Perfectly fine to arm up the Sunnis

WSJ front-pager on US selling $30B worth of F-15s to the Saudis, albeit lacking features that Israel opposes.

I'm not a fan of Saudi Arabia, even as I wish King Abdullah (and his reforms) a much longer life, but frankly, I'd sell the Saudis whatever they want in whatever amounts they want, because, once Iran gets the bomb, the Saudis will be sorely tempted to follow suit.  So the more cool we keep them in the short run, the better.

The Saudis are never going to attack Israel and wouldn't find any utility in letting others do the same.  They've grown beyond such dynamics, so why not arm them and everybody else in the region to the teeth, so as to make clear to Tehran how they gain nothing in military influence by achieving the bomb.

I still await the argument that proves how nukes ever got anybody anything--other than safe harbor from attack by other great powers.  About the best case you can make is that Ike signaled his willingness to go all the way on Korea, convincing the Soviet bloc to avoid escalation.  But even there, you're talking about a bad thing being prevented more than any victory won or influence cemented. 

All Iran does by getting the bomb is to make itself Israel's strategic equal in the region, logically triggering bilateral talks once the brinkmanship gets tiresome (less for them than for interested great powers).  To the extent that Turkey and the Saudis step into that dynamic on their own, I see less danger in proliferation and more safety in a truly regional strategic security architecture.

But meanwhile, we balance appropriately.

Germany retools its military

I'm training here! I'm TRAINING!

image here

NYT story on new plan by German defense minister to end draft and cut end strength (number of troops) by 90k (from 250k to 163,000)  Currently, the Bundeswehr can project only about 7k troops abroad at any one time.  The goal, long expressed, is to double that to 14,000, but that couldn't be achieved absent this restructuring, says the defense minister.

Driving dynamic is to cut 8B euro from the budget over 2011-2014 timeframe.

If we're realistic, we admit Europe is a minor military partner in the decades ahead, leaving us to court million-man armies in Asia (India, China--a goal that's worthy simply for making sure the two don't mix it up for real).

Everything else is peanuts.

Mexico talking decriminalization of pot

Economist story.

Felipe Calderon, president of Mexico, floating the idea that enough is enough.  His war on drugs (truly a war) has come at the cost of 28,000 lives in four years--with no let-up in sight.

We freak out, as a nation, over 4,000 troop deaths over twice the period, and we're three times the population of Mexico.  So fair to expect far more of a political freak-out on their side, which has remained really quite reasonable throughout.

So I guess I don't see why, as The Economist says, that "it came as a surprise when on August 3rd Mr. Calderon called for a debate on whether to legalise drugs."

If we had similar numbers of per-capita deaths, we'd be talking 84,000 deaths since 2006, or roughly 15 times what we've lost in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002.  If we were suffering such losses, dontcha think we'd be talking decriminalization a lot more than we are now.  Hell, even with our relatively marginal losses, 30 out of 50 US states have passed or are considering medical pot/decriminalization bills.  So why such a surprise that mellow Mexico calls for just a debate?

Calderon's predecessor, Vincente Fox, has already called for legalization in response.  If California soon votes to legalize and tax pot sales to adults, then expect Mexico to more ahead, I say.  

Waiting on the first civil suit: GPS-aided stalkers

Phone companies pretty much always know where you are--to within 100 feet.  Annually, about 25,000 people are stalked across these United States.

Eventually the two trends meet, to the detriment of the stalked.

Therapists who work with domestic-abuse victims say they are increasingly seeing clients who have been stalked via their phones. At the Next Door Solutions for Battered Women shelter in San Jose, Calif., director Kathleen Krenek says women frequently arrive with the same complaint: "He knows where I am all the time, and I can't figure out how he's tracking me."

In such cases, Ms. Krenek says, the abuser is usually tracking a victim's cellphone. That comes as a shock to many stalking victims, she says, who often believe that carrying a phone makes them safer because they can call 911 if they're attacked.

There are various technologies for tracking a person's phone, and with the fast growth in smartphones, new ones come along frequently. Earlier this year, researchers with iSec Partners, a cyber-security firm, described in a report how anyone could track a phone within a tight radius. All that is required is the target person's cellphone number, a computer and some knowledge of how cellular networks work, said the report, which aimed to spotlight a security vulnerability.

