Month: January 2011

Egypt

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Paul Krugman sums up beautifully the reasons I’ve refrained from commenting on the recent protests in Egypt:

I don’t know anything, have no expertise, haven’t even ever looked at the economic situation. Hence, no posting. If there comes a point when I have something to say, I will.

I think, from what I can tell, I like the developments there and in Tunisia. But like the French Revolution, it’s too soon to tell what their final impact will be. As long as the United States can stay above the fray and above all not even hint at support for the Mubarak Regime, we’ll be doing the right thing.

Recommended Reading (2011-01-30)

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Anti-government protesters clash with police in downtown Cairo January 25, 2011.

– John Robb’s analysis of Mubarak’s survival strategy. “It’s to create a vacuum.  De-escalate and out-wait the protest.”

– Remarkably good breakdown and compilation of the usual cross-European (and transatlantic) stereotypes.

One Frenchman, an intelligent man; two Frenchmen, a violent altercations; three Frenchmen, a relationship.
One Englishman, an imbecile; two Englishmen, two imbeciles; three Englishmen, a great nation.
One German, a pig; two Germans, beer; three Germans, war.
One Italian, an artist; two Italians, a concert; three Italians, defeat.
One American, a drunk; two Americans, two drunks; three Americans, Prohibition.

– Huis ten Bosch is an enormous recreation of several Dutch cities in amusement park fashion. It’s located in Japan, naturally. Spike Japan takes you on a tour in three parts.

– At some point, Lee Sandlin’s very long essay “Losing the War” deserves a proper and comprehensive response, but for now… Just read it. It is amazing.

– The concept of the “elite” is being taken on from all quarters now. Particularly good examples at n+1 and The Atlantic.

– Did the poor cause the economic crisis? (Answer: no. But a good exploration anyways.)

And from the past week at Automatic Ballpoint:

Drezner’s talk on theories of international politics and zombies meets with great acclaim. My newest Fortnight piece is published. Massive new addition to the links page. And is the J-20 a bastard child of the F-117?

Whatever Happened, Happened

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My new piece at Fortnight, partially inspired by the events of the MV Mavi Mamara Gaza flotilla raid, is all about the facts and just the facts, ma’m. More specifically, it’s about how no one agrees on what should be indisputable, universally accepted truths. Reality itself is now up for debate.

On May 31, 2010, Israeli naval commandos rappelled onto a series of boats in an enemy flotilla that was attempting to run a blockade off of Gaza. Provoked, Jerusalem had no choice but to respond to and interdict the flotilla. Met with hostile resistance as they boarded the boats—rappelling down from helicopters—the Israeli troops responded in kind, and neutralized the terrorist threat.

Or: On May 31, 2010, a band of Jewish thugs murdered several innocent protesters who were on a mission of mercy to the blighted Gaza strip. In an attempt to persuade the world of the injustices and cruelty being perpetrated on the innocent peoples of Palestine, Israel proved that it could not tolerate even peaceful protest, and violated its own principles of free speech by slaughtering those attempting to exercise their rights.

But, how about we phrase it this way: On May 31, 2010, a bunch of people were killed and injured on boats in the Mediterranean. Two parties, clearly at odds with each other, both overreacted and some people died because of it.

Nobody wins.

Sadly, time will heal little, and temporal distance from the Gaza flotilla incident will do even less to clarify what happened and why. Who is correct in their interpretation of history?

***

Today, there is no single agreed-upon history from which to gauge correct accounts of political events. Facts are debatable. Ignorance and willful denial can coexist in a single narrative. Conspiracy theories and epistemic alternate realities (or, to use the recent turn of phrase, a certain “epistemic closure”) run rampant and unchecked. Cultural differences in conceptualizing time even play a part. And this all assumes there is an active desire and search for truth; many news consumers now cope with a world in which shoving their collective past down the “memory hole” is de rigueur.

Read the rest over at Fortnight.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

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A classic example of realist IR theory at work.

