Hagel is nobody's fool on national security

ARTICLE: "Sen. Hagel warns against conflict with Iran," By John M. Doyle, Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, 07/01/2008 , page 13

Sees more danger in non-communication than talks.

Corroboration

ARTICLE: Preparing the Battlefield, by Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008

The more Fallon speaks, the less it looks like I misrepresented him one whit in the Esquire profile.

(Thanks: Constantina Meis and Galrahn)

Scanned Bobbitt's second book (Terror and Consent) and found it inaccessible

I realize the guy's smart as hell, and his books are truly magisterial, but I will confess: they seem like a solution from another planet.

I also realize that his inside-baseball level of detail thrills many aficionados of the long war, but the approach seems so inside-out, starting with the government and "market states" and all their associated paraphernalia as the alpha and omega of the solution, and I'm just highly skeptical of basing so much of our political system on interpreting terrorism as the be-all and end-all threat of the age.

As I've said repeatedly, terrorism is, to me, what's left, not what's next—much less what's transcendent.

To me, that's like America in 1875 saying Crazy Horse and threats like him are the future of the United States experiment and we should reshape our entire government and foreign policy and national security establishment to meet this transcendent challenge.

We're facing a world where we've radically expanded the in-club to include the vast majority of the East and much of the South, and we in the West find that extended family pretty scary—pretty wild in comparison to the sedate, security rule sets we've long enjoyed in our small family. Along with all these new family members, we've got some serious but limited and sporadic resistance from key situations (and many not so key) in the Gap.

My question is, do we focus on getting the new family members inside our international liberal trade order first, or do we freak out over the envisioned, overwhelmingly Gap-based threat (yes, I understand their fellow travelers will come here and seek to do us harm, but let's not go all wobbly too fast on our own inherent resilience) and choose to arm ourselves with all sorts of new doctrines and capabilities and laws that keep that threat at bay, while—unavoidably—at the same time sacrificing the connectivity we should be building with that huge chunk of humanity, just added to our universe thanks to Cold War's end and the stunning expansion of globalization, which doesn't view this new world with the same fears and paranoia that we now seem given to?

You know my answer.

I read Bobbitt and can't help but think he's willing to risk the New Core's integration in order to secure the Old Core's viability in the face of this transcendent, age-defining threat called terrorism.

To me, that just seems like a bad bet—plus way too government-centric in its approach. I guess I just don't see governments as being as in-charge of things as others do. I never did, so I suppose I don't see the "loss" of state power either.

Thus I don't see the great need to totally revamp the political construct or risk defeat.

I simply don't see defeat on the agenda and never have. We win and we're winning and we continue to win. It's our winning in spreading and nurturing and defending this international liberal trade order, this American System-of-states-uniting-cum-globalization, that gets us the friction (terror) in the first place.

I'm interested in the motion, not the ancillary costs involved.

And so I just don't "get" (meaning, dig) Bobbitt's stuff, even as I admire it and respect his efforts at reorienting thinking. I see a lot of his ideas as being reasonable and sound. I just don't see the need for the larger teleology: just cite me the tactics (laws mostly for him) to be modified and let's move on, because this isn't the game. This is how we handle drunks in the stands.

Please, somebody do their best to enlighten me further on Bobbitt. I'm not offering this comments as a rejection of all his thinking, just the elaborate need for universe-spanning packaging, I guess, because I find that packaging so misleading and so inappropriate and so unhelpful.

To me, the only grand strategy worth having today is a globalization-centric one, not a terror-centric one. To me, that would be like living a cholesterol-centric health-regime—just too narrow. You can't take something that narrow (terrorism) and make it holistic, in a grand strategic sense, in this age of globalization (in which, market states surely play but hardly dominate or define).

Again, I look for counter-arguments here. Bobbitt is impressive if dense and hard to approach, and I'd like to be able to locate his thinking somewhere in my universe, but whenever I pick up his stuff, I simply find myself putting it back down, saying, "Nice, but we don't talk the same language."

That statement may well be a product of my dense-ness on the subject of law and terror (Bobbitt's bailiwick), so I remain open to being convinced otherwise, but clearly, I'm not getting there on my own without some help (another bad sign to me is when you need a cast of others to help you understand why a book is good).

Get your own foreign policy and Kiva

Gunnar Peterson wrote a post about Kiva and quoted Tom:

Everyone who wants to make a difference should just go ahead and get their own foreign policy and stop waiting on change from above.

He got a cool comment:

Gunnar:

That's so damned inspiring. I'm going to go and check out Kiva right now.

That quote from Barnett is fantastic.

Firefox users = Core

David Eaves compared Tom's Map to a map of the Firefox 3 download distribution.

