Have a nice Labor Day weekend

The amazing - and continuing - drop in crime in US

Economist story about how "big city" PDs around US using Compstat (a data management system that allows crime stats to be worked in-depth for deeper understanding and response patterns) and how most cops feel like it's been a huge tool in the plummenting of crime rates across the US for the past 20 years - a trend that is absolutely amazing.

Yes, I know some think "three strikes and you're out" accomplished much, but many professionals say the key is big data, effectively wielded through better policing tactics.

Other theories abound, but to me, this is a sign of what happens when big data is worked: the whole complexity-out-of-control meme just isn't true.  The growth of networks is fundamentally freeing - not enslaving, and it offers more control over environments - not less.

Point being, if you believe that America is avatar of modern globalization, this is proof that growing connections and technology handles growing complexity much better than we - in our enduring fears - imagine.

Orwell continues to be one of the most stunningly incorrect futurists, but this is the plight of all dystopians.

(Busy)

Speaking at banking conference in Colorado Springs.

Fascinating article on GM-SAIC partnership in China

From WSJ.

The USG could learn much from GM on this:  the Detroit automaker sought out SAIC about 15 years ago, which is when the US should have made its moves as well.  They embraced genuine partnership with the Chinese automaker, and worked hard to bring it up to global standards.  In the process, GM became the biggest foreign player in China's exploding auto market.

But yeah, now SAIC wants to go global with GM and somewhat on its own at the same time, and that's where the relationship gets trickier.

But my point is, GM has the right problems to manage right now, while the USG is still stuck in a host of aging issues with Beijing.

As the piece says, "SAIC wants more from its partnership with GM; GM has yet to decide how far it will go."

The great quote from GM chief exec Dan Akerson:

It's kind of like a marriage.  We have a good and viable relationship and partnership.  But to make it work, you have to have needs on both sides of the table, not just wants.

That, in a nutshell, is the big constraint on Washington's approach to Beijing:  we constantly focus on our wants and denigrate China's needs.

Would that national security strategists had the breadth of vision that GM has so ably demonstrated in this long-term engagement.

Again, that's where the US and China should be:  we facilitated China's rise and then got scared right when we should have moved closer in.

The latest US missile defense announcement re: Asia

What to say?  WSJ says US is planning yet another "major expansion of missile defenses" in Asia.

The excuse continues to be North Korea, but that's a lot of money for just the DPRK.

"The focus of our rhetoric is North Korea," said Steven Hildreth, a missile-defense expert with the Congressional Research Service . . . "The reality is that we're also looking longer term at the elephant in the room, which is China."

As usual, I ask you to consider the reverse scenario:  China placing missile defense systems around the perimeter of the United States so it could maintain "access" for its carriers and their air wings.  Imagine the Congressional hearings on that one.

But we are only being prudent while the Chinese are being aggressive.  After all, it's East Asia, where the U.S. military has long ruled as de facto Leviathan.  We did this so powers could rise peacefully - through economics, which China most certainly has (how many wars has China fought since 1980 versus the United States?), but China grows it's military quite a bit, even as observers might note just how much bigger the US defense budget has become over the same time period (let's say the US has increased its budget by $500m since 1990 and China has probably jacked its budget up by about $125).

From Wikipedia

Yes, no doubt that China is spending plenty to make it hard for the US to get in close, and that worries its neighbors.

But you really have to ask, is this an arms race we can expect to afford - much less win?  Their neighborhood: we can plant plenty of defense systems, they can stock up on plenty more missiles, but what is the end-point here?

We spent decades encouraging the peaceful rise of Asia writ large, and now we flood the place with weaponry? Triggering a race dynamic with China?

Makes you wonder where our mil-mil could be if not for the Taiwan situation holding it back all these years.

The irony: as America executes "strategic pivot" to contain Chinese military, the US economy continues to open up to Chinese FDI

FT p. 1 story: "US opens up to Chinese takeovers with record figures for M&A deals."

Almost $8b of deals announced so far for this year.  Biggest is Dalian Wanda buying my favorite movie theater chain from my college years - AMC Entertainment.  Next is a Sinopec purchase of a stake in Devon Energy.

Best year of Chinese FDI to date is $8.9b, so 2012 likely to set new record.

Why this matters: the more China buys into the US economy, the harder it gets for Washington to treat it as the military "other," because stakeholders accumulate inside the US - in addition to all those who export to China.  All these jobs add up.

China's looming populist problem

It's right out of 1880s America:

In China, less than 1% of households control more than 70% of private financial wealth.

So noteth the WSJ.

In the US today, we're talking somewhere between 40 and 45 percent.

Globally, says, John Bussey in the WSJ, the number is "nearly 40%," so America's not much off the norm.

But here's the biggest problem for China: a great deal of the wealth is connected to people with political positions (aka, the princelings like Bo Xilai and his now imprisoned wife).  In the US, if you want to get rich, you need to stay out of government (or get rich before you go in, aka, the "fuck you money" that allows you to behave yourself while in power and quit on principle if need be).

For China to truly advance and become a genuine competitive threat, the political system has to decide to divorce wealth from political power.  Otherwise we're looking at decay and decline and a very short "Chinese century."

US hit that moment and launched itself into a multi-decade progressive era that cleaned up a lot of things but government most of all.

As I have said many times, the world needs a small army of Teddy Roosevelts right now - but China most of all.

Swing states tint red, but not in the way you think

 Percentage tilt by presidential elections 1992-2008

You know the old bit about how blue states tend to pay more taxes into Washington than red states, while red states tend to receive more USG tax dollars? Well, the WSJ has another bit like that in a recent editorial, pointing out that "swing elections states are among America's top exporters."

It starts out by stating:

Democrats and Republicans don't agree on much in this polarizing election year, but one exception is trade with China. Nearly every politician seems eager to claim on the stump that the scheming Asian giant is hurting U.S. living standards.

