The calibration of destruction

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

The Economist reports on how smart bombs are changing warfare:

During the first Gulf war, in 1991, American warplanes had to drop an average of six 450kg satellite-guided bombs to destroy a tank or a small building. During the second war, 12 years later, a similar attack required bombs half that size, and fewer of them. Today 100kg bombs would suffice, because guidance systems are so good that individual rooms, as opposed to entire buildings, can be aimed at.
[...]
One defence contractor, Israel Military Industries, makes a 225kg bomb, the MPR-500, that can hammer through several storeys of a building and explode on a chosen floor. This feat means triggering the detonation about two milliseconds after the bomb hits the ceiling above the doomed storey. The bomb can be programmed to do this just seconds before it is dropped. Such precision means it is sold as a replacement for ordnance two or more times its size.

The CBU-105 is the kind of hardware war nerds love:

On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber attacked the first 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass. It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers of both sides — and, soon enough, military observers everywhere.

While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks.

The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.

The CBU-105, however frightening, may actually point the way toward less violent warfare. Cluster munitions — which release bomblets to cover a wide area — are banned or tightly restricted by an international convention. But the CBU-105 and its cousins, known as sensor-fused weapons, are considered legal because very few discs remain unexploded on the battlefield. Those that fail to detect a target are supposed to self-destruct in the air. The trigger batteries of those that do not will quickly die, so duds are unlikely to kill civilians later.

Crucially, the manufacturer of the CBU-105, Textron Defense Systems, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is improving sensors to allow the weapon to distinguish the heat signatures of cars, buses and homes from those of military hardware. If there is such a thing as a humanitarian bomb, this might be it.

I’m not sure what role that plays in counter-insurgencency, but it sure is a whiz-bang gizmo. Emphasis on the bang, I suppose.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Pink Panthers

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Matt McAllester of the GlobalPost claims that battle-hardened veterans of Yugoslavia’s breakup have turned to crime full-time — as real-life Pink Panthers:

Each member of the gang did his or her job perfectly. The attractive young woman seduced the son of the jewelry store owner in Rome to find out where the safe was in the owner’s house. She also discovered that the owner needed builders for repairs. Some of the others secured the renovation contract and cased the house. The get-away driver spent weeks learning every one-way road and stop sign in downtown Rome. And eventually the safe-cracker, the smallest in the group, hid himself inside a false-bottomed chest that the others left on the balcony of a bedroom where the safe was located.

As luck would have it, he didn’t even have to break into the safe, which was hidden behind a painting. The jeweller’s other son left it open for 15 minutes, plenty of time for the diminutive safe-cracker to remove the diamonds and make his escape to the street, where the driver was waiting for him. Back in their rented apartment in Ostia, near the Fiumicino airport outside Rome, the gang met up and celebrated.

“That was one of the most beautiful jobs I’ve ever done,” the get-away driver said, smiling at the memory in an interview with GlobalPost at a seaside fish restaurant in the former Yugoslav republic of Montenegro late last year.

It sounds like a plot from Ocean’s Eleven. But the October 2001 robbery, described in detail by the driver — a rakish, multilingual career diamond thief — is exactly the sort of daring heist that a loosely affiliated group of 200 thieves from the former Yugoslavia has been pulling off with such frequency that Interpol has dubbed them the Pink Panthers. Since 1999, the criminals have stolen $340 million worth of jewelry in more than 160 robberies in at least 26 countries.

The Panthers have choreographed some spectacular jobs: In 2007, a group of men drove two cars through windows and into the forecourt of a mall in Dubai, racing out to rob a jewelry store of $3.4 million worth of jewels; in 2004 two men and two women raided a jewelry store in Tokyo, smashing a display cabinet and escaping into the bustling crowds with $30 million in jewels, in what was the biggest grossing robbery in Japan’s history; in 2003 two men stole £37 million in jewels from a diamond store in London. Only a fraction of those jewels have been recovered but police did find a 2.32 carat blue diamond ring hidden in a jar of face cream belonging to the girlfriend of one of the thieves, echoing a scene from the first Pink Panther movie starring Peter Sellers. A name — and something of a legend — was born.

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Permanent, Orderly, and Legitimate

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Robert Kaplan says, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite — notably excepting a few insightful individuals:

  • the scholar and former head of the State Department’s policy-planning staff George Kennan,
  • the Harvard historian Richard Pipes,
  • the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and
  • the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

SHOT Show Technology

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

The Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show featured a number of new technologies.

Armatix, for instance, is offering a pistol that only shoots if it’s near its matching wristwatch. I can’t imagine too many people will pay €7,000 for a .22 pistol that lights up green (or red) though.