Inevitably, protections will be put in place, and those who are lax about respecting them will be sued by victims--in part because their pockets are deep and they should know better.

Now abuse shelters tell women to turn off their phones the minute they walk through the door, but this is a sad state of affairs.  Eventually, the phone companies will have to become part of the solution.

How that might work:

The organization put that policy in place after a close call. On Feb. 26, Jennie Barnes arrived at a shelter to escape her husband, Michael Barnes, according to a police affidavit filed in a domestic-violence case against Mr. Barnes in New Hampshire state court. Ms. Barnes told police she was afraid that Mr. Barnes, who has admitted in court to assaulting his wife, would assault her again.

Ms. Barnes told a police officer that "she was in fear for her life," according to court filings. The next day, a judge issued a restraining order requiring Mr. Barnes to stay away from his wife.

Later that day, court records indicate, Mr. Barnes called his wife's cellular carrier, AT&T, and activated a service that let him track his wife's location. Mr. Barnes, court records say, told his brother that he planned to find Ms. Barnes.

The cellular carrier sent Ms. Barnes a text message telling her the tracking service had been activated, and police intercepted her husband. Mr. Barnes, who pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife and to violating a restraining order by tracking her with the cellphone, was sentenced to 12 months in jail. 

The cat and mouse on this one will be fascinating to watch.  New rules galore.

Chart of the Day (part duh!): NATO-Russia convergence of a different sort

Finally read George Friedman's The Next 100 Years and came away thoroughly disappointed.  I think he got some of the ancillaries right, like women's rights, demographics (albeit selectively) and emerging energy technologies, but the scenario?  A thinly-veiled reworking of the 20th century (Russia and China fragmenting, then crisis in the 30s, then world war (Japan again! Turks subbing for Nazis, Poland subbing for Stalinist Russia), America triumphs while discovering new energy technologies and a golden age ensues, only to be threatening by too damn many Mexicans showing up in the 90s.

Whew!

The part that really lost me was Russia having to launch a second cold war this decade because of its extremely exposed northwestern flank (you know, the terrain both Hitler and Napoleon used to invade), as if anybody wants to invade that place!

This Economist piece is about such remnants of the first Cold War. What caught my eye was the Russian military's declining share of GDP.

Seems the Putinesque economic miracle, for as long as it lasted, didn't equate to more attention being shown on the military, especially when the US splurged big time across the decade.

Again, the Russians disappoint.  (Sigh!)

Give Moscow enough time, and I'm sure we'll finally achieve the fabled convergence.

Chart of the day: German militarism is dead

Economist chart showing the demilitarization of conscription in Germany over the post-Cold War years.  When the 1990s began, the ratio of conscripts going into actual military service compared to community service was 2-to-1.  Now, more go into community service than military service, primarily because the number going into military service has collapsed to just over one-quarter of the 1990s total.

A sign of how Europe is opting out of the kinetic side of frontier integration in this age, which means we have no alternative but to go with the rising powers of the age—aka, the incentivized.

Getting hospitals ready for a WMD event

pic here

Bernadine Healy piece in Newsweek catches my eye because of Enterra’s emerging/ongoing work with major hospitals in the NYC area (and now in TX) regarding this very same issue:  how to maximize and coordinate cooperation among major hospitals in the event of WMD terrorism.

Healy cites a Thomas Tallman, head of emergency services at the fabled Cleveland Clinic on 4 key points:

First, hospitals must be ready to respond to any large-scale terrorist attack via robust contingency plans for patient flow (something Enterra works on a lot).

Second, all healthcare workers are trained up on WMD drills and can rely on plans posted throughout the facility.

Third, and most importantly in our minds, “networks of local and regional hospitals have been created to work closely with public authorities so resources can be shared.”  This is what the exercises are for, making everyone aware of and conversant in the network established.

Fourth, the chain of command is clear and practiced ahead of time—another key aspect of exercises, in my experience.

All really basic stuff but hard to achieve in facilities that operate—as a rule—as close to 100% capacity all the time in order to save money.

