Humanitarian Intervention

Wednesday, February 12th, 2014

Modern humanitarian intervention begins with the Biafran war in 1968:

It is a fascinating moment because it is where the framework — the contemporary filter through which we now perceive all humanitarian tragedies — was first constructed.

The Eastern part of Nigeria had declared independence and called their new state Biafra. In response the Nigerian army attacked the rebel government. Things went very badly for the Biafrans, but no-one in the West cared. While the British government happily sold lots of arms to the Nigerians.

But then the Biafran government found a very odd Public Relations firm in Geneva, called MarkPress who set out to change the way people in Europe saw the war.

I have discovered a great documentary in the BBC archive which tells what then happened. It is shot inside the PR company’s offices and interviews the men running the campaign.

It shows how they turned a war that people saw simply as a political conflict in a faraway land into something heart-wrenching and dramatic.

It became a moral battle between evil politicians in Nigeria — aided by cynical and corrupt politicians in London who were selling the arms — and the innocent victims of the starvation caused by the war.

The British newspapers went for it in a big way. And a new movement grew up. It was driven by moral outrage, fuelled by a disgust with the old British political class who were prolonging the suffering through arms sales.

Celebrities joined in. They held a 48 hour fast in Piccadilly Circus over Christmas. Here are some frame grabs from the news report. The one that shows what was really happening is the placard that says BATTLE OF BRITAIN 1940 — BIAFRA ’69.

Biafran War Protests

The conflict was being fitted to the template that was going to define the whole movement. It was the Good War. A justified resistance against evil to protect the innocent wherever they were being threatened in the world.

Just like the struggle against fascism in the Second World War.

But Biafra also revealed the terrible dangers of this simplified view of wars — dangers that would always haunt the humanitarian movement.

[...]

[T]he aid that resulted from the wave of sympathy that these images created had a terrible unforeseen consequence. It prolonged a futile war for a further 18 months — and thus contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Gun Control in Sochi

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

The Soviet Union may have handed out tens of millions of AKs with few strings attached, but Russia itself enforces strict gun control — even on Olympic biathletes:

When biathletes arrived in Sochi, their rifles were taken off their planes and delivered directly to the biathlon venue, which is the only place they can access them. Biathletes must sign out their rifles when they arrive and sign them back in before they leave. Every box of ammunition must also be signed out and accounted for.

The measures are similar to those used at previous Olympics, and Russia isn’t the only country with such tight controls. But it is among the strictest. “There aren’t a lot of other countries like that,” said U.S. biathlete Sara Studebaker.

For American biathletes in particular, it represents a stark change from what they are accustomed to at home.

“In the U.S., for a biathlon rifle, it’s really pretty simple,” Team USA’s Leif Nordgren said. “To be honest, no one really seems to care too much. When you’re done with training, you throw your rifle into the back of the car and bring it into the house.”

There are reasons biathletes like to take their rifles home or back to a hotel. Away from the mountain, many of them hang sheets of paper with five black dots on bedroom or living room walls, which mimics the targets in a race. They use them for a training method called dry firing, in which they aim at the dots with their rifles unloaded and pull the trigger.

Before a typical race day, they can do this casually — before bed the previous night or just after breakfast, for instance. But at the Olympics, the security measures bring those routines to a halt once biathletes step out of the competition venue. “You just kind of adjust your schedule,” said U.S. biathlete Lanny Barnes.

Competitive shooters perform far, far more dry fire than live fire.

Knowingly Fighting a Lost Cause

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

Poul Andersen’s science-fictional hero, Dominic Flandry, had a problem, Pseudo-Polymath notes:

Mr Flandry’s problem was he was knowingly fighting a lost cause, his people (a large human dominated stellar empire) was failing due to cultural decadence. He knew it was a lost cause, but soldiered on regardless. This post reminds me of that. As does this one. And this one.

A is for Atom

Tuesday, February 11th, 2014

A is for Atom was part of the BBC’s Pandora’s Box series about politics and science:

The film shows that from very early on — as early as 1964 — US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.

The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.

Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.

In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.

And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked — but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.

As one of the AEC scientists says in the film:

“We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn’t have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn’t admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good”

And again the warnings were ignored by senior members of the Agency and the industry.

The Coming Anarchy

Monday, February 10th, 2014

Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy appeared in The Atlantic 20 years ago. Now he notes that the anarchy unleashed in the Arab world has other roots not adequately dealt with in his original article:

The End of Imperialism. That’s right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities — both artificial and not — and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population — a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days — a millennium ago — when the West was called “Christendom.” Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire — whose whole identity was infused with Christianity — had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state — with anarchy sometimes the result.

RAS-12 Shotgun and Shotshells

Monday, February 10th, 2014

The traditional shotshell has a flat nose and a rimmed base, which makes it hard to feed from a pistol- or rifle-style box magazine, but Intrepid Tactical Solutions’ new RAS-12 shotgun — a 12-gauge upper on an AR-10 — uses a ball-tipped rimless round — full of 00 buckshot rather than .308 ball:

RAS-12 shotshell

Tyler Kent

Monday, February 10th, 2014

Long before the recent intelligence leaks, a young US State Department employee named Tyler Kent stole and copied thousands of Top Secret cables from his job in the code room of the US embassy in London. His goal was to keep America from getting involved in a disastrous foreign war — the one we now call World War II:

Kent explains how his aim was to release the secret cables during the Presidential election campaign in 1940. Over 80% of the US population didn’t want to go into the war — and the cables showed President Roosevelt secretly promising Churchill help against Germany.

