonder what Professor Yoo thinks about President Ronald Reagan's view on nuclear weapons?

 “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.  The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.  But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 

President Reagan in his 1984 State of the Union address.

UPDATE: Upon reflection on the issue, I will agree that the president does have authority to use nuclear weapons (see this excellent article at the Arms Control Association), but my point remains that Yoo distorted the discussion about Truman's role - and another point, it was not "millions of American and Japanese lives" at stake from an invasion of the Japanese homeland, but more likely in the low hundreds of thousands. 

UPDATE 2: People are telling me that in fact, the president could, if he wanted, unilaterally start a pre-emptive nuclear war. I would suggest that the ethics of the decision would merit the president consulting with Congress and others. And having nuclear release authority doesn't naturally lead to the executive authority to order torture. Yoo is still an asshole and I think he still distorts the Truman case.

Cyber Warfare - It's the New WMD

Friend of the blog Patrick sends this article discussing a national exercise called "Cyber Shock" which postulated the effect of a cyber-attack on the United States. He commented about the parallel that the participants made with the WMD threat.

In a post-event discussion moderated by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the participants broke out of their roles to discuss the lessons learned during the exercise. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who chaired the simulated National Security Council, said cyber-terrorism “ought to be treated as a threat of sufficient seriousness that we give it the priority attention we’ve given weapons of mass destruction.” Cyber-terrorism is “more complicated by the fact that it involves every individual. Anybody who has a smart phone, who downloads an app or gets on their PC is engaged in this process.”

“A useful aspect of something like this simulation is it helps people visualize what is realistic and possible in some circumstances. The smart thing is to prepare now, to do the legislation now, to do the bipartisan work now, to do the intelligence work now, the foreign policy work,” said John McLaughlin, playing the role of Director of National Intelligence. “These are all very complicated things and we need to get started on them.”

I find it somewhat amusing that Chertoff suggests we ought to treat cyber-terrorism as seriously as we do WMD terrorism. DHS's record on preparing for WMD terrorism is really not that good. Since we don't really pay that much attention to WMDs other than counting the number of nukes that we own and that others own and how to use arms control to limit those numbers, I'm kind of hoping that we would pay more attention to cyber-security issues than WMD terrorism. Tim Stevens at Kings of War comments as to the cybersecurity-as-national-security drama that the Beltway pundits play this issue up as.

The results of the simulation – that the US is unprepared for a major sci-fi cyber scenario – were never in doubt. If such a televised exercise were carried out in the UK it would be interpreted as a very political attempt to exert pressure on the administration and critiqued on that basis, as would its War of the Worlds tone, replete with Wolf Blitzer moderating the action from the White House National Security Council control room. I don’t think non-US viewers can see the program online from CNN but YouTube is your friend, and it can also be seen in full here. Oddly, it was accompanied by a banner saying, “This Program Is A Simulated Exercise”. Surely, that should be “This Program Is About A Simulated Exercise”?

All this is to say that cybersecurity as an element of national security and a subject of political concern seem to be playing out very differently in the US and its main European ally. Whereas the UK is cautious in projecting concern into the public domain, some elements of the US hierarchy seem very determined to make this a public issue of the highest priority. The discourse is different, and is being mediated in starkly contrasting manner.

Fellow blogger George Smith has tracked the sensationalism over cyber-attacks for some time. The terms "cybersecurity" and "combating WMD" are routinely abused and exaggerated to suit people's agendas and political platforms. They're complex issues, and ought to be seriously addressed, but because real national security issues have the stage - like dealing with the Middle East, developing new nuclear weapons, addressing Chinese military expansion, little things - these people overplay the threat to get some attention. It's pretty pathetic, but it's the circus that is the military-industrial-political complex. 

UPDATE: Also see George Smith's latest post addressing this "Cyber Shock" story.