More practically, Glock has updated its pistols:

Each one has a fiercely textured grip, a larger magazine release and interchangeable backstraps. There’s something new under the hood too. Each gun has a set of three springs to dampen recoil. When we shot the .40-caliber Glock 22, its kick was surprisingly soft.

This Burns scope sounds like technology I expected to see much earlier:

It has a laser rangefinder that can automatically adjust your sights to compensate for the fall of each bullet over long distances. Just point the crosshairs at the target, push a button on the side of the scope, and a bright red dot will show you exactly where the bullet will fall. We were able to easily hit targets at 400 and 700 meters without any experience at long-range rifle shooting.

The semi-auto civilian version of H&K’s 416, the MR556, should be out soon — but by then everyone will already have an assault rifle, right?

Threatening home invaders with apparently deadly force and then shooting them with tiny koosh balls does not strike me as “the most intelligent way to defend your family” — but that’s what Lightfield is selling:

Later this year, you will be able to buy rubber bullets for home defense. Lightfield has been selling these projectiles to law enforcement agencies and wildlife officials for years. Each round is filled with a soft projectile that resembles a koosh ball. They look like toys, because they’re made by a Chinese toy factory. The best thing about them is that they aren’t likely to kill someone even if they are fired at point blank range. They’re so soft that they’re almost incapable of penetrating the body.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

‘Forced Features’ Drive Up Hybrid Prices

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

The Union of Concerned Scientists — with all the credibility of the Super Friends — has released a Hybrid Scorecard that faults automakers for selling their fuel-efficient cars with forced features that drive up prices:

These features [DVD players, keyless entry systems, heated power mirrors and other pricey gadgets] are standard equipment, not options, and add an average of $3,000 to the bottom line. That’s on top of the “hybrid premium” that typically adds three to four grand to cover the cost of the electric motor and battery pack.

“Consumers shouldn’t be forced to take features on the hybrids and pay thousands of dollars more because manufacturers don’t want to offer them a choice,” said Don Anair, a senior analyst in the vehicles program at the union. “People are looking for fuel-efficient vehicles, and they shouldn’t be forced to pay thousands more for them.”

The automakers can only make so many hybrids, which use new technologies and exotic raw materials, so they can’t make up low margins with volume. If they took out all those “unnecessary” high-margin add-ons, they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, sell the cars for thousands less.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

In Command, But Out Of Control

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Lt. General Paul Van Riper (retired) is a fascinating character. Here he discusses being in command, but out of control:

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The Junior Meritocracy

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Jennifer Senior argues that kindergarten-admission tests are worthless. Or morally wrong. It’s not quite clear:

The beauty of a meritocracy is that it is not, at least in theory, a closed system. With the right amount of pluck and hard work, a person should be able to become whoever he or she is supposed to be. Only in an aristocracy is a child’s fate determined before it is born.

Yet in New York, it turns out that an awful lot is still determined by a child’s 5th birthday. Nearly every selective elementary school in the city, whether it’s public or private, requires standardized exams for kindergarten admission, some giving them so much weight they won’t even consider applicants who score below the top 3 percent. If a child scores below this threshold, it hardly spells doom. But if a child manages to vault over it, and in turn gets into one of these selective schools, it can set him or her on a successful glide path for life.

Consider, for instance, Hunter College Elementary School, perhaps the most competitive publicly funded school in the city. (This year, there were 36 applicants for each slot.) Four-year-olds won’t even be considered for admission unless their scores begin in the upper range of the 98th percentile of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which costs $275 to take. But if they’re accepted and successfully complete third grade (few don’t), they’ll be offered admission to Hunter College High School. And since 2002, at least 25 percent of Hunter’s graduating classes have been admitted to Ivy League schools. (In 2006 and 2007, that number climbed as high as 40.) Or take, as another example, Trinity School. In 2008, 36 percent of its graduates went to Ivy League schools. More than a third of those classes started there in kindergarten. Thirty percent of Dalton’s graduates went to Ivies between 2005 and 2009, as did 39 percent of Collegiate’s, and 34 percent of Horace Mann’s. Many of these lucky graduates wouldn’t have been able to go to these Ivy League feeders to begin with, if they hadn’t aced an exam just before kindergarten. And of course these advantages reverberate into the world beyond.

First, the beauty of a meritocracy is not openness for its own sake; it’s openness to talent, so that the best individual for the job gets the job. An inherited aristocracy would be a meritocracy if wisdom were perfectly heritable. It’s not, of course, but the Founding Fathers did expect a natural aristocracy to replace the artificial aristocracy in their new republic.