What can a mere rifle do?

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

The target analysis methodology US Special Ops forces use is unclassified, Weapons Man notes:

It is described by the acronym CARVER. That stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability. A brief definition of Criticality might be: “how critical is the targeted node to the target system, or to the enemy’s war-making capability?”

[...]

CARVER works as well when planning to protect or defend a target. For instance, it systematizes developing CT countermeasures or securing a target against exploitation by reconnaissance, surveillance, or attack. The primary product of CARVER is a thorough understanding of the target, target system or target complex by the assigned team, but they also produce a target folder. (In the real world, they’re usually updating a preexisting target folder, which might be a half-century old). One of the documents they produce, for each target, is a CARVER matrix which can be unweighted, but in the real world is usually drafted with weighted values. The weights depend on overall mission objectives and priorities. (For example, CARVER values are weighted differently for a clandestine attack in a time of nominal peace, than they are for an overt attack in time of war). This example of a simple, unweighted CARVER Matrix is from Appendix B to FM 34-36.

CARVER Matrix from FM 34-36 Appendix B

Herschel Smith describes the terrorist attack that America cannot absorb:

The most vulnerable structure, system or component for large scale coal plants is the main step up transformer — that component that handles electricity at 230 or 500 kV. They are one-of-a-kind components, and no two are exactly alike. They are so huge and so heavy that they must be transported to the site via special designed rail cars intended only for them, and only about three of these exist in the U.S.

They are no longer fabricated in the U.S., much the same as other large scale steel fabrication. Its manufacture has primarily gone overseas. These step up transformers must be ordered years in advance of their installation. Some utilities are part of a consortium to keep one of these transformers available for multiple coal units, hoping that more will not be needed at any one time. In industrial engineering terms, the warehouse min-max for these components is a fine line.

On any given day with the right timing, several well trained, dedicated, well armed fighters would be able to force their way on to utility property, fire missiles or lay explosives at the transformer, destroy it, and perhaps even go to the next given the security for coal plants. Next in line along the transmission system are other important transformers, not as important as the main step up transformers, but still important, that would also be vulnerable to attack. With the transmission system in chaos and completely isolated due to protective relaying, and with the coal units that supply the majority of the electricity to the nation incapable of providing that power for years due to the wait for step up transformers, whole cites, heavy industry, and homes and businesses would be left in the dark for a protracted period of time, all over the nation.

As bad as the recent Metcalf, California attack was, it could have been worse. The West Point Combating Terrorism Center found that an attack on well-chosen nodes could take down one of the three regional grids powering the US.

Groups Responsible for Most Terrorist Attacks in the United States, 2001-2011

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

When you look at the numbers, you may be surprised by the groups responsible for the most terrorist attacks in the United States in the last decade:

Groups Responsible for Most Terrorist Attacks in the United States, 2001-2011

The Engine of Consumerism

Saturday, February 8th, 2014

It is impossible to over-emphasise the influence Bill Bernbach (“We try harder!”) had on advertising, Adam Curtis says — and on the whole engine of consumerism:

His central idea was to encourage people to be “different” — and what that led to was a new dynamic in society.

If you want to be different you are always running away from the others who are also trying to be different — and thus become like you. So you are continually searching for something newly different, something Hip.

And that required an endless stream of new — different — products. As Thomas Frank puts it very eloquently in The Conquest of Cool:

“Bernbach’s enthusiasm for the idea of ‘difference’ became the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced

Hip was indeed the solution to the problems of the mass society, although not in the way its ideologues had intended”

But one could argue that it is precisely that continual search for difference that has led us into the static world of today. If consumerism continually scours the margins of society for rebellious or contrary notions and then immediately turns them into stuff to sell — it ironically becomes very difficult for new ideas to change society. Instead they tend to end up reinforcing it.

No Stress At All

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Chris Hernandez once participated in a raid on a crack house:

The owner of the house was about 60. His house was disgusting; no electricity or running water, trash everywhere, roaches scattering at our approach, holes rotted through the floor, buckets full of urine and feces in the kitchen. An officer asked him, “How can you stand to live like this?”

The man answered, very articulately, “Officer, I have no stress. I don’t have to work. I get free food. I get free money. If I want crack, I let a dealer use my house to deal from, and he gives me free crack. If I want sex, I let a crack whore stay here and she lets me have sex with her. I have no stress at all.”

Darkness is the norm

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Darkness is the norm, Jim points out:

Copper production shows three peaks: The Roman Empire in the west, the Song Dynasty, and modernity.

The Roman Empire in the west and the Song Dynasty had about seven times the preceding and following level of copper production, thus while those civilizations were going concerns, they had far more production and wealth than the rest of the world put together.

When the Roman Empire in the West fell, its GDP dropped about a hundred fold.