In the late summer of 2009, Dan Drezner came out with a delightful piece in Foreign Policy called “How International Relations Theory Would Cope with a Zombie Uprising.” It’s really quite clever, exploring the effects of a zombie apocalypse as seen through the eyes of  a structural realist, a liberal institutionalist, a social constructivist, and so forth.

Apparently, Drezner was so pleased with the idea that he ran with it and turned it into a book: Theories of International Politics and Zombies. And for the launch of the book, he’s doing some sort of speaking tour. I had the pleasure of seeing him talk last night, courtesy of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. There’s no way I could have passed it up – it combines two of my great pleasures in life. International relations theory and the walking dead.

Having an open bar was an excellent call for an event like this. There’s only so much gravitas you can hold while discussing the finer points of the constructivist critique; namely, that zombies “are what we make of them.” No single paradigm can accurately model zombie behavior, of course. Realism assumes that somewhere down the line zombie states will emerge. Liberalism sees the possibility of cooperation with the zombies. Constructivism thinks that the zombies can be socialized. None of these will hold true; the closest real-world comparison for the tactics and effects of massed zombies would include assymmetrical warfare, global transnational terrorism, and the spread of communicable disease.

Drezner was great, peppering his talk with clips from Night of the Living Dead, both the original Dawn of the Dead and the remake, Shaun of the Dead, and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Also getting heavy mention was Max Brooks’ World War Z, which I was especially glad to hear as it meant I could ask a question about the Battle of Yonkers being a failure of RMA without having to explain the former. (Answer: not a failure of RMA, but a reflection of the bureaucratic morass at the Pentagon – the intransigence of Standard Operating Procedure.) Here are Drezner’s general conclusions:

  • Thucydides is still relevant in a post-zombie world
  • The zombie canon is too pessimistic (from Patient Zero to the apocalypse always takes about ten minutes)
  • International relations paradigms probably suffer from intellectual rigidity
  • Analytic eclecticism has its advantages to explaining a zombie uprising

And now, some highlights from the Q&A. Drezner’s zombie contingency plan:

If you don’t hear from me for a week, pack up and move to New Zealand.

The zombies’ effect on existing conflicts:

If zombies broke out in Belgium, you know the Flemish would throw the Walloons under the bus.

We would see a large exodus/mass migration from urban centers to far more rural areas:

Richard Florida would be devastated. And eaten.

A protracted counter-zombie campaign would most likely lead to a ‘counter-zombie policy fatigue’. We might, perhaps, come to take the same view of such a strategy as we eventually did of Prohibition. Drezner also suggested his next book, in keeping with Keohane’s After Hegemony, might simply be titled After Aliens.

Anyways, it was a great event, and many thanks to the Chicago Council for putting it on. Especially as a Young Professionals event. I picked up a copy of his book there (and had him sign it. “To Graham: hope you survive!”); expect a review soon.

Blogroll Update, Vol. Whatever

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The list keeps growing, and growing, and growing (just realized that I haven’t updated the master list since October). I finally had to prioritize different feeds, I just had too much to keep up with. But definitely try out Yahoo Pipes for an excellent way to filter and scrub your feeds. Still, the days of not having 1000+ unread items are over.

Friends & Colleagues

General News Sources

Strategy/Diplomacy/War

History

Strategy

East Asia

Politics/Economics/Society

Left

Neutral

Right

Iconoclast

Economics

Policy/Society

Maps/Infographics/Geography

Science/Technology/Futurism

Culture

Urban

Boston

Humor

Comics

Sports

Born in the USA

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An F-117 flying over Nellis AFB, Nevada, 2002.

This story, if indeed true, is rather frightening:

On March 27, during the height of NATO’s air war on Serbia, a very smart and very lucky Serbian air-defense commander…managed to shoot down an attacking U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighter-bomber…

The destroyed F-117’s left wing, canopy and ejection seat — plus Zelko’s helmet — wound up in a Belgrade aviation museum, but most of the rest of the 15-ton jet was gathered up by farmers living around the crash site…

Bach in March 1999, the F-117’s wreckage was possibly still cooling when foreign agents sprang into action. “At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,” Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, then the top Croatian officer, told the Associated Press.