Then it references some research from the U.S.-China Business Council (and here I quote from that site) that says:

Congressional districts all over the country are seeing exports to China outpace exports to the rest of the world according to the US-China Business Council's (USCBC) annual US Congressional District Exports to China report. Out of 435 congressional districts, 420 districts had higher growth in exports to China in 2011 than they did to other markets around the globe.

The Council then cleverly notes that "diverse" states (read, swing states) tend to do quite well on this scale.

Back to the WSJ:

Railing against imported Chinese goods is especially shortsighted given that so many of America's own exports are components for the products the U.S. eventually imports again.

Besides the manufacturing, there's also the reality that "roughly 55 cents of every dollar that Americans spend on 'Made in China' products goes to the Americans who design, ship and market those products."

The need to demonize foreigners has long been a staple of American populism (hardly making us unique). Read your Benjamin Friedman (Moral Consequences of Economic Growth): Americans turn xenophobic every time middle-class wages stagnate.

But, of course, it doesn't stop there.  As we see with the AirSea Battle Concept, the Pentagon is also hoping to protect its money in this era of tense populism, and it naturally turns to China as well.  Long ago it was Quemoy and Matsu.  Now, we'll arm up East Asia to fight with China over even tinier rocks - all over the money to be made in the seabed below.

Trust me, in the end, it's always about the money.

DoD embracing crowd-sourcing more and more

From a WSJ story of a few days back:

A branch of the Pentagon is looking into whether a bunch of volunteers could design a better amphibious vehicle for the Marines than a defense contractor.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, is preparing to assess whether crowdsourcing, a freewheeling collaborative method sometimes used to develop software, can be an effective means of designing military equipment.

The U.S. military hopes crowdsourcing could help counter the enormous costs and long delays that often dog the development of new weaponry and vehicles.

Darpa aims to use crowdsourcing to tap more brainpower than the traditional defense-contractor route . . .

That dovetails with the positive response that Wikistrat has recently received from the Defense Department. Facing an era of wanting to do as much or more with far fewer resources, DoD is proving to be very receptive to the Wikistrat pitch.  It's all about not relying on the same small crowd of contractors and working to get up to globalization speed, because that's the velocity at which all our enemies act and events unfold.

Some common sense on S. China Sea dispute, where US China hawks are losing all perspective

I've known Doug Paal for many years now (going back to my early Naval War College days), and he's an eminently sensible fellow with a huge background in Chinese affairs.

Some key bits from a Diplomat piece just published:

The South China Sea presents complicated issues of evolving international law, historic but ill-defined claims, a rush to grab declining fish stocks, and competition to tap oil and gas reserves. Beijing’s much discussed “nine-dashed line,” that purports to give China a claim on about 80 percent of the South China Sea and its territories, used to be an eleven-dashed line. Two dashes separating Chinese and Vietnamese claims were resolved through bilateral negotiations years ago. This suggests that the remaining nine dashes are equally negotiable. But China rigidly refuses to clarify the basis for its claims, whether they are based on the accepted international law of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) or the less widely accepted historical assertions. Beijing’s refusal to choose suggests it wants to maximize its legal and political leverage, even as the growth of its military and maritime assets gains physical leverage over its weaker neighbors.

Beijing is not alone. Hanoi has leased oil exploration blocks in contested waters, and Manila is trying the same. Their colonial occupations left a discontinuous record of historic claims, inclining them to rely more on UNCLOS to manage disputed resources. They eagerly encourage American weight thrown onto their side of the competition with China for free.

This is where the United States needs to move with caution and only after thinking many steps ahead . . . 

Point being, while China is clearly strong-arming and pushing its claims even more so than others, it is not the only country rattling sabers and pushing boundaries.  

Now, by singling Beijing out for criticism, but not the others, Chinese observers believe the United States has taken sides against China. This has undermined the U.S. assertions of a principled approach based on international law by appearing not to be impartial.

U.S. direct interests in the South China Sea are not unlimited . . .

The Obama Administration has clearly decided to champion this cause as a means of "standing up" to China, thus raising the "losing of face" dynamics, which means, instead of our usual approach of trying to cool things down, we've decided to purposefully heat things up.  Why?  A lot of Washington political and budgetary interests are served by this choice - just like in Beijing.

Today, the South China Sea is not at the “Sudetenland” moment of the twenty-first century, which calls for standing up to aggression and the rejection of appeasement. China has not militarized its foreign policy and does not appear equipped to do so for a long time. Its neighbors are not supine, and they show on occasion, when needed, that they are able to coalesce against Chinese actions that they judge as going too far. At the same time, China and those neighbors have more going constructively in trade, investment, and other relations with each other than is at risk in this dispute.

This suggests the makings of a manageable situation, even if it remains impossible to resolve for years to come. Different Asian societies are quite accustomed to living with unresolved disputes, often for centuries.

No kidding.  There are numerous missing peace treaties in Asia, which is part of this problem of ill-defined territorial boundaries, but leapfrogging from that reality to a rerun of WWII is hyperbole of the worst (meaning unthinking) sort. Frankly, you know your counterparty in any argument has run out of ammo whenever they pull out Hitler.

A very sensible piece worth reading.  Might just keep you off the budgetary gravy train that is AirSea Battle Concept.

Packers-Browns game Thursday night

Took Vonne Mei.  She's wearing Starks' actual back-up jersey for the Super Bowl.  He gave it to his college (Buffalo) and we got it on an online auction. It is bizarrely tailored for a tight fit.  I could barely get it on myself, so I now understand why staff have to pull them on players.  It comes with all sorts of tightening bands you don't find on the official replicas, so it's fascinating to look over.  Starks signed one of the back 4s.