So, looking at the past few thousand years, the norm has been relatively brief periods of civilization in relatively small parts of the world.

I would guess the problem is that the state lacks the cohesion and self discipline necessary to refrain from devouring civil society, and anarchy lacks the cohesion necessary to keep the roads safe and property rights secure. Technology can advance during anarchic periods, often quite rapidly, but the amount of wealth, as indicated by copper production, shipwrecks, and such, tends to be very low indeed during such periods. Despotic states, on the other hand, have higher wealth, probably because they can make the roads safe over a large area, but are apt to end technological progress, and often reverse it.

Wings over Waziristan

Friday, February 7th, 2014

In 1919 there was a grand attempt to create a modern Islamist state in Afghanistan. It collapsed into civil war and horror, but the war against the British infidels continued in nearby Waziristan, where an RAF pilot took home-movie footage that would become — almost half a century later — Wings over Waziristan:

A young Wazir tribesman called Sayid Amir Noor Ali Shah from the village of Jhandu Khel fell in love with a Hindu girl — an heiress called Ram Kori — from Bannu. He persuaded her to run away with him, become a Muslim and marry him. The Hindus were furious and complained to the British authorities. The British sent soldiers to kidnap the girl and bring her back.

The Wazir tribe was furious, and a local hermit from the village of Ipi persuaded them to rise up in rebellion. He was known as the Faqir of Ipi and he used his charisma and religious reputation to unite the Wazir and the Mehsud tribes in a full-blown war against the British.

These were the two most reactionary forces — local maliks and the rural mullahs uniting together to try and force the British out. They had no other aim or vision. The British responded brutally — through what thay called “Air Control” — bombing the Waziristan villages.

In 1935 Group Captain Robert Lister of the RAF was sent out to fight in Waziristan. Lister was a keen amateur movie-maker. Home movie-making was just begining as a leisure activity and he had the most modern equipment available. He decided to take his camera and lots of film with him so that he could film the whole campaign including the bombing raids.

I don’t do nuthin’

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

Chris Hernandez shares a story from another officer:

Years later, in the late 90’s, an officer I worked with told me about a call he was on at a housing project. About three in the morning there was a fight. When the officer showed up he encountered a crowd cheering the fighters on. One of the people cheering was a healthy woman, about 40 years old, who we knew pretty well. She wasn’t a real troublemaker, but every time there was a late-night fight or shooting (which was several times a week), she’d be out there drinking a beer and enjoying the show.

Since the woman was a witness to the fight, the officer interviewed her. During the interview, he asked her, “Why do you just hang out here every night? Shouldn’t you have a job or something?”

The woman very calmly asked him, “Officer, how much money do you make?”

The officer told me he was surprised by the question. But he gave her an honest answer: his salary was about $38,000 a year.

She answered, “Well, I make almost as much as you do. And I don’t do nuthin’.”

Assault on California Power Station

Thursday, February 6th, 2014

I’m not surprised by last year’s assault on a California power station — just by the lack of media coverage until now:

The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.

Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.

To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.

[...]

The country’s roughly 2,000 very large transformers are expensive to build, often costing millions of dollars each, and hard to replace. Each is custom made and weighs up to 500,000 pounds, and “I can only build 10 units a month,” said Dennis Blake, general manager of Pennsylvania Transformer in Pittsburgh, one of seven U.S. manufacturers. The utility industry keeps some spares on hand.

[...]

Mr. Wellinghoff said a FERC analysis found that if a surprisingly small number of U.S. substations were knocked out at once, that could destabilize the system enough to cause a blackout that could encompass most of the U.S.

[...]

Overseas, terrorist organizations were linked to 2,500 attacks on transmission lines or towers and at least 500 on substations from 1996 to 2006, according to a January report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group, which cited State Department data.

This attack wasn’t the work of bored teenagers or drunk hunters:

At 12:58 a.m., AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut — in a way that made them hard to repair — in an underground vault near the substation, not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose. It would have taken more than one person to lift the metal vault cover, said people who visited the site.

Nine minutes later, some customers of Level 3 Communications, an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.

At 1:31 a.m., a surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.

The substation’s cameras weren’t aimed outside its perimeter, where the attackers were. They shooters appear to have aimed at the transformers’ oil-filled cooling systems. These began to bleed oil, but didn’t explode, as the transformers probably would have done if hit in other areas.

About six minutes after the shooting started, PG&E confirms, it got an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence, which is shown on video.

Four minutes later, at 1:41 a.m., the sheriff’s department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.

Riddled with bullet holes, the transformers leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, then overheated. The first bank of them crashed at 1:45 a.m., at which time PG&E’s control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.

Five minutes later, another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.

At 1:51 a.m., law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.

A PG&E worker, awakened by the utility’s control center at 2:03 a.m., arrived at 3:15 a.m. to survey the damage.

Grid officials routed some power around the substation to keep the system stable and asked customers in Silicon Valley to conserve electricity.

In a news release, PG&E said the substation had been hit by vandals. It has since confirmed 17 transformers were knocked out.

Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.

In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.

“They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack,” Mr. Wellinghoff said.