Healy’s point:  even if you do all four, no plan will survive contact with an actual WMD event, due to the immense complexity.

That’s where Enterra comes in with its focus on rules smart enough to rule themselves and change in response to altered conditions (altered as far as the plans are concerned). 

Bottom line:  your plans have to be reconfigurable on the fly.

Defense, and especially aerospace, looks to emerging (country) sales

WSJ story on US defense firms finding their future in foreign sales in light of coming flat Pentagon budgets, with Asia and the Middle East obvious targets (follow the money), with Brazil, India and China leading the way. No choice, as everybody is predicting a global--as in, Western--defense spending downturn of great length. Second FT article on Italian defense firm says the same.

Wil it be sufficient offset?

No way, but it cushions the blow for pure defense firms.  Those who sell civilian aerospace too will do better.

Moving towards the arms control concept in the cyber realm

WAPO story on how a number of major powers have signaled a willingness to explore the use of arms control vehicles to reduce the risk of cyber attacks on one another.

While I have never felt that borrowing deterrence notions from the nuclear realm for cyberwarfare made a lot of sense, because I tend to view cyberwarfare as being more akin to chemical and bio weapons than nukes, I do see the logic of mutually agreeing to limit their use via arms control treaties like we've done successfully with chem and bio.

The good news:

Although the agreement, reached this week at the United Nations, is only recommendations, Robert K. Knake, a cyberwarfare expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said it represents a "significant change in U.S posture" and is part of the Obama administration's strategy of diplomatic engagement.

Among other steps, the group recommended that the U.N. create norms of accepted behavior in cyberspace, exchange information on national legislation and cybersecurity strategies, and strengthen the capacity of less-developed countries to protect their computer systems.

When the group last met in 2005, they failed to find common ground. This time, by crafting a short text that left out controversial elements, they were able to reach a consensus.

Do I expect states to eschew pursuing cyber capacities as an asymmetrical hedge in the event of great-power war?  No.  I just expect them to agree to the notion that, outside of augmenting possible kinetics, advanced states will refrain from messing with each other with such capabilities.  Why?  Bigger and better fish to fry--all things being peaceful.

Expecting more is naive, but assuming the worse is unduly alarmist.  In a connected world, there are no clear and unambiguous advantages to be gained in cyberwarfare casually pursued (meaning outside the context of real war), but there are clear and identifiable costs to be shared.

Again with the "climate wars"!

The Economist bemoaning the flurry of new books predicting climate wars.

Yet surprisingly few facts support these alarming assertions. Widely touted forecasts such as for 200m climate refugees in the next few decades seem to have been plucked from the air. Little or no academic research has looked at questions such as whether Bangladeshis displaced by a rising sea would move a series of short distances over a long period, or (more disruptively) a greater distance immediately.

And yet the next edition of the IPCC report will have a chapter exploring this issue.  A recent conference in Norway explored the issue.  What was proposed was pretty weak.

The hardest evidence for a link so far comes from a team led by Marshall Burke of the University of California, which studied African wars from 1980 to 2002 and found that rising temperatures are indeed associated with crop failure, economic decline and a sharp rise in the likelihood of war. It predicted a “50% increase” in the chance of civil war in Africa by 2030.

But that claim is now heavily revised, since researchers redid their sums to take account of the more peaceful period of 2002-08. Others say that political and other factors such as ethnic conflict and outside intervention are far better indicators of the likelihood of fighting.

Take the widely cited case of the war in Darfur, the western region of Sudan. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, described it as “an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change”. Environmental problems have probably worsened the Darfuris’ dreadful plight, offering grist to those who call climate change a “threat multiplier”. Average rainfall in the region fell abruptly (by a third or more) in the early 1970s and Darfur repeatedly suffered droughts. Clashes over grazing and then displacement of villagers were followed, from 2003, by horrific war.

Yet the connection is elusive. Roughly three decades elapsed between the rain stopping and war starting. Many other factors—political, ethnic, demographic and economic—conspired to stoke violence. Those were specific to Darfur, whereas the sharp drop in rainfall hit the whole Sahel, without intensifying conflict elsewhere.