We left Indy about 7pm and got to the seats a solid hour beforehand, so I could stare at all the construction above us (the new upper deck sections that effectively ends the pure bowl status of Lambeau but adds 6,700 seats, which may increase the Barnett total because my Mom is very close to the top of the waiting list (collectively, my Mom, brother Andy and I now possess 6 seats x 2 regular and 1 preseason game)).  We drove back to just south of Chicago before crashing in a cheap hotel around 4am Friday (EDT). It was quite the trek.  Naturally, I had to limit myself to Sprite.

My brother Andy came over and shot this as halftime.

My sense of the additions:  

• We now have real speakers loaded right behind our upper-bowl section, so the sound is superb on that score now.
• The new high-def screens are awesome.  No sense in us watching the closer-in one because the angle distorts the clarity, but distant one is so good you almost catch yourself watching it versus the field (which would be stupid, because you miss all the defensive backfield info)
• The closing in of the bowl will make field goals a lot easier.  It also cuts down on what used to be plenty of wind in the open south end, where my seats are.
• Now, I must admit, I feel like my two seats are in a real pro stadium versus on top of a college-style big bowl (Lambeau is the only bowl in the NFL, and the only one with benches versus real seats). Bit sad because now when I go out on the terrace behind our seats, it's no longer an open-air terrace but semi-enclosed. I used to feel on top of the world (or at least Green Bay) before. Then again, there will be actual shelter from the rain/snow/etc back there now.
• Us "bowlers" will be offered the right to move our existing seats up to the new sections.  The tradeoff: will be colder up there, but also roofed.  Same basic view for me, just higher. Up there you'll have real seats and I could sit side-by-side with my other seat instead of right behind it like now. Downsides: my front seat now sits in row 1 at end of row, so my kids get an unobstructed view.  If we go topside, I'd need some assurance that would still work via sharper incline (likely). Of course, they will only grow in height . . .
• Lambeau clearly upgraded the food, which is good, because it has sucked bad for years.  Having gone to a good half-dozen other stadiums over the past 2-3 years, that much was evident.

I have the Bears Thursday game in early September, right after a Madison speech that afternoon.  Taking an old college roommate to that one because I can't manage one of my kids due to a preceding speech in Denver.  So I make that up to my son Jerry with 8th row seats for Saints game in late Sept. Will take older son to Cards in Nov.

Thursday night's showing was dreadful.  I don't think we have to fret over a perfect season possibility this year! I think the key is to pray for A-Rod's health, because we are looking like a Colts team under Peyton, right down to the Curtis Painter-type backup in Graham Harrell.

Yikes!

For the Record: Excerpt from "Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of the Leaderless Resistance"

Book is by George Michael of Air War College.  I wrote the following blurb for the backcover:

As globalization continues to process a lot of populist anger over injustices - both perceived and real - stemming from its rapid expansion into traditional cultures, the world is going to suffer a lot more of the 'leaderless' terrorism that Michael explores in this wonderfully evenhanded book.  Those hunting for solutions - in addition to the 'bad guys' - would do well to add this to their reading list.

--Thomas P.M. Barnett, Chief Analyst, Wikistrat

In the conclusion, after a section on PLA Colonels Qiao Lian's and Wang Xiangsui's book, Unrestricted Warfare, Michael offers a summary of my thinking:

Global Integration

In a sense, Qiao and Wang's advocacy of unrestricted warfare on multiple dimensions is similar to Thomas P.M. Barnett's notion of "war within the context of everything else." A former Pentagon defense analyst, Barnett argues that in the contemporary world security must encompass several different dimensions, including economics, politics, trade, international law, and, most important, connectivity. His major study, The Pentagon's New Map, advanced a grand strategy for the United States. In Barnett's scheme, the world is divided into two broad regions.  Countries in the "Functioning Core" are integrated into a world system and operate under "rule sets." They arbitrate their differences through international bodies, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and are less likely to go to war against other countries in the core.[PNM] In contrast, countries in the "Non-Integrating Gap" do not follow these rule sets and are the setting for most of the problems that bedevil the world today.

The real enemy, according to Barnett, is disconnectedness, the separation of people - especially globally. Life in the Gap is, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, poor, nasty, short, and brutal, he says.[PNM] An unabashed economic determinist, he believes that people integrated into the global economy are far less likely to succumb to radicalism. As he puts it, the only viable exit strategy for the US military in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to leave those countries with more jobs than when the operations began.[GP & Zakaria's Post-American World]  With no resevoir of discontent, extremist and terrorist groups will find few recruits and pose no existential challenge to the system. Although Muslim rage may be fueled by issues such as the status of the Palestinians and US foreign policy, Barnett argues that it really stems from the Middle East being one of the most disconnected parts of the world. In short, Barnett's long-term strategic goal is the integration of all into the global economy, to drain the resevoir for international terrorism. Multilateral efforts could eliminate the Gap altogether, making globalization truly global.[PNM] Barnett sees globalization as inevitable, because it is the ultimate "non-zero-sum game" - meaning that all sides win.  The entire world will benefit from greater connectedness, he believes, through economic growth and higher standards of living.[BFA]

Lending credence to Barnett's thesis, researchers at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland have discovered that countries that are more tightly integrated into the global economy experience less instability.[Ted Gurr edited volume Peace and Conflict 2008]  Nearly 80 percent of all international crises in the post-Cold War era have involved at least one unstable or failing state.[Peace and Conflict 2008] The physical security of the United States is now threatned not so much by the strenth of other states, but by their weakness, since weak and failed states often serve as sanctuaries for transnational terrorist groups.[PNM & Takeyh/Gvosdev cite]  Despite current global problems, Barnett is optimistic about the future and believes that the terrorist threat can be managed effectively:

I don't see the Salafist threat as particularly profound. It has not done well, particularly in the last several years by my calculations . . . I see them more as a friction. I expect to see more of its as globalization more extensively penetrates the Middle East ast a much faster pace. The Salafists are a response to globalization, a reflection . . .