Criticizing Charlie Wilson

If you're interested in a slightly longer, refined version of MAJ Jeremy Kotkin's SWJ paper on Charlie Wilson and his actions in Afghanistan, download his paper.Download RIP Wilson v2-1 Keep in mind the author's overall intent here. MAJ Kotkin says:

...part of my job is to: 1) as much as possible, ensure commanders understand the entire system into which they are injecting power and what the likely results will be, 2) that if something seems too good to be true (at the strategic level) it usually is, and 3) maintain a policy-strategy match and the balance of ends, ways, and means using documented grand strategy in the development of military strategy. As I read NSC-68, Operation Cyclone fails to keep that balance and that match. Had someone played the devil’s advocate and bothered to tell leadership something they might not have wanted to hear, and done their job, someone would have told Carter and Brzezinski that their plan was full of holes and not let Rep. Wilson and the CIA run roughshod with US foreign policy.

I admire his willingness to put out an unpopular view and force us to debate the issue. It's a good discussion. My personal two cents, I think this is a case study for why George Kennan criticized the advocates of NSC-68 for its heavy emphasis on "military containment" as opposed to confronting the Soviet Union on political, economic, and diplomatic fronts.

UPDATE: The guys at MilPub debate young Kotkin's article.

Meet the Sims and Shoot Them

P.W. Singer, the author of the acclaimed book "Wired for War," says that we have to beware of the rising dark side of "militainment" - a.k.a. the idea that playing military first-person shooters will dull us to the real pain and struggle of warfare. 

The real danger of militainment, though, might be in how it risks changing the perceptions of war. "You lose an avatar; just reboot the game," is how Ken Robinson, the Special Forces veteran who produced Army 360, put it in Training & Simulation Journal. "In real life, you lose your guy; you've lost your guy. And then you've got to bury him, and then you've got to call his wife."

This is not just an issue for the military, but also for a broader public that has less and less to do with actual war. As Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, told Salon, "I've always believed when people participate in virtual violence, it makes the victims of violence become less empathetic and less real, and people become immune to the real pain people suffer." But for most parents, having to send their children to war is not something they worry about, even as it becomes something that more of them play at.

At the same time, the nexus of video gaming, war, and militainment is growing even fuzzier with the rapid growth in unmanned systems that use video-gaming technology to conduct actual military operations (the United States now has some 7,000 unmanned systems in its aerial inventory and another 12,000 on the ground). Indeed, the executive at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is becoming too fuzzy. "It's a Nintendo issue," he told me. "You get kids used to playing Grand Theft Auto moving on to armed robots. Are you going to feel guilt after killing someone?"

With more and more soldiers sitting at a robot's computer controls, experiencing no real danger other than carpal tunnel syndrome, the experience of war is not merely distanced from risk, but now fully disconnected from it. One Air Force officer speaking to Wired's Noah Shachtman about his experiences in the Iraq war, which he fought from a cubicle hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: "It's like a video game.... It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's fucking cool." 

Of all the people who comment about the hidden evils of first-person shooters, I would not have imagined P.W. Singer sinking to the level of "oh these bad computer games will make us all cold-blooded killers" meme. War has been a condition of humanity since Cain and Abel fought. Peace is that temporary lull that happens from time to time, allowing nations to rebuild their military power and prepare for the next war. Military-based computer games have only been around for two, maybe three decades as a form of casual entertainment. But somehow, they're responsible for now deadening our soldiers' sensitivity to the hell that is war?

Is Singer seriously saying that the reality of "Modern Warfare 2" is responsible for the mentality of aggressive Marines seeking out combat in Marja? Was "Command and Conquer 3" responsible for the US Army's disregard for discrete counterinsurgency tactics in 2005-2007? I can't understand how "Grand Theft Auto 4" hasn't turned me into a maniac while engaging the Beltway traffic. And how is it that "Borderlands" hasn't' caused me to grab my 9mm Baretta and just go crazy inside the Pentagon? I just don't know... 

Meine Frau disapproves of the popularity of computer games because they divert people from useful habits and practices, say like knitting sweaters and socks. Fortunately, she lets me get my frustrations out on the computer. But this line of logic? I think it's horseshit. People know the difference between reality and games. People who join the military out of some idealistic view that they may have gotten from a movie or a game quickly determine whether it's the right lifestyle for them. And no one's figured out a way to take the cruelty, suffering, and misery out of war yet. 