Another commonly cited example is violent competition for scarce grazing between nomadic herdsmen in the Horn of Africa. Yet a study of fighting among pastoralists on the border between Kenya and Somalia in the past 60 years (presented at the conference) showed instead that conflict worsened when grazing was abundant and fell during droughts. Hungry people were too busy staying alive, or too exhausted, to fight. By contrast, when rains made herdsmen’s lives easier, they could release surplus young labour for the violent sport of raiding other groups.

Honestly, this all sounds like a bunch of academic pinheads looking to create fear out of thin gruel. We just have a hot topic and a lot of people chasing money. Predicting 50% higher chances of civil war in Africa simply on the basis of global warming, while ignoring the obvious commodity and connectivity boom going on, is just silly.  It is reductionism to an absurd degree, something modern political science is amazingly adept at pursuing.

The cyber "shield" in the making

WSJ story on planned federal government initiative "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and gov agencies running critical infrastructure.  Naturally, it will be a vast and expanding program--a la the WAPO series by Priest and Arkin.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment.

Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

Hard to argue against some government effort to surveil the critical infrastructure domain, and hard not to see the effort stay fairly secret, because as I learned with Y2K, the critical infrastructure industry isn't exactly interested in advertising its vulnerabilities.

Building up cyberwar as this era's equivalent of nuclear war

Economist piece that leverages the salesmanship of Richard Clarke and Mike McConnell, two industry leaders in the great government spending spree unfolding on cybersecurity. McConnell especially likes to compare the effects of full-blown cyberwarfare to a nuclear attack.

Not so, retorts Mr Schmidt [Obama's new cybersecurity czar and former head of security at Microsoft].  There is no cyberwar.  Bruce Schneier, an IT industry security guru, accuses securocrats like Mr Clarke of scaremongering.  Cyberspace will certainly be part of any future war, he says, but an apocalyptic attack on America is both difficult to achieve technically ("movie-script stuff") and implausible except in the context of a real war, in which case the perpetrator is likely to be obvious.

I, as you know, tend toward the skeptic position on this, simply because whenever technology is proposed to rule over all--either positively or negatively, I find that reality is far more complex.

The truth, as The Economist suggests, lies somewhere in between:

By breaking up data and sending it over multiple routes, the internet can survive the loss of large parts of the network. Yet some of the global digital infrastructure is more fragile. More than nine-tenths of internet traffic travels through undersea fibre-optic cables, and these are dangerously bunched up in a few choke-points, for instance around New York, the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait in the Philippines (see map). Internet traffic is directed by just 13 clusters of potentially vulnerable domain-name servers. Other dangers are coming: weakly governed swathes of Africa are being connected up to fibre-optic cables, potentially creating new havens for cyber-criminals. And the spread of mobile internet will bring new means of attack.

Reminds you of any map you've seen here before?

My favorite bit from the piece:

Western spooks think China deploys the most assiduous, and most shameless, cyberspies, but Russian ones are probably more skilled and subtle. Top of the league, say the spooks, are still America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, which may explain why Western countries have until recently been reluctant to complain too loudly about computer snooping.

The usual concluding judgments:

Deterrence in cyber-warfare is more uncertain than, say, in nuclear strategy: there is no mutually assured destruction, the dividing line between criminality and war is blurred and identifying attacking computers, let alone the fingers on the keyboards, is difficult. Retaliation need not be confined to cyberspace; the one system that is certainly not linked to the public internet is America’s nuclear firing chain. Still, the more likely use of cyber-weapons is probably not to bring about electronic apocalypse, but as tools of limited warfare.

Cyber-weapons are most effective in the hands of big states. But because they are cheap, they may be most useful to the comparatively weak. They may well suit terrorists. Fortunately, perhaps, the likes of al-Qaeda have mostly used the internet for propaganda and communication. It may be that jihadists lack the ability to, say, induce a refinery to blow itself up. Or it may be that they prefer the gory theatre of suicide-bombings to the anonymity of computer sabotage—for now.

Like any good horror show, the authors here feel the need to wrap up the subject rather neatly before departing, but not without that ominous seed of doubt being planted just before the credits roll.