If we pursue the strategy [of expanding "the core" and shrinking "the Gap"], I don't see how it could fail. If we pursue the strategy, then we can participate in it more and we can shape the process and shape the regimes and the global pillars that arise from the process [May 2008 interview by Michael]

According to Barnett, economics got ahead of politics during the 1990s, and technology got ahead of security, causing the world to become too connected too quickly.[PNM] New technology had led to the emergence of "superempowered individuals," who Barnett believes have the potential to wreak unprecedented damage or "system perturbation."[Friedman's Lexus & Olive Tree, GP] Although the United States cannot be defeated at the nation-state level, Barnett points out that it can still be humbled and even defeated at a system level if the US government is induced to disengage from the Middle East, through acts of terrorism in the style of 9/11.[PNM] Another terrorist attack on that scale could further destabilize financial markets and have a negative ripple effect throughout the economy. Nevertheless, he believes that modern societies have advanced precisely because they have mastered network complexity, usually in response to disasters and scandals that have periodically perturbed their systems and exposed vulnerabilities.[GP]

The encroaching process of globalization, Barnett avers, will undoubtedly engender opposition from those who feel threatened with a loss of identity and culture. The goal of such actors is a "civilizational apartheid" - removal of their areas from the process of globalization. In some ways, though, greater connectivity could increase the number of terrorists. For instance, inasmuch as the "virtual umma" is built on the Internet, increasing access to the medium would increase the potential to radicalize a large number of disaffected Muslims.[irregular warfare book cite]

Despite disruptions along the way, Barnett believes that globalization, if managed effectivey, is a force for good that improves the life conditions of many people. In order for his grand strategy to become a reality, the United States must take a leading role, with other "great powers" pitching in.[GP] Some observers, through, presage an end to US hegemony. What is more, some fear that centrifugal forces could actually tear the United States apart.[pages 158-60]

Michael follows that segue with a section on Sam Huntington, Pat Buchanan, William Lind, Martin van Creveld and Robert Kaplan entitled "Fragmentation."

The next section is called "The Viability of Leaderless Resistance," and here's the last bit referencing my stuff:

Societal fragmentation could increase the frequency of small-scale violence and the prevalence of lone wolf terrorism. But some observers believe the threat of leaderless resistance is overstated. Thomas Barnett finds the discussion about fourth-generation and fifth-generation warfare to be overwrought, depicting, as they sometimes do, a future in which Mad Max-like warriors roam a wasteland. Far from seeing al Qaeda as winning, Barnett sees a movement in retreat, as time and time again it has shifted its center of graveity from one locale to another in response to evictions and military reprisals. Likewise, he see little future for terrorism in "the core." As he points out, terrorism in core countries tends to be sporadic and unsupported by the populace. Perpetrators are often disaffected loners, such as Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, who "we see shuffling in orange jump suits and chains . . .  on their way to a court appearance." Rather than representing a "political storm," they become a social nuisance. This is in contrast to terrorists in the Gap who often thrive in a "wild frontier" environment.[BFA] [pages 165-66]

A pretty fair capture of what I wrote, although I always get this thing where my writings on connectivity leading to peace are countered with the notion (cited from others) that initial connectivity can actually lead to a rise in instability, which is, of course, a point I made ad naseum in my three books. After all, I called it The Pentagon's New Map, indicating that I argued globalization's spread would map out where conflict is going to occur.

Michael did a fair job of laying out my grand strategic vision while making clear that globalization's spread is inevitable all on its own at this point ["unabashed economic determinist . . . Barnett sees globalization as inevitable ..."], whether or not the US leads.  Too often my emphasis on what the US should do gets translated as "defeat the US and defeat globalization," which, as I note often in my writings, I don't believe is possible at this point in history, in large part because it's Asia that now leads in globalization's expansion. Where I argue the US role is crucial comes in how that inevitable globalization of globalization unfolds - i.e., how much violence is attached to that process and what are the pol-mil outcomes.

Naturally, opponents to President Obama's "strategic pivot" to East Asia are going to complain that the US is "abandoning" the Middle East, thus securing the radical Islamist "win" on some level (per my description above), but, as I have written time and again, I don't buy that one bit.  I see the "pivot" as an ass-covering drill by the Democrat Obama intent on closing down Bush's wars (along with a certain indulgence of US populism that blames a lot of America's current woes on "dastardly" China's rise), as well as a budget-floor-locating drill by the Pentagon eager to cut back on the Green (Army, Marines) and favor the big-war Blue (Air Force, Navy) that was "unfairly" penalized by the Long War and Bush's far-too-delayed embrace of COIN. True to form, globalization keeps pulling America's attention back to the Middle East in the form of the Arab Spring.

In short, our attention is pulled to wherever globalization's continued expansion hits traditional cultures not quite ready for it. East Asia gets a certain amount of our attention due to the deficit of regional integration schemes there, but these are not issues to be settled by great-power war - as much as plenty inside the Pentagon dream of such nasty business there.  But growing pains are growing pains, so East Asia gives us enough "crisis" to attract our attention even as other developing parts of the world are where the sub- and transnational action are at.

Having said all that, I did mean what I said in the blurb: I do think globalization's continued expansion gets you more leaderless terrorist activity, not so much because they're superempowered (because we all are), but because that's all that's left as globalization penetrates and absorbs the remaining traditional cultures (on view right now with the Arab Spring and in Africa's widespread economic boom and the socio-economic churn created by that). 

Of course, so long as the US offers the mentally ill easy access to military-grade automatic weaponry and ammunition, we'll have things like the Aurora shooting, which is plenty scary. The ease of doing that in our society eventually has to attract the attention of more organized foreign terror groups along the lines of the Mumbai incident.  I expect that to happen at some point, forcing the US and the West in general down some of the same domestic security paths that Israel long ago adopted (as did the UK in response to the IRA). This adjustment will be uncomfortable, but not life changing.  And it will have no impact whatsoever on globalization's continued advance. It will simply be the price of America's grand strategic success in spreading globalization these past seven decades - along with a sad reflection of our societal love of guns and violence.