UPDATE:  See continued discussion here.

Cheney Hospitalized

So Dick Cheney had another heart attack... so sad. 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was hospitalized on Monday after experiencing chest pains, and his office said he was resting comfortably while doctors evaluated the situation.

Cheney, 69, who served as vice president from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush, has had a long history of heart ailments and has had an implanted heart defibrillator since 2001.

"Former Vice President Cheney is in George Washington Hospital after experiencing chest pains," his office said in a statement. "His doctors are evaluating the situation and he is resting comfortably."

Cheney has had four heart attacks, the most recent one shortly after the November 2000 election that saw him elected as vice president. That attack was described as mild and shortly thereafter he had the defibrillator implanted.

Wow, where's a death panel when you need one? Oh, I forgot, former political appointees get full government health benefits throughout their career and retirement. It's the other 30 million Americans who don't get this level of health care, and 45,000 Americans who died last year as the result of being uninsured.

Random Shots

Many want to lable Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, as a terrorist, but don't know whether Andrew Stack, the suicide pilot in Austin, qualifies. Can't we just call both of them violent loners? Or is it just something in the Texas water that makes them crazy?

"The Hurt Locker"" pulled in six BAFTA awards, including best film, best director, cinematography, editing, original screenplay and sound. Now we knew that the British film audience has good taste to pick "The Hurt Locker" over "Avatar" - will the Oscars recognize the same?

Surprising only Elaine Donnelly, a detailed study on gay service members in Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and other countries shows that there are no cases of undermined morale, large numbers of resignations, and no instances of increased harassment. Expect the Republican rebutal to be "yeah, well those guys spell defense with a 'c' - what do you expect?"

MAJ Jeremy Kotkin has written a controversial paper on former Rep. Charlie Wilson, in that on the eve of his death, Kotkin suggests that Wilson's good intentions to strike at the Soviet Union through the Afghan insurgents was a really bad idea, in hindsight. It's caused a flurry of discussion at SWJ and elsewhere, suggesting that Wilson, through his actions, was a major part of the development of the Taliban. I like his approach, especially connecting the NSC-68 "military containment" concept to Wilson's motivations. Others may disagree with his interpretation (and others will agree), but the issue is worthy of discussion.

Republican heads explode upon relevation thatinterrogations led by law enforcement officials actually does work better than torture. Added benefit, no pictures of degrading treatment of prisoners for al Qaeda to use as recruitment incentives. So will the right call General Petraeus a pussy for wanting to close Gitmo's prison camps?

Andrew Bacevich has a blog at World Affairs. If you like his sharp, hard-hitting commentary like I do, you'll stop by and read his posts.

R.I.P.  General Alexander Haig - they just don't make generals like him anymore.

Dead in Dubai

I've been reading the accounts of the mysterious Dubai murder of a Hamas official last week. It's an interesting story. I found the Israeli Foreign Minister's comments very droll.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Wednesday that there was no proof implicating the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency.

But Mr. Lieberman did not explicitly deny that the assassination of alleged Hamas arms procurer, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, was the work of the Mossad, saying in an interview with Israel's Army radio that Israel holds to a "policy of ambiguity" on discussing intelligence issues.

"I don't know why we take it for granted that it was Israel or Mossad that used those passports or the identities of that British citizen. It's just not correct. Why are we in such a hurry to take all kinds of tasks upon ourselves" Lieberman said.

What a card. Kenneth Payne says that it's "simply not cricket." It made me think of the old story about SecState Stimson killing the American Cipher Bureau, saying "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail." I'd like to say that I understand the Israeli government's point of view, but maybe they were a little arrogant in using false passports of dual-citizenship Israelis living in Europe. It's as if they said, so whatta you goin' to do about it? That kind of arrogance isn't helpful right now, guys.

"All Wars Are the Same"

The Blond Ghoul with whom media "news" shows seem to enjoy conversing suggests that there is no difference between the Iraq War and World War II. They're both wars, you see.

"Yeah, I think Iraq was an important war to fight, and like I say, I think we're enjoying the benefits of it now, thank you, George Bush!"