Basically, it matched up pretty closely. Be sure to click through to read Eaves' conclusions on this post and a subsequent one.

The naval build-up in Asia—so far disappointing the arms-race aficionados

ASIA: "Into the wide blue yonder: Asia's main powers are building up their navies. Is this the start of an arms race?" The Economist, 7 June 2008, p. 53.

China and other Asian states say they build up their navies to ward off pirates and terrorists. This is considered an "implausible" explanation by the Economist.

Hmm, the magazine should spend more time at naval conferences. I hear that stuff from more than just Asian navies . . .

Emerging great powers build navies. That's history.

The Asian situation has been artificial for a very long time: the American navy dominating the region's waters. In a "flat world," it should not surprise anyone that this does not continue, nor should it.

Instead, we should be encouraging the rise of Asian navies interested in policing their own waters and securing the SLOCs between Asia and the Middle East, not to mention handling disaster relief.

But, of course, says the magazine, despite lots of opportunities for cooperation, there also exists the danger of confrontation.

So what's the answer? Let the naval developments trigger more regional security agreements. Build your East Asian NATO from the water in.

Oh, and dream of another Pacific War!

A new, far larger estimate of infrastructure spending in New Core

ECONOMICS FOCUS: "Building BRICs of growth: Record spending on infrastructure will help to sustain rapid growth in emerging economies," The Economist, 7 June 2008, p. 88.

This one stuns: Morgan Stanley says $22 trillion (today's prices) in infrastructure development in the next ten years! I've been going around saying $10T in water and energy by 2030 (may still be true) and that gets jaws a'dropping. This estimate concerns (according to the charts) air travel infrastructure, electricity, telephone and roads.

Of the $22 trillion, China accounts for 9.3, India 2.8, Russia 2.2, Brazil 1.1, the Middle East 0.9, other Asia 2.4 and "other" at 3.1 for a total of $21.7 trillion.

Goldman Sachs report just out says infrastructure development is a result of growth, not a driver. Chicken or egg to me.

That's just a load o' money, no matter how you count it.

Badlands National Park

Video

Minuteman tour

Last remaining Minuteman silo site off I-90 in S.D. We go on short tour here, in the middle of nowhere.

It's the last silo from the 150 missiles that used to be clustered in southern S.D. Something like 450 MM still active.

Best attempt to capture training missile in silo thru glass.

Sense of the cap that would track off to left to uncover silo.

Veteran Minuteman missileer explaining launch room.

Launch board (just flip switch)

Missileer explains launch procedure.

This guy the only man to actually launch Minuteman from U.S. soil in '65 test.

Rushmore

Crazy Horse pix

Model of ultimate Crazy Horse mountain sculpture.

What it looks like today (face done and most of horse blocked out).

The eternal "if . . . may" on nuclear proliferation

THE WORLD: "Going Nuclear: Global interest in finding alternative sources of energy may presage a new arms race," by Joby Warrick, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 19-25 May 2008, p. 18.

Forty developing/emerging economies from Middle East/North Africa and Latin America tell the UN they're interesting in starting nuclear power generation programs.

Naturally, the proliferation crowd in national security is freaking, but maybe $150-barrel oil is driving this more—you think? People are amazed when Gulf nations with plenty of oil and gas explore the same, but if you check out their stunning rise in domestic consumption of the same, that too is not that odd, because it's leaving them with far less to export and when they don't export but consume their stuff, guess what? No income.

Arguably, both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, serious rivals of Iran, have a case for strapping on if Iran's going to man-up with a weapon capacity. Turkey's legitimately in the category of great power-with-nukes whether there's an Iran or not, Saudi Arabia less so, since their guarantor of security is ultimately their reserves, and the great desire by numerous external great powers to keep it all safe and accessible.

Beyond that, the arguments are reduced to this: once Iran has its nukes (unpreventable in my opinion), there are two ways this goes forward.

First, Iran-the-nation-state decides to cash-in on the advantage and forces status-enhancing and regime-recognizing contacts/negotiations/for with both regional powers and extra-regional great powers, like us. In that pathway lies mutual recognition between Israel and Iran, which is a regional deal-enabler if that's the way Iran wants to go, getting explicit in its we-are-the-Shia-champions role, because at that point, the scenario in which Israel takes them down or gets us to do the same or Saudi Arabia similarly pushes us basically evaporates. Iran, at that point, is out of the closet as Shia champion, confident enough that it can't be suppressed in the role. But that's an Iran that puts the failed revolution largely to bed and decides it's going to play more conventionally. That's clearly not an Iran led by Ahmadinejad; it's one where the pragmatic conservatives convince themselves and the Supreme Leader that there's a better way out of their current economic situation than playing East v. West, a dynamic currently working, given the choices of the Bush administration.