Chart of the Day: Water and Food in Mideast

Close the Straits of Hormuz, says the WSJ, and you shut down more than oil flow.  Ninety percent of food in the PG is imported.

Water is perhaps the most complex of the region's resource-security puzzles.  Gulf countries have some fo the lowest rainfall rates and smallest water resources in the world.  Gulf countries satisfy demand by desalinating seawater, but that leaves them vulnerable if their desalination plants malfunction or are attacked.

When - and why - GMOs will attract a lot less criticism/resistance

WAPO story on how a few select US farmers are waiting on pins and needles to see how a planting of GMO corn ultimately handles the worst US drought in half a century - one that costs the US economy about $18B just after last year's TX-centric drought cost $8B.

In western Kansas, the corn looks unsalvageable. The landscape is rife with curled brown leaves, an unmistakable sign of severe drought.

Yet beneath those wilted leaves, some of the corn shows promise. The kernels have held up surprisingly well in a few places given this summer’s swelter. At hundreds of sites across the Great Plains, seed companies such as Monsanto and Pioneer are testing a slew of corn varieties engineered to withstand drought. As the harvest approaches, they’re anxious to see the results . . . farmers are more interested than ever in innovations that could make crops more resilient. That includes improved farming practices, better plant-breeding techniques and even — most controversially — genetic engineering . . . “I’ve been surprised so far. The plants are responding well,” said Clay Scott, a Kansas farmer who planted two plots of Monsanto’s genetically engineered DroughtGard Hybrids among his 3,000 acres of corn. The experimental strain, which carries a gene that helps it draw water more gradually from the soil, is slated for wider release in 2013. “The ear size, kernel counts, the ear weights look good,” Scott said. But, he cautioned, “pretty corn doesn’t always result in yield.”

For Scott, who lives in a region prone to dry spells, where irrigation water from the nearby Ogallala Aquifer needs to be conserved, these crops could prove indispensable.

It’s a pitched battle between nature and human ingenuity that will only grow more difficult. Earth’s population has soared past 7 billion. Climate models suggest that drought will become more frequent in North America. Water will become increasingly precious. Feeding the world will require wringing as much food as possible from every last drop of water.

It’s far from assured that human ingenuity will win out.

Human greed will win out.  US farmers and the US economy will want that income in order to exploit the wider human greed for better and longer lives through improved nutrient and caloric intake.

Yes, as the story points out, GMOs are only part of the equation.  There are plenty of tactics that improve yields and make crops more resistant to drought - but water is water, and climate change is undeniably here (to all but those who abandon facts for faith).

In the future, GMOs will constitute a clear margin between life and death.

Fascinating achievement of US foreign policy: Iraq outcranks Iran on oil

You have to credit Bush the Elder on the northern NFZ after Desert Storm because that set in motion the KRG we know today.  You also credit Bush on the surge and Obama on the latest sanctions strategy, because it's collectively a significant restructuring of the correlation of forces in the region - a dynamic obviously driven by the ability to export oil (FT says Iran's exports = 1/2 gov revenue and 80% of total export value).  Iraq hasn't outproduced Iran since their mutual war in the late 1980s.

Iraq dreams of 12mb by 2017, but the industry pegs 4.5mb as more realistic, according to the article.

By December, analysts say, iraq will have earned more selling its oil than Iran for the first time since Saddam Huessein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

All this is to remind of Zhou Enlai's response to a question concerning his opinion of the French Revolution: "Too early to say."

China's worker-to-retiree ratio will be as bad as West's come 2050

Fascinating chart.  When you run the numbers globally, the worker-to-retiree ratio was 12 to 1 in 1950 and 9 to 1 in 2000.  But when you jump ahead to 2050, it's down globally to 5 to 1.

But then you note the distinctions:

• Old Core West is 2 to 1
• New Core East and South is 5 to 1
• Gap is still 10 to 1.

Now, you look at that and think China's doing okay, but as my research into the mean age by nation shows, China moves from the mid-age cohort (where it exists with US now at about 36 years old) to the old-age cohort (Russia, Europe, Japan) by 2050, when China's mean age will be 47-48 years old and the US will still be just under 40 years old (thanks to higher birth rate and immigration).

Well, this chart confirms how unique China is among the New Core "risers" just as the US is unique among the Old Core great powers.

Among the Old Core powers, the US simply doesn't age like the rest:  by 2050, the US mean age is still a hair below 40 while the rest are all deep into the 40s.

And among the New Core powers, China will suffer a PSR (potential support ratio) come 2050 that's more in line with the Old Core's 2-to-1 PSR instead of the New Core's 5-to-1.

Further proof that China gets old before truly rich, or perhaps better said, by the time it gets rich, it'll be as old as the old West (with only Japan serving as demographic lead goose, as it does today).

And - again - truth be told, China should track Japan as its future, far more than the US should ever feel it should.

First openly gay US flag officer - a big move for all involved

Obviously a calculated gesture that had to have been cleared with a lot of people beforehand, but a very nice move by the US Army, Defense Department and the Obama Administration.  My hat off to all of them - especially the flag officer (newly promoted to BGEN) and her spouse.

An Army officer being promoted to brigadier general openly acknowledged her homosexuality on Friday by having her wife pin her star to her uniform, thus becoming the first openly gay officer of flag rank in the United States military.

Everyone knows we've had gays and lesbians in the military forever.  The only question left hanging all these years was: would we allow them their identity - openly - in exchange for their service?  Too much to ask?  Hardly.

It's a tough job and a hard life, and everybody deserves to be able to acknowledge their fundamental sexual identity while serving their country.