Besides the ridiculous simplification that Coulter makes here, the CRS projects the Iraq and Afghanstan War to top one trillion dollars by the end of this year. Added to the Bush tax cuts and recent economic downturn, President Obama got to inherit a staggering deficit that will take decades from which to recover. Then there's the 6300 dead coalition troops and 41,100 additional coalition casualties who have paid the price of fighting in the Middle East since 2001. As we watch Iraq turn into a Shia-dominated government that backs Iran's power plays in the region, condones continued sectarian violence, and (my favorite part) uses US foreign military sales to obtain M1 tanks and F16 planes (in addition to other "leave-behind" defense systems), we all get to say, "thank you, George Bush. May we have another?"

Closing the Amerithrax Case

Last Friday, the FBI announced that it was closing its case on the Amerithrax incident of 2001. They believe that Bruce Ivins, a government scientist at Fort Detrick, is in fact the perpetrator of the letters that were sent out of a New Jersey mailbox, causing much panic and several tens of billions of dollars of investment to develop specific countermeasures to any future incident. The FBI has a dedicated site to this issue here. From the NY Times:

The report disclosed for the first time the F.B.I.’s theory that Dr. Ivins embedded in the notes mailed with the anthrax a complex coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluding to two female former colleagues with whom he was obsessed.

The report described how an F.B.I. surveillance agent watched in 2007 as Dr. Ivins threw out a article and a book, Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” that could betray his interest in codes, coming out of his house in Frederick, Md., at 1 a.m. in long underwear to make certain the garbage truck had taken his trash.

Whether the voluminous documentation will convince skeptics about Dr. Ivins’s guilt was uncertain on Friday. Representative Rush D. Holt a New Jersey Democrat and a physicist who has sharply criticized the bureau’s work, said the case should not have been closed.

“Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,” Mr. Holt said, noting that the National Academy of Sciences was still studying the F.B.I.’s scientific work. He said the F.B.I. report laid out “barely a circumstantial case” that “would not, I think, stand up in court.”

Rep. Holt is talking out of his ass, of course, but we shouldn't hold his symptoms of being a politician against him. It's natural for Americans to distrust what the government tells us - we look for vast conspiracies against our common good, and are disappointed when it's only a "lone gunman." Others will criticize the FBI's scientific analyses of the anthrax spores, or that Ivins was a fall guy for the FBI's failure to find a perp quickly enough. But here's the thing that I think many people miss - analyzing the anthrax spores was a key step in figuring out whether this was a domestic incident or a foreign incident, and it wasn't just DOJ-connected forensic labs doing the work, it was a host of DOD and other federal agencies who were performing the analyses. Once the possibilities were narrowed down, then it was just a matter of traditional law enforcement practice to focus on on a few suspects.

Ivins had access to the biological material, he had a motive (so to speak - more on this later), and the opportunity to mail the letters. The envelopes came from the Maryland/Virginia area, the language in the letters was similar to writings of Ivins, he undertook suspicious behavior, and he had mental issues. He was not a well man, and unfortunately, it seems that we didn't have a solid screening process for researchers using BW material as we do for CW material (that's been corrected, I think).

I had to read the motives section carefully before I understood it. The FBI had reason to suspect that Ivins sent out the anthrax:

Based on his e-mails to two former colleagues (hereinafter “Former Colleague #1 and Former Colleague #2), and from his own statements to investigators, it is clear that by the summer of 2001, Dr. Ivins was under an extraordinary amount of stress in his professional life. The anthrax vaccine research program that Dr. Ivins had invested essentially his entire career of more than 20 years was in jeopardy of failure. The anthrax vaccine with which he was assisting was failing to meet potency standards and, absent some major breakthrough, may have been eliminated. Also, the military anthrax vaccine, and Dr. Ivins, in particular, were the subject of increasingly vocal criticism by those who associated the vaccine with “Gulf War Syndrome.” Finally, the rPA, or Next Generation Anthrax Vaccine, on which he was also working, had run its course at USAMRIID, leaving him potentially without anthrax research to do. According to Former Colleague #1 and others, Dr. Ivins not only took great pride in his work, but also he could not stand to be criticized. Under extreme pressure from so many different assaults on his career and life’s work, Dr. Ivins had a motive to commit the crime.