“The destroyed F-117 topped that wish-list for both the Russians and Chinese,” added Zoran Kusovac, a military consultant based in Rome.

David Axe suggests that there is a good portion of F-117 DNA in the recently unveiled Chinese J-20. As he points out, it would also go a long way towards explaining the relatively sudden retirement of the barely 30-year-old F-117 in 2008.

But it does raise the question of future incidents. Out of 168 F-22s, already three have crashed (albeit all within United States territory). What happens when we lose one elsewhere? What if it’s in a combat zone? It sounds like the most helpful piece to the Chinese was learning the composition of the F-117’s skin coating and other advanced composite materials. And those are hard to self-destruct.

The pilot of the F-117, Lt. Col. Dale Zelko, was rescued remarkably quickly, but little interest was shown in recovering the wreckage. If the J-20’s lineage can in fact be traced to the F-117, that’s a mistake unlikely to ever be made again.

Recommended Reading 2011-01-23

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A Tunisian demonstrator holds his breadstick like a weapon in front of riot police during a protest against the country's new government in Tunis on January 18, 2011.

– Abandon the internet! It’s time to start thinking about its successor.

– The White House, through the Commerce Department, is pushing for internet IDs. I suppose Commerce is probably a slightly less troubling agency than the NSA or DHS, but still. While I welcome anything that might stop YouTube comments, this is not a solution to anything. Even the master password system under discussion is not something anyone should be interested in (via the Daemon Technology Feed).

– Popular Science suggests an alternative ‘Terminator scenario‘. The machines won’t necessarily gain sentience and rise up against us, but instead:

We would build powerful military systems that would “take over the large key functions that are done exclusively by humans” and then discover too late that the machines simply aren’t up to the task. “We blink,” he said, “and 10 years later we find out the technology wasn’t far enough along.”

– A really profound and thought-provoking piece on digital life after death. Time to prepare a virtual will.

– Historians have ceded the debate over an American “character” to sociologists (ew). Time to reclaim the mantle, says David M. Kennedy.

http://futurismic.com/2011/01/05/rushkoff-abandon-internet-build-its-successor/AB

More Island Chains

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Courtesy of The Globe and Mail (and via Information Dissemination) comes this infographic of the range of Chinese naval operations:

Now, if both this map and the “Island Chain Theory” of Chinese strategy are accepted as true, then perhaps China is not as far along as recently thought. China has uncontested control of neither the South China Sea nor the Luzon-Okinawa-Kiyakyushu chain. But is that slow progress the result of capabilities or intent?

The PLAN has grown more than was previously thought, but much of that growth has come from additional submarines – not the most effective offensive weapon to claim and hold territory. Still, it would not be especially difficult for China to assert themselves more unilaterally in the South China Sea especially – the other ASEAN nations have virtually no navies and little recourse to international fora to decry Chinese expansionism.

And still, while Chinese leadership seems to disdain international standards and mores, there is some respect for general global sentiment towards the country. Isolated instances of repression, jailing dissidents, and other such common phenomena in the People’s Republic barely make it to the A section of major newspapers, and usually just as a sidebar item. Most people would hardly notice unless they were looking for it.

But if a major operation were launched – like one to take and secure the Paracels and the Spratlys, and to start building on them – you can be sure the international outrage would be deafening. And that seems to be what CCP leadership hates the most. Not necessarily being lectured or talked to about human rights, but being yelled at. Regardless, the Chinese position vis-a-vis the first island chain should be seen as soft. It may look underdefended and contested, but the PLAN could easily seize key points along it in a heartbeat. For the moment, at least, there is just no need to do so.

Mea Culpa

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Apologies are again in order for the quiet and lack of posting around here. I started a new job a couple weeks ago (just retail, nothing to be proud of), and so that’s been keeping me pretty busy. I’m fairly certain that Tom Ricks can’t be counted as a reader of this blog, but he’s noticed a similar dimming across the entire military blogosphere.

Let’s hope it doesn’t continue, and I’ll be posting when I can. Unfortunately, it’s been pretty hard to keep up with the very current events, so I’ll most likely refrain from commenting on them. Of course, that leaves much more room for original thought.