I can tell you exactly when the whole subject jumped the shark for me:  There was this study done sometime (I believe) in the 1990s.  An inside job where some trusted Pentagon contractor went back over the personnel records of the entire force throughout the entire Cold War, looking for instances in which homosexuality led to somebody being successfully blackmailed by the enemy.  Their finding?  Not a single case.  

Despite all those Allen Drury novels saying otherwise, nobody gay (uniform or civilian) ever had their secret used successfully against them in a security-breach manner.

It was at that point that I knew it was just a matter of time - and the right administration.

So my thanks to Obama on that score.

I have to admit that when I saw the headline in the NYT, I thought it was a gag.  I mean, I don't think there are any publicly acknowledged enlisted personnel, so how did somebody get all the way up to being a general, I thought (rather stupidly, I realize).  But then it struck me: the DoD wanted somebody prominent as the first to step forward in this manner, and somebody going from officer to flag is the perfect tipping point in a career to hold up as an example.  

Very smart.

A complication that displays the interdependency between the Chinese and US economies

Great WAPO piece on how China's economic slowdown can complicate relations with the US.

Some bits:

Chinese leaders are under pressure to take steps to help the economy as a rare change in power looms. This fall, the Communist Party will choose a new general secretary and officials through the government.

“They cannot afford, during a period of political transition and political turmoil, to suggest any loss of economic control,” [Eswar] Prasad said.

China and the United States are the twin engines of global growth, and both need each other to take steps to keep economic activity going.

China has a number of tools at its disposal to stimulate economic growth — some harmful to the United States, others potentially neutral or helpful. China routinely subsidizes companies that locate there, reducing the competitiveness of U.S. businesses. More favorable programs include China’s effort to boost government spending and lower interest rates to increase lending . . .

It’s also possible the United States might take steps that could aggravate relations with China.

When the Federal Reserve embarked on another aggressive campaign to lower interest rates in late 2010, China howled, saying it would devalue the dollar and help U.S. exports. And indeed, the dollar did come down some, and exports boomed.

But the dollar has since rebounded, likely as investors have sought security in U.S. Treasury bonds.

China might signal similar concern this September, if the Fed launches a round of so-called quantitative easing to jolt growth.

Point being, we are locked in a symbiotic relationship with China.  There is no good global economy without us and there is no good global economy without them.

This is what gets me when Pentagon strategists casually consider war with China, to include direct attacks on the Chinese homeland.  What happens to the global economy when the two intertwinned biggest national economies decide to start blowing each other's citizens up?  The global economy would tank at a speed that would stun everybody.  There wouldn't be any days or weeks of bombing campaigns.  We'd have global economic turmoil of a stunning nature well before that, as the markets would freak out.

But I advise people to read the CSBA scenarios as they pertain to war with China, because they are downright hallucinatory.  From my China Security piece of a while back:

Reading through CSBA’s full-up exploration of ASBC, the resulting war between China and the United States strains credulity beyond all reason.[3] Three maps in particular depict what are logically lengthy strike campaigns against China’s radar/space facilities, ballistic missile facilities and submarine bases. In total, they suggest a China-wide bombing campaign by the United States of such tremendous volume that, as CSBA’s authors note, America would be required to dramatically ramp up short-term production of precision-guided munitions. Toward that end, one supposes, America should preemptively terminate all trade with China; trade that would financially underwrite the production lines of such weapon systems—again, to service a theoretical protection of “the free movement of goods around the world.”

Beyond that fantastic scenario extension lies CSBA’s plans to basically destroy the entire Chinese air force and submarine fleet, plus institute a “distant blockade” that would see us interdict and search—and here the irony balloons—China’s seaborne trade, which ought to be fairly simple since so much of it involves the US economy.  And because it’s not easy to stop committed large ships (don’t tell Somalia’s pirates), CSBA broaches the notion of using Air Force bombers to “provide ‘on-call’ maritime strike.” One can only imagine how many thousands of Wal-Mart containers the US military could send to the bottom of the Pacific before the White House would hear some complaints from the US business community. But why let that reality intrude?

Sounds crazy enough, right? 

Nice critique of the sheer - and reckless - overkill that is ASBC

Written by an Aussie strategist for The Diplomat.

Here is the best chunk.  I italicize the parts I found most compelling.

By denying China’s capacity for anti-access, the United States intends to preserve its options for sea-control and power projection, reinforcing its primacy and role as the region’s guarantor of free navigation. This decision, in turn, reflects a deeper, more quixotic judgement that such an objective is both vital to the United States and attainable at a level of cost and risk commensurate with US interests in the region.

On both counts, though, there are reasons to be sceptical. First, the cost of AirSea Battle is likely to be prohibitive. Though it remains a largely notional concept, AirSea Battle will depend on an expansive set of upgraded capabilities: a hardened and more dispersed network of bases and C4ISR systems; more and better submarine, anti-submarine and mine-warfare capabilities; and new, long range conventional strike systems, including bombers and anti-satellite weapons. Then, of course, there are the aircraft carriers and other major surface combatants, strike-fighter aircraft, and possibly even amphibious ships.

This strategy is no panacea for the region’s problems, of course. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy and it would involve Washington making some hard capability trade-offs as well as accepting greater limits on its capacity for intervention in the Western Pacific. But there are benefits as well. In particular, maritime denial would allow the US to continue to play a strong role in the region. It would enable Washington to fulfil its defensive commitments to regional allies, prevent Chinese dominance and, at the same time, by reducing its visible military footprint, give Beijing more political breathing room. To that end, a US maritime denial strategy would also help avoid the worst aspects of crisis instability that AirSea Battle would provoke. And all without breaking the bank.

