Tim Ferriss interviews Arnold Schwarzenegger on psychological warfare and more:
What follows is the Brecher Two-Stage Martyr-Killer Theory of Insurgency:
The example that led me to this pattern (and which consumed a miserable decade of my life) is early 20th century Ireland. Imagine George Patton repeating his line, “No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country” to the handful of literary weirdos, sentimental Celticists, and assorted other freaks who had occupied downtown Dublin in the name of “…a 32-county, Irish-speaking Republic” on Easter Monday 1916.
What kind of response would Patton’s bad-ass pragmatism have gotten from the eager martyrs holding out in Dublin, waiting for the inevitable retaliation by the British Army? They were a strange group, but then most Europeans were a little insane around 1916, and this lot had decided it would be better to die in Dublin, which they actually knew and liked, than in some unpronounceable Flemish town on the Western Front. As Yeats said, “They…decided, ‘We will sell our lives at a better market” than the one run by the German machine guns and artillery.
So they sold their lives, as planned. The British Army, not in any mood to fuck around with this home-front insurgency in the middle of the fight of its life, shelled the occupied buildings, shot the survivors, and declared the matter closed.
So far, this looked like the worst debacle among debac-ulous Irish rebellions, which is saying something. But that’s where it gets interesting; that’s where the notion of effective martyrdom via tactical debacle starts to play itself out. Because, weirdly enough, these guys won. Nobody had managed to leave the British Empire by force since America did it in 1783, but Ireland did (26 counties’ worth, anyway) in 1922, just six years after those freaks got themselves killed in downtown Dublin.
And it was martyrdom that won, the whole cult of martyrdom. At first, Dubliners cursed and jeered the survivors of the Easter Rising — I mean, you’d be mad too if a handful of nutters had brought the world’s most powerful army’s revenge down on your home town. But then the songs started — and if you know the Irish, you know it’s all over once they start singing. Soon there were a half-dozen songs celebrating every martyr who died in 1916.
These pub songs were the social media of rural Ireland, circa 1920, and they were very effective. They inspired a whole generation of saner, smarter, more cold-blooded and effective revolutionaries thinking about how to try another rebellion — one that could actually succeed. A guy named Michael Collins came up with the concept of urban-guerrilla warfare, focusing on killing spies before going after soldiers, and next thing you know, Ireland’s independent, the first country to exit the Empire against the Empire’s will in over a century.
And this pattern is being repeated, right now, across the planet: A first-wave insurgency that seems insanely quixotic, totally doomed, useless…which then inspires a second insurgency, more effective, more cold-blooded, more interested in killing than in dying.
You can see the pattern in the weird differences between the first and second Intifadas against Israeli rule. The First Intifada, from 1987-1993, was mainly about Palestinians dying, often by choice, at the hands of much-better armed Israeli forces. Casualties were typically lopsided: 160 Israelis killed vs. more than 2000 Palestinian dead.
The image this first Intifada tried to engrave on the world media’s eyeball was of Palestinians, unarmed or with nothing but rocks, getting mowed down by expensive military vehicles. Again — it looked crazy, but it wasn’t. It was a typical first-stage sacrifice.
The Second Intifada, or “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” starting in 2000, involved armed Palestinians not just dying but killing. Casualties for this rebellion were much more evenly distributed: 1008 Israelis killed vs. 3034 Palestinians.
That’s a ratio of 3:1 (almost precisely 3:1, in fact), and though it may seem to favor the Israelis, it actually terrified them, because the better-armed occupying force expects something more like the 13:1 Palestinian/Israeli KIA of the First Intifada.
This two-stage formula is playing out right now, in parts of the world most people don’t pay much attention to — like the slow-burning Muslim/Malay insurgency in Southern Thailand. In the Southern Thai town of Su So in 2004, a Muslim insurgency announced itself in a way that made the Easter Rising look cunning and practical by comparison: the local men and boys simply stood around outside the Thai National police stations waving machetes and yelling until they were shot down.
Crazy, right? Not really. The insurgency is burning very well in that part of Thailand now, and the hundred-odd men who were mown down in that apparently pointless, suicidal demonstration outside the cop-shops knew exactly what they were doing