My sense remains until proven otherwise: the assumption of escalation dominance lying with cyber attackers is a whopper. We went through the same fears on nukes early on, and the truth worked itself out over time: defense is never all that far behind the offense.

WAPO's "Top Secret America"

First chunk of what will clearly be a large series flow of information, and certainly an accompanying book from Dana Priest and William Arkin at the Washington Post.

The general theme is, "Be amazed at how big our secretive defense world is!"  Also, "Look how big it has grown since 9/11!" Finally, "Much of this work is redundant, useless in its overwhelming flow, and no closer to dot-connecting than before 9/11!"

All valid points but all also painfully predictable and well known. So the charges aren't particularly new or revealing, even as the great flow of anecdotes are well designed to make you especially anxious and frustrated.  I would expect tons of air time for the duo, lots of op-eds bemoaning the details revealed, and the usual congressional grumblings.

But not a lot of positive action in reply.

Two bits caught my eye:

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

This is why briefers ruled before 9/11 and it's why they still rule. The flow of info is too great for the system to handle.  So the "just-tell-me-what-I-need-to-know-right-now" principal relies primarily on whomever does the all-purpose daily or weekly brief.

Second, befitting all "electronic-Pearl-Harbor-is-right-around-the-corner" media flow:

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

"Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach," CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

"Cyber is tremendously difficult" to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. "Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf." Why? "Because it's funded, it's hot and it's sexy."

This is why the problem, which existed long before 9/11, gets worse inexorably over time:  the latest crisis du jour becomes simply the newest layer of effort added on top of all the rest (in PNM, this was my explanation for how America's "national security interests" mushroom over time).  Nobody and nothing ever get downgraded or truly eliminated because, once created, they take on a life of their own, with all sorts of bureaucrats and contractors protecting their programs.  My favorite example is missile defense, which is now being touted in op-eds as our great response to North Korea and Iran.  Not exactly how it started out, but heh, you work with what life gives you.

I don't mean to pooh-pooh the piece, which is very good and certainly rare enough in these days of tight budgets in the MSM.  I just find the target too easy and too big, and, as I said above, I don't think this kind of reporting stands much chance of having any real impact because the whole long war mindset regarding transnational terrorism is too strong to crack right now, both for legitimate and illegitimate reasons. Everybody will decry all right, but nothing will be done.  Even with the push to cut defense by untold billions over the next X years, a lot of this stuff will remain sacred.

And that's a shame, but the reporting here is all accurate.  It's too big, too redundant, and too useless to justify the resource diversion.  The investment should be in resilience in the face of bad things happening in this complex world, not intelligence fantastically tasked with preventing bad things from happening in the first place.  There's real money to be made in the former, and way too much to be wasted on the latter.

Chart of the day: dropping defense budges in Europe

Apologize for grubbiness of scan.  WSJ online version didn't include the charts, and all I had was my marked up version.

Point is simple enough:  none of our traditional allies feature anything but seriously declining defense budgets, and with our own budget coming up huge strains, it's clear we need new friends if we're going to continue playing the role of military superpower.  Indispensable?  Yes.  Sufficient?  No.

Those ads you only see in Washington

WAPO piece on the unique DC advertising culture whereby major defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin, hawk major platforms like new cars:

In the market for a shiny new combat ship? If so, you might be interested in the ads appearing in Metro stations around Washington. "The shape of littoral dominance has a familiar look," Lockheed Martin says over a photo of a sleek naval vessel cutting the waves.

Or how about a nice attack helicopter? Boeing may have just the thing. In a full-page ad in the Hill newspaper, it brags that its AH-64D Apache "is the most powerful and effective combat helicopter in the world."

Tanker planes, light tactical vehicles, jet fighters -- you won't see this kind of hardware advertised in Kansas City or Cleveland, or in Moscow or Beijing. Only in Washington are multibillion-dollar war machines marketed like soft drinks and cellphones. These days, the products of the military-industrial complex are appearing in can't-miss-'em ads in The Washington Post, in Capitol Hill publications such as Roll Call and the Hill, on posters and billboards in Metro stations and even on local radio.