Needless to say, these are expensive capabilities. Many are disproportionately costly (and vulnerable) relative to the platforms against which they’re being fielded. And in some cases, particularly anti-submarine warfare and ballistic missile defence, their prospective cost greatly exceeds the operational effect they can be expected to produce. All of this would be exacting for the United States in peak economic condition. In a new era of fiscal stringency, with US debt expanding and the Pentagon looking to save hundreds of billions over the next decade, expecting the US military to do more with less is at best unlikely, and at worst wholly untenable.

It also risks failing to learn from history. Strategic competition in the Western Pacific is beginning to echo the Cold War, only this time the United States is at risk of reprising the role of the Soviet Union. Washington has already repeated Moscow’s mistakes in Afghanistan. With AirSea Battle, Washington is trying to do too much with too little. It’s facing off against an opponent in better economic shape whose smarter, more asymmetric strategy will impose a disproportionate military burden. For Washington, adopting such a maximalist doctrine risks playing into China’s hands and, like the Soviet Union, spending itself into penury.

But cost factors are only part of the danger. An arms race is already underway in Asia. AirSea Battle will accelerate this process, with serious implications for regional stability and crisis management. First, by creating the need for a continued visible presence and more intrusive forms of surveillance in the Western Pacific, AirSea Battle will greatly increase the range of circumstances for maritime brinkmanship and dangerous naval incidents.

Second, AirSea Battle’s emphasis on pre-empting China by striking early against the PLA will continue to compress the time available to decision-makers in a crisis. As military plans become increasingly dependent on speed and escalation, and diplomacy fails to keep up, a dangerous ‘use it or lose it’ mentality is likely to take hold in the minds of military commanders. This risks building an automatic escalator to war into each crisis before diplomatic efforts at defusing the situation can get underway.

And finally, AirSea Battle calls for deep strikes on the Chinese mainland to blind and suppress PLA surveillance systems and degrade its long-range strike capabilities. Such an attack, even if it relied solely on conventional systems, could easily be misconstrued in Beijing as an attempt at pre-emptively destroying China’s retaliatory nuclear options. Under intense pressure, it would be hard to limit a dramatic escalation of such a conflict – including, in the worst case, up to and beyond the nuclear threshold.  

Taken together, the costs and risks associated with AirSea Battle spell trouble for US primacy in Asia, and for the sea control and power projection capabilities on which it relies. Yet while Washington’s comfortable hegemonic habits will be hard to kick – especially after so many peaceful, prosperous decades – it’s not all doom and gloom. Primacy, after all, is only a means to an end, a way of preventing China from attaining regional dominance. There are other, more cost effective ways of doing that, including by playing China at its own game. That would involve developing a maritime denial strategy, focused mainly on the use of submarines, designed to inhibit China’s use of the sea for its own power projection. Indeed, the same capabilities that imperil US power projection in the Western Pacific would have an equally profound effect on China’s own fledgling efforts.

A very smart analysis of the dangers and costs.  And the "out" provided by focusing more on subs would make even me a serious believer of increasing our capacity there versus CSBA's somewhat insane notion of bombing the breadth and length of China and somehow not triggering a nuclear escalation.

People are going to construe being against the CSBA's notion of AirSea Battle as capitulating to Chinese domination of East Asia.  That is, of course, complete nonsense.

Proponents of ASBC will also toss in the if-you-only-know-the-secret-stuff-I-know-you'd-buy-into-ASBC card. That secrecy argument is the equivalent of patriotism-as-the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels temptation - as in, when you can't win the argument on cost and feasibility and dangers and operational success, then simply hide behind the "ominous" signs that only you and yours are privy to.

There are, as this article points out, cheaper and more sensible alternatives.  To those provided here, I would simply add selling plenty of military capabilities to the rest of East Asia (which we're already doing).

As I said before, ASBC suffers greatly from aspiring to be an Air Force-Navy Full Deployment Act.  Like any force structure wish list, it must ramp up the storylines - hence the fantastic war-gaming of CSBA that is intellectually fradulent to the point of being laughable.

There is no strategic logic that says the US should get in an absurdly expensive spending war with China over a scenario that happens just outside China's front door.  There is also no logic in promising a hair-trigger standoff where we pre-emptively bomb the length and breadth of China just to get them to back off from some aggressive shenanigans in their neighborhood.  For America, already deeply intertwinned with China on trade and investment and debt, to adopt such a posture is simply ludicrous.  These notions remain the fantasy of strategists who live "inside baseball" lives and have little to no clue about how this larger world works.  "Strangelovian" is not too strong a term.  In fact, it's right on the mark, because it implies a closeted world of strategists with no sense of proportion or connection to the wider dynamics of power in this era.  This is dinosaur thinking at its worst, and it needs to be opposed whenever and wherever possible.

Keeping China from doing something truly stupid in East Asia is not hard.  We need to undermine their asymmetrical approach by - as this article argue - creating our own, and NOT by setting ourselves up for a rapidly escalating great-power war.  Bombing the length and breadth of China in the opening hours of some crisis is just plain stupid and reckless and painfully unimaginative.  This is a massive retaliation response that pretends China isn't a nuclear power capable of significant retaliation.  

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who hasn't taken the crazy pill on this one:  YOU DON'T CONDUCT WIDESPREAD BOMBING CAMPAIGNS AGAINST THE HOMELANDS OF NUCLEAR POWERS!  

There is no clever way to spin ASBC's logic.  It promises a sheer - and therefore reckless - overkill that defies any sensible strategic logic.

This is not a "revolution in military affairs."  This is Cold War thinking at its most rigid - somehow surviving within our ranks.  It pretends, in the classic domino thinking approach, that if China pulls off anything in East Asia, we will have lost the entire competition!

Again, can you get any more narrow in your reading of the entirety of our world or our capacity to lead globally versus that of China's?  That's were ASBC truly sucks:  it reduces all our enduring strengths to one specific threat and then asks us to roll the dice on nuclear war over that one scenario.  Why?  BECAUSE IF WE DON'T ALL WILL BE LOST AND CHINA WILL RULE THE WORLD!