I think some of it needs to be explained better. Before 1996, the DOD's entire anthrax vaccine production came from one plant in Lansing, Michigan, owned by the Michigan Department of Public Health. Because of the severe shortfalls witnessed in the Persian Gulf War (1991), the DOD wanted to produce the vaccine in a greater amount so that the total force would be protected from the number 1 BW threat in the world prior to shipping out. A company called BioPort bought the facility, which is now "Emergent BioSolutions." The problem was that BioPort needed to upgrade the 1970s-era facility to meet the DOD requirement, and it needed FDA approval to do that. The FDA found some problems that would take years and millions of dollars to correct.

So BioPort started producing the vaccine anyway, because DOD had only one source to get any anthrax vaccine - but it was "quarantined" until the FDA approved the lots. In the meantime, the DOD was running out of the older MDPH-produced vaccine lots, and there was all this "Gulf War illness" controversy. Ivins evidently felt pressure because the public trust in "his" anthrax vaccine was evaporating, and that his current work on a next generation anthrax vaccine was in jeopardy. He didn't want to do other biological research, he viewed himself as "an anthrax researcher." So he decided to create an incident that would force people to take his work seriously.

I want to stress two things here: first of all, and fundamentally, this decision of Ivins - if it was based on his insecurity and pride over his work - was not a rational one. He had no reason to believe that his work was in jeopardy. Yes, BioPort had some initial technical issues in getting FDA approval (and for the record, it did get FDA approval for production and the quarantined lots were released for use), but there was literally no other source of vaccine available. There were significant demands by other nations and other federal agencies for BioPort's limited stocks (especially in 2002-2003), let alone the prime contract to support the DOD demand for vaccine for all of its military units and research laboratories.

There was a delay, yes, there was scrutiny (some of it unwarranted), yes, but there was no chance that BioPort was going to be shut down or that all of the agencies and nations looking for anthrax vaccine were going to accept Cipro as the answer. This was a guaranteed cash cow, which is why BioPort had lots of interested investors watching as the DOD paid higher and higher per-unit costs for anthrax as a result of these delays and modernization efforts at the plant. Ivins was in a very safe area of military medical research, very important and very necessary for combat forces to fight and survive in a CBRN threat environment.

Second, obviously Ivins is dead and isn't going to confirm what his motive was or if he had assistance or if there's a one-armed man who really did it but pinned it on Ivins. It falls to traditional law enforcement practices to put all of the pieces together.

In its early stages, despite the enormous amount of evidence gathered through traditional law enforcement techniques, limitations on scientific methods prevented law enforcement from determining who was responsible for the attacks. Eventually, traditional law enforcement techniques were combined with groundbreaking scientific analysis that was developed specifically for the case to trace the anthrax used in the attacks to a particular flask of material. By 2007, investigators conclusively determined that a single spore-batch created and maintained by Dr. Bruce E. Ivins at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (“USAMRIID”) was the parent material for the letter spores. An intensive investigation of individuals with access to that material ensued. Evidence developed from that investigation established that Dr. Ivins, alone, mailed the anthrax letters.

Yes, the FBI could have run this investigation better, and yes, they still don't "get" CBRN terrorism, but they're getting better at understanding it. But this is why we let law enforcement run terrorism issues, because in the end, they have to resolve who did what, when and where. It's not up to the military to determine who was behind the Amerithrax incident or any future terrorism incident. It's the military's job to watch for indications of such activity, to make sure that our military service personnel can survive such attacks, and to use lethal force to take out terrorists who are attacking us when it's in a military context. It's up to the law enforcement community to prevent such incidents (ideally), to figure out how it happened, and to make the solid case that particular individuals are the ones who did it. I think the FBI got the right man.

Biden: Nukes Shall Make Us Free

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden gave a long speech explaining why increasing the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration to rebuild two vital facilities is actually going to help us execute a nonproliferation agenda better. 