More importantly, Senior’s confusing cause and effect if she thinks that four-year-olds who score in the 98th percentile only go on to earn degrees from Ivy League schools because of their elite elementary and secondary schooling. She makes the same mistake later, after discussing expensive prep courses:

The practice of prepping can run families into the thousands of dollars, posing a clear disadvantage to those who can’t afford it. But the truth is, even without coaching, children coming from economically and culturally rich backgrounds do far better on these tests. And that’s a far more urgent reason to challenge the widespread reliance on them.

It’s the darnedest thing. The sons and daughters of wealthy doctors, lawyers, and MBAs keep outperforming “underprivileged” kids.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

A Policy of Unlimited Objectives

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Kissinger’s A World Restored, ostensibly about the end of the Napoleonic era, indirectly confronts the 1938 debacle at Munich, Robert Kaplan says, in which Chamberlain allowed Hitler to seize the Sudetenland. Here is what Kissinger wrote:

Those ages which in retrospect seem most peaceful were least in search of peace…. Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community.

Kaplan continues:

Kissinger declared, “It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is ‘good faith’ and ‘willingness to come to an agreement’”; in a revolutionary situation “each power will seem to its opponent to lack precisely these qualities.” In such circumstances many will see the early demands of a revolutionary power as “merely tactical” and will delude themselves that the revolutionary power would actually accept the status quo with a few modifications. Meanwhile, “Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists.”

“‘Appeasement,’” Kissinger concluded, “is the result of an inability to come to grips with a policy of unlimited objectives.”

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Leonardo da Vinci’s resume, written to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, in 1482, describes what the 30-year-old weapons-engineer could do:

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
  1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

  2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.

  3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.

  4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.

  5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.

  6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.

  7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

  8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.

  9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.

  10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.

  11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency — to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.

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Creating Cities From Scratch

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

American real-estate developer Stan Gale is building a South Korean city from scratch:

The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre “Central Park” modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. “It’s four days old!” he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

Experimental prototype community of tomorrow? I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before.

A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an “international business district” and an “aerotropolis” — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a “smart city,” studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its “Smarter Planet” religion.

It’s not quite clear what a “smart city” offers, but Cisco seems to think it should mean “telepresence”:

No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore’s Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.

Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco’s TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You’ve heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities — water, power, traffic, telephony — into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.

In case you missed it, Gale announced plans to roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. We’ll see how that works out.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

DIY Streamliner Motorcycle

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” Allert Jacobs has modified a Honda Innova to get 199 miles per gallon:

The Honda Innova is no slouch out of the box, returning 133 mpg from a 125cc engine producing a whopping 9 horsepower. But the Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” as EcoModder calls him in its write-up, couldn’t leave well enough alone.

He’s put in a lot of miles on recumbent bicycles and knows a thing or two about aerodynamics, so the first thing he did was convert the Inova to a recumbent by moving the seat waaaay down on the bike’s step-through frame and moving the footpegs. That and a simple fairing boosted the bike’s top speed from 56 mph to 69 mph. Together with taller gearing, Jacobs raised his fuel economy to 156 mpg.

But why stop there? Jacobs spent several months designing and building the full fairing, which splits in two vertically just behind the windshield so he can get in. While it looks like you’d blow right over with a sneeze, Jacobs claims the bike is stable even in a 40-mph crosswind.

The bike’s record is 214 mpg, and Jacobs says it averages 199. But he’s not done yet. He’s shooting for 235 mpg — which for those using the metric system is 1 liter per 100 kilometers.

If you travel 10,000 miles per year, going from 133 mpg to 235 mpg saves you 33 gallons of gas, or about $83, per year.

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Dropping Bayonet Training

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who’s in charge of overhauling Army training, says that “We were teaching Soldiers too much stuff,” in Basic Training — stuff that wasn’t mastered — and the result was task paralysis. So he wants to drop bayonet training:

Hertling, though, conceded that bayonet training is deeply ingrained in the Army culture.

“Some of these ideas would make old infantrymen turn over in their graves,” Hertling said.

Hertling also wants combatives or hand-to-hand fighting to de-emphasize grappling or basic wrestling moves. Instead, Soldiers need to learn to fight with their hands and use anything they can grab — whether it is a knife or stick — as a weapon, he added.

Recruits need to learn how to use their hands, the St. Louis native said. “A greater majority of recruits have never been in a fistfight,” he added.

The Army’s combatives training — that is, its hand-to-hand combat training — has three goals:

  1. To educate soldiers on how to protect themselves against threats without using their firearms
  2. To provide a non-lethal response to situations on the battlefield
  3. To instill the ‘warrior instinct’ to provide the necessary aggression to meet the enemy unflinchingly

As someone who trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I do nonetheless find it odd that the Army builds its program on more-or-less orthodox Gracie fundamentals — maintaining the mount, escaping the mount, maintaining the guard, passing the guard, etc. — but for the Army’s stated goals, it makes a fair bit of sense, because grappling is an excellent way to train warrior instinct, and it’s a legitimate alternative to lethal force — unlike, say, a knife or bayonet — even if it’s not designed for battlefield self-defense, like traditional Japanese jujutsu or modern Israeli krav-maga.