The ads are seen by many but are intended for just a few. With two of the largest defense contracts ever on the verge of being decided, the targets are the several hundred -- and in some cases, several dozen -- people who determine how billions of federal defense dollars will be spent. That means people in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon, as well as a fringe of "influencers" working in think tanks, trade organizations and the media.

Everyone else just seems mystified.

As someone who travels to DC often and usually uses the Metro, I always delight in these ads.  They're just so weird and relevant at the same time.

Naturally, they tend toward the Leviathan side of the house.  Why?  The SysAdmin stuff is all over the news, so it's important to remind decision-makers that this stuff still needs to be bought in some measure.

Oh, how the locus on competition has shifted

graphic here

WSJ story where the headline just made me laugh.

It read, “Carriers Go To Battle Over Faster Networks.”

When I first glanced at it, I thought it was a story about naval technology—you know, big decks!

Instead, it was about Google v Apple.

That tells you something about the world we live in, a world in which radical Islam pales in comparison to the rise of the global middle class—where all the real battles will take place and virtually none of them will involve any kinetics.

The China model of crime spreads

pic here

Wherever the Chinese go globally, they tend to enclave themselves far more than any other nationality.  That kind of closed community-atmosphere is perfect for criminal activity, making it all that much harder for the local cops to penetrate illicit networks—as Italian cops are discovering.

With the mafia still entrenched in Sicily and the southern portion of Italy, it’s the Chinese triads who have moved into central and northern Italy, where previously the mob was decimated through effective prosecution.

You know that old bit about “carrying coal to Newcastle?”  Well, it don’t get any better than exporting mafia to Italy.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Italian police go after the triads.  They certainly have the experience and will, so maybe they’ll teach the world a thing or two about how to do this right.

Another take on cleaning up Brazil's favelas with better policing

Economist story.

Starts with "City of God" (2002) film reference to Rio's rundown Cidade de Deus housing project, where a gang of drug traffickers kept 60k residents in lives of constant fear.  The film cemented Rio's reputation for lawless favelas (a Brazilian term for tightly-packed slums), as well as its sad decay after the country moved the capital to Brasilia in 1960.

With the Olympics teed up for 2016, Rio now seems to be undergoing a renaissance:

Last year the police tool control of Cidade de Deus--this time for keeps, they say.  A force of 318 officers, backed by 25 patrol cars, is based in a new community-police station in a side street between two fetid, litter-strewn drainage channels.  The result has been dramatic.  IN 2008 there were 29 murders in Cidade de Deus.  So far this year there has been just one . . . Other crime has fallen too.

A key factor:  getting all levels of government to chip in and double the salaries of front-line cops. The focus: to formalize the existing economic activity with legality and infrastructure.

Sounds like your basic COIN, yes?

The external driver:  Rio becomes the hub for off-shore oil development of that huge oil field just found, plus there's those Olympics and all the construction triggered.

Rio has a ways to go, but the trend is positive.

Good globalization = $20T in annual trade; bad globalization = $130B in annual criminal trade

Fabulous chart in FT story meant to disconcert you: global crime gangs' muscle growing--yet another thing for me to fear!

So I look through the article for the summing up dollar figure and get $130B, with $105B of that being drugs.

Then I check the size of the global economy, because the number I have stuck in my head from my NewRulesSets.Project days with Cantor at the start of the 2000s is $30T.  Well, the global economy is now twice that size, or about $60T, and despite conventional wisdom, all that money didn't go into the pockets of Goldman Sachs (about $12B in profit in 2009).

Of that global economy, about 1/3rd is traded ever year.  For example, in 2008 (and 2010's numbers will be roughly similar after recovering from 2009) the global merchandise trade (stuff) came to $16T and the service trade was almost $4T, so a total of $20T (see this WTO report).  So you put $130B over $20T and get rid of all those matching zeros, and your equation becomes 130 over 20,000 (please catch any mistakes here), and when I reduce it further, I come up with 65 over 10,000, then 13 over 2,000, and then 1 over about 150.

And then my heart rate slows and I don't feel so freaked out. Global crime equals less than 1% of global trade?

Now let's assume the UN calculations are way off, and the global crime numbers are 5 times larger!