Capabilities like an adaptive missile defense shield, conventional warheads with worldwide reach, and others that we are developing enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, as other nuclear powers join us in drawing down. With these modern capabilities, even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.

As we’ve said many times, the spread of nuclear weapons is the greatest threat facing our country. 

That is why we are working both to stop their proliferation and eventually to eliminate them. Until that day comes, though, we will do everything necessary to maintain our arsenal.
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That’s why earlier this month we announced a new budget that reverses the last decade’s dangerous decline. 

It devotes $7 billion to maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.  To put that in perspective, that’s $624 million more than Congress approved last year—and an increase of $5 billion over the next five years.  Even in these tight fiscal times, we will commit the resources our security requires.

This investment is not only consistent with our nonproliferation agenda; it is essential to it.   Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security.  As our conventional capabilities improve, we will continue to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.

Responsible disarmament requires versatile specialists to manage it. 

The skilled technicians who look after our arsenal today are the ones who will safely dismantle it tomorrow.

And chemists who understand how plutonium ages also develop forensics to track missing nuclear material and catch those trafficking in it.   

The funny thing about the Obama administration's position is how centrist it is. The right will hate it because he's reducing the number of nuclear weapons and building up nonproliferation activities. That's not going to lead to bombing Iran. The left will hate it because he's not reducing nuclear weapons fast enough and he's building up the nuclear weapons labs, when there are reports about our nuclear weapons being in pretty good shape.

But it's very responsible to both preserve the intellectual capital and infrastructure of the US nuclear weapons program as long as other nations have nuclear weapons. And as VP Biden said, as long as they do, so will we. 

Worrying About Iranian Nukes - Again

 With the IAEA's report last week about Iran's attempts to enrich uranium, it's time for the worry-warts to come out and talk about when we need to attack Iran to stop another Muslim bomb from coming...

The IAEA report said that Iran has transferred its entire known stockpile of low enriched uranium — about 2,000 kilograms — from its main enrichment facility at Natanz to another facility at Natanz where Iran began to enrich uranium to a higher grade earlier this month. [...]

Iran’s move of its stockpile of low enriched uranium also puzzled the senior administration official, who noted that the above-ground facility currently only has equipment that enables Iran to produce a small amount of higher enriched uranium a day — about 100 grams worth, or 3 kilograms a month. 

At that rate, the official said, it would take Iran five or six years to produce enough higher enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, should they choose to. 

Why people keep pissing themselves over the idea of Iran owning a nuke is beyond me. One bomb not an arsenal. They can't launch it that far from Iran without risking nuclear retaliation, and they're smarter than that. I think their leadership just enjoys watching the West twist in the wind over every little nuance of their nuclear program. The drama isn't worth the worry. We have time to work out a plan.

President Obama has been much criticised for being ineffectual in foreign policy, as he was for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize before having achieved anything. But he has actually set up a potentially powerful trap both for Iran and for P5 members, such as China, that are reluctant to condemn Iran. He has done this by setting up two summits, in April and May respectively, to discuss nuclear security and to review the NPT — exactly the sort of initiative that was praised by the Nobel prize committee. These will, or should, put both Iran and China on some sort of spot.

Before then, a decision on tightening sanctions is likely to have to be made. Pushing for quick, tough sanctions would be pointless: they wouldn’t work, they risk strengthening the regime, and China might well block them. But a slower squeeze on Iran, playing for time until the nuclear summits but making a political point, would be more worthwhile.

So let's hold off from "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" songs. See Fareed Zakaria's op-ed for a sane view of this topic.

Pulsers Take to Talk Radio

If you have Michael Savage expressing support for your cause, then you might just be a psychotic nut-case.

Hat tip to George Smith.

I am a little surprised at Sharon Weinberger's article in Foreign Policy titled "The Boogeyman Bomb." In her discussion about the polarized politics over the EMP threat, I thought she would at least mention the obvious - that the right-wingers use EMP as their excuse to further their position on a national missile defense program. It's a pretty obvious condition.

Federation A-Team