In reaction to the news, DefenseTech lamented the passing of bayonet training, and a few commenters mentioned a bayonet charge by British troops in Basra in 2004:

The battle began when over 100 Mahdi army fighters ambushed two unarmored vehicles transporting around 20 Argylls on the isolated Route Six highway near the southern city of Amarah. Ensconced in trenches along the road, the militiamen fired mortars, rocket propelled grenades, and machine gun rounds. The vehicles stopped and British troops returned fire. The Mahdi barrage caused enough damage to force the troops to exit the vehicles.The soldiers quickly established a defensive perimeter and radioed for reinforcements from the main British base at Amarah — Camp Abu Naji. Reinforcements from the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment assisted the Argyles in an offensive operation against the Mahdi militiamen. When ammunition ran low among the British troops, the decision was made to fix bayonets for a direct assault.

The British soldiers charged across 600 feet of open ground toward enemy trenches. They engaged in intense hand-to-hand fighting with the militiamen. Despite being outnumbered and lacking ammunition, the Argylls and Princess of Wales troops routed the enemy. The British troops killed about 20 militiamen in the bayonet charge and between 28 and 35 overall. Only three British soldiers were injured.This incident marked the first time in 22 years that the British Army used bayonets in action. The previous incident occurred during the Falklands War in 1982.

This is how one participant described it:

“I wanted to put the fear of God into the enemy. I could see some dead bodies and eight blokes, some scrambling for their weapons. I’ve never seen such a look of fear in anyone’s eyes before. I’m over six feet; I was covered in sweat, angry, red in the face, charging in with a bayonet and screaming my head off. You would be scared, too.”

Corporal Brian Wood
Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment

Posted in Martial Arts, War | No Comments »

60 Minutes on The Quiet Professionals

Monday, February 1st, 2010

60 Minutes spent two months with the quiet professionals training Afghan troops — and their performance is not inspiring:

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The Vice Guide to Liberia

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Even if you’re familiar with Liberia — and the Liberians’ gangsta-style assault tactics — the Vice Guide to Liberia is shocking:

The host summarizes the country’s recent history:

This is like a civil war on steroids, a post-apocalyptic armageddon with child soldiers smoking heroin, cross-dressing cannibals, systematic rape, it’s total hell on earth.

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Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Henry Kissinger’s first book, on the Napoleonic Wars, explains Kissinger’s foreign policy better than any of his memoirs, Robert Kaplan says:

Kissinger’s first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (1957), covers not the Nazi era but the latter part of the Napoleonic Wars and the efforts of European statesmen to build a durable peace afterward. The book’s principal character, the Austrian diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich — secretive, manipulative, and tragic in his world view — is often seen as the figure Kissinger took as a model, though Kissinger has denied it. Nevertheless, Munich and the Holocaust are ever-present in A World Restored.

Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany in 1938, was in the early 1950s trying to claw his way into the stuffy, Protestant-dominated sanctums of the East Coast foreign-policy establishment. He was not about to wear his trauma and his Jewishness on his sleeve, as it is fashionable to do now. Rather, he elegantly camouflaged them. In A World Restored, Napoleon plays the Hitlerite role, and Kissinger’s answer to the problem of mass evil is contrary to the instincts of liberal humanists. His argument is thus subtle, original, and, I believe, brave.

Court diplomacy of early-nineteenth-century Europe seemed quaint and irrelevant at the dawn of the thermonuclear age:

Even if the technology of war had changed, Kissinger implied, the task of statesmen remained the same: to construct a balance of fear among great powers as part of the maintenance of an orderly international system — a system that, while not necessarily just or fair, was accepted by the principal players as legitimate. As long as the system was maintained, no one would challenge it through revolution — the way Hitler in the 1930s, categorized by the thirty-year-old Kissinger as a “revolutionary chieftain,” did.

A world threatened by nuclear disaster could learn much from Metternich:

With the British Foreign Secretary, Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh, Metternich built an order so ingenious that from 1815, the year of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, to the outbreak of the First World War, a hundred years later, Europe knew no major conflicts, with the exception of the ten-month-long Franco-Prussian War, in 1870-1871. Thanks in significant measure to Metternich, who did everything in his power to forestall the advent of democracy and freedom in the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, Europe in 1914 saw peace and steady economic growth as natural and permanent conditions. Europe had thus lost that vital, tragic sensibility without which disaster is hard to avoid, and troops rushed onto the battlefields of Flanders in a fit of romanticism.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

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