In that scenario, some regional players may logically decide they want nukes too, in order to make sure they've got seats at those tables. Not actually necessary, but they may come to that conclusion anyway.

Or, second, Iran-the-revolutionary-movement continues to shoot off its mouth and signals that it does not recognize the nuclear weapons rules of the road and isn't interested in cashing-in on the nukes but instead intends to use them as perceived threatening collateral for anything they continue to pursue in supporting regional non-states like Hamas and Hezbollah. In this path, Israel will strike eventually, and we'll back them up.

You can say, Why not stop Iran from the bomb?

If Iran is truly committed, and I think they are, then I don't think we'll ever muster the international consensus to stop the dynamic from unfolding. There's just too much East v West tension in the system: the East simply isn't sufficiently incentivized to trust us enough and not—in contrast—prefer to see our tie-down continued in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the tie-down ends, we might start a worse war, in their opinion, with Iran, or worse, turn on them next, as the neocons around McCain already signal their desire to do (see Kagan's latest book and the "league of democracies" bit).

As for Iran's actual capabilities, I've described my thinking on that for years now: the sloppy asymmetrical deterrence already exists, thanks to our past and ongoing strategic choices (the tie-down both operational and diplomatic). By that I mean, we can't make the conventional preventive strike/hard kill takedown, and conventional bombing, while gratifying emotionally, won't dead-end this pathway. Ditto for Israel. So we're both faced with going nuclear to prevent Iran from getting nuclear.

For now, Iran's playing it fairly cleverly: they've got the gun (crappy Scud-deluxes/duplexes from North Korea), they're making gunpowder (enrichment, with great public fanfare), and they're eschewing bullet manufacturing (the NIE report)—for now. As I've said: pretty clever and somewhat Japanese, with a lot of lip-flapping added in.

Iran may choose to never cross the bullet-line, and continue in this belligerent vagueness, but that seems sub-optimal over the long haul, getting them neither regime security nor economic opportunity (they can be China's energy whores to the max, but as they would eventually find out, it may be the devil and it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody!). Nor does it allow them to capitalize on the Shia revival.

But what it would do, if Ahmadinejad's cohort prevails in 2009 (the election), is allow the revolution revivalists to continue to put off tough economic decisions and pretend that the Fidel Castro route works—with oil. Problem there is that the demographics don't favor that path for too much longer. Students started this party and, given enough non-opportunity, they can just as easily end it.

So again, for me, the discussion with accepting some of the strategic realities I've described and unwinding our unleveraged position—the great legacy of Bush-Cheney.

The "League of Democracies" prefers Obama—by a lot!

WORLD NEWS: "Europeans Much Prefer Obama: Polls Show Support Across Continent; U.S. More Liked, Too," by John D. McKinnon, John W. Miller and Marc Champion, Wall Street Journal, 9 June 2008, p. A10.

Polling data saying that if the election is held in Europe, Obama wins in a landslide.

Good news on child soldiers: fewer reporting for duty

ARTICLE: "Fewer Conflicts Involve Child Soldiers, Report Finds," by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, 22 May 2008, p. A15.

Despite those trying to sell us on conflict-centric (or worse, terror-centric) grand strategies, the news keeps pouring in that the world is getting more peaceful.

That doesn't say the 9/11 break-point wasn't real, just that it's not a turning point for globalization per se, the real driver behind both the force (economic integration that pacifies) and the friction (the blowback).

So, on this point of child soldiers, we get some good news: 27 conflicts with kid soldiers four years ago. Today only 17.

The phenomenon is ugly but hardly surprising, given the frontier-integrating age we live in.

Eventually, it will come to R2P

INTERNATIONAL: "To protect sovereignty, or to protect lives? The new notion of global responsibility to alleviate suffering has struggled to win acceptance—and Myanmar will not be the place where it comes of age," The Economist, 17 May 2008, p. 73.

R2P refers to "responsibility to protect," or the notion that advanced states have the right to intervene in Gap countries when state failure or obstinacy costs lives—like Burma/Myanmar with the cyclone.

For now, a bit of an empty slogan, as the Economist argues, but as globalization's hyper-connectivity and hyper-interdependency grows, this sort of thing is inevitable—like state intervention in the broken home. The closer we grow together in all these nets, the less willing people are to let bad things go on just a few doors down.

You map the gap when you do SysAdmin.

ARTICLE: IT vs. initiative: The Internet age comes to the battlefield, By Tyler Boudreau, The Industry Standard, 06.25.2008

Interesting. The imposition of the net is the essence of the securitizing function: you will be recorded, the net will detect--however achieved.

(Thanks: AJ Barnett and Mike Wood)