So I start with $650B and I come up with a fraction more like 1/30. Does anyone expect to live in a world where there isn't crime that equals 3% of legal economic trade (understanding that means the UN stats miss 80% of all global crime)

Again, please tell me where my math is wrong.

Does it sound to you like criminal gangs are running the world?

Yes, there are aggregate estimates of illicit activity that run higher than the UN's focus here, and they're always bulked up overwhelmingly by estimates of illegal financial flows (for example, there are credible estimates of $1T a year of illicit financial flows from developing to developed markets). If you want to run with such aggregate estimates, fine, but the UN's record on statistics is pretty good, and here I'm comparing apples (smuggling stuff and people) to apples (legal trade in merchandise and services), not adding in money flows and then comparing that fantastically boosted total to just global trade--a typical misleading trick of those who like to scare people. Because if you add up global financial flows, you're into a whole new scale and if you engage in legitimate apples-to-apples comparisons there, your percentages will yield the same small fractions.

Anti-ship cruise missiles: dominant threat of tomorrow--as always

Economist Technology Quarterly story on a bugaboo I've been hearing about since the early 1990s: anti-ship cruise missiles will rule the naval warfare landscape of tomorrow.

I've always been fuzzy on how this would work.  Great power navies firing missile at each other and somehow not triggering unwanted escalation toward nuclear exchanges?  Or maybe it's regional rogues who nail a great-power ship or two and, on that basis, win the larger conflict?  Or the lucky shot by terrorists that changes the global correlation of forces?

Every scenario I've ever come across has this fait accompli logic: we're denied "access" to some fight because our ships can't get in close out of fear of anti-ship missiles and then the baddies win the entire day--lightning quick.

If this sounds an awful lot like the Taiwan scenario, you've been paying attention.  

Then there's the whole closing-the-Straits-of-X scenarios, where cruise missiles shut down major lanes of global trade for days/weeks/months on end, but these get too fantastic almost from the start.  If it takes 10 or more subsonic missiles to sink a well-defensed warship (a standard cited in the piece), then imagine how many it would take to sinker a big-ass tanker.

Then there's the transnational swarmers easily defeating a nation-state foe, with the big example being Hezbollah firing a subsonic missile in 2006 at an Israeli corvette and killing four sailors. This is held up as a stellar example of "poor man's way" of sea power (a STRATFOR comment that reflects that for-profit company's typically clever fear-mongering).

In this way, we are meant to be impressed to Iran's growing seapower of fast boats and so on.  

But whenever I read these scary reports, I'm always impressed by the fact that all the relevant technology is being developed by great powers and then exporting to medium sized powers, who buy the weapons primarily out of fear of the same great powers. So in the end, we've got a lot of navies getting all excited--in weird isolation from the world around them--about the possibility that they're going to get to sink each other's ships like crazy in coming, dreamt-of naval battles.

Oh, and then there's the Iranians shutting down Hormuz or Hezbollah ruling . . . I dunno, the Eastern Med for 20 mins some afternoon.

So you're left with globalization's major-economy navies worrying about the residual possibilities of great-power warfare (the 65 year moratorium looks stronger than ever), medium powers worrying about great powers, great powers worrying about "poor man's" sea-power-seeking navies built around fast boats, and that old lucky-shot-by-terrorists scenario.  And all this is meant to scare me into what, exactly?

I guess it should scare me into stop building my fleet primarily around huge platforms and start moving toward swarm mentalities.  

Or I can continue building tricked-out capital ships and have my industrial complex sell missiles abroad and then fret about the chances that those trends will eventually collide--undoubtedly with Trafalgar-like, world-empire-shattering impact. US Navy ships are so easy to sink, that's why they drop like flies all the time.

Is it just me?  Or does naval thinking seemed trapped in some strange land of yesteryear?  I mean, how far back do we have to go to find significant naval battles to justify this seemingly brain-dead thinking? When you get down to citing Iran and Hezbollah in your article on "peril on the sea," doesn't it seem like the conversation has gone stale?  Here we live though the great age of globalization, and the state of imaginative thinking in naval strategy is running around with your hair on fire over cruise missiles.

Ah, but I neglect the great Sino-American battles to come. Those should play well on major financial markets.

Then again, I am so naive.