Honestly, doesn't that logic strike you as cartoonishly bad?  Remember when the Commies won everything by grabbing South Vietnam?  Or does it seem strange that we're now allying with Vietnam against China?

The "primacy" impulse dies hard within our ranks, especially among those who imagine that it resides solely with our military means to wage war.  The naive simplicity of this argument is almost beneath serious debate for anyone not trapped in the Pentagon's self-serving notions of "power!" (meaning 99.9% of the world as we know it).

But this is, sad to say, all part and parcel of the politics of protecting one's budget, so get used to hearing all sorts of bad strategic logic tossed in your faces.  In virtually every instance, the goal will be the same: to scare you into accepting the mis-allocation of resources within the US defense budget.

We live in a world of small wars.  That is the reality of the world America spent the last seven decades creating and defending.

But we are still far too dominated and influenced by an elite that sees the world only in big-war terms, because those capabilities are what that elite believes will continue to provide for American primacy.

Simply put, we created a world in which numerous great powers could rise, but some of us continue to freak out over that achievement.

I will readily confess: the more time I spend in international business, the less I find I have in common with the national security community in the United States. That whole mess strikes me today as being more divorced from reality than at any previous time in my career.

From the CSBA report on ASBC: the section entitled "Executing a Missile Suppression Campaign."

From the CSBA report on the ASBC: the section entitled "Blind PLA ISR Systems."

These two maps detail the places where CSBA advocates that the ASBC campaign should target in the opening salvos of any war with China. 

Again, imagine the Chinese bombing on similar terms across the length and breadth of the continental US and then consider what our strategic response might be.

China comes back to even in its trade with the world!?!

Economist story: "for the first time since 1998 more money leaves China than enters it."

On the surface, you say, "balanced trade!" when what you should really say is "balanced investment!"  But even there you'd be missing the subtext, so sayeth The Economist:

MAINLAND China can now boast over 1m wealthy citizens (qianwan fuweng) each with over 10m yuan ($1.6m), says the latest edition of the “Hurun Report”, which keeps track of China’s capitalist high-roaders. But the mainland seems to be having trouble keeping them. According to the report, published on July 31st, more than 16% of China’s rich have already emigrated, or handed in immigration papers for another country, while 44% intend to do so soon. Over 85% are planning to send their children abroad for their education, and one-third own assets overseas.

The affluent 1m have profited handsomely from China’s economic boom. But only 28% of those asked expressed great confidence in the prospects over the next two years, down from 54% in last year’s report.

Them's some stunning numbers:  60% of the rich plan to emmigrate and 85% are sending their kids abroad - thus perpetuating the attraction of leaving the Mainland.

Frankly, those are numbers and dynamics one associates with post-Cold War Russia or Africa of the past several decades.  There is a looting quality to this circumstance, driven primarily by the sense that China is becoming a dangerous place to have wealth.

Now, we can all get jacked with the dominant populist vibe (check out the "Dark Knight Rises"), but it's a very negative sign when your rising economy's rich people don't want to stick around.  For China it says, we don't trust the - now longstanding - reforms will stay in place.  It also says, we want to go where our wealth translates into genuine political power (rich people are like that).

True political pluralism usually arises when the rich realize that the only way they can keep their wealth is to open up the system for a stabilizing middle class to take the reins of political power. No, they don't enjoy the process, but it beats the alternative - revolution typically from the lower classes.

This dynamic is presenting itself across much of the developing world right now: we see the rise of a truly global middle class and - big surprise - amidst all that wealth creation a super-rich emerges (happens every time), thus the richest-to-poorest delta is fantastically large.  That's when you get nasty populism that, by and large, can either be deflated nicely by a long progressive period of cleaning up the system, environment, politics, etc., or can explode into something far more destructive.  

Europe got that initial middle class about the same time America did, and Europe came up with two scary alternatives:  Bolshevism to prevent that dastardly bourgeoisie from emerging, and fascism, which pretended to protect those "shopkeepers" from radicalized workers but really was about keeping the rich safe and everybody else wound up by freakish nationalism and militarism.

America split the difference brilliantly, plowed through a lengthy progressive era, and centered its political system - along with its economy - on a stable middle class.

We are rerunning that Western experiment now on a global scale, with the biggest democratization process to come being - obviously - China, which faces the daunting task of democratizing amidst a progressivist dynamic (like virtually everything China does, it's a combination that's unusual in its "cramming it in" ambition, but there you have it).  Meanwhile, the West is coming to grips with two stunning problems:  it no longer can manage a blue-collar middle class status and hasn't adjusted its educational system from its industrial era origins, and it's facing a demographic aging wave (less so the US) that forces it to revamp its industrial age pension and healthcare systems rather drastically.

The progressive age that must inevitably unfold globally so as to tame globalization's natural excesses (in this period of rapid expansion) is the most important challenge humanity faces in the next several decades.  Truth be told, global warming will by and large have to await that process before being truly addressed on a systematic level (even as much progress should occur thanks to the fracking revolution and its triggering of widescale movement "down" the hydrocarbon chain).

But back to the point of the piece:  China's movement toward accepting a progressive era is crucial to initiating this process on a global scale, because a China that moves down this path will be less frightening to an America that is currently using the excuse of "scary" China to delay its own internal reforms (the AirSea Battle Concept being just one telling symptom of a general political escapism).

And this is where I go back and forth in my fears and hopes for China.  Whenever I'm there I meet so many in the elite who are acutely aware of all this and realize the global responsibility China's internal development represents.  But then I also meet plenty who can't rise above their own fears for their own status.  So no, this battle is not decisively waged in either direction, even as I take great solace in the whole Bo Xilai Affair and its diminishment of the brain-dead Red revivalism in the interior.

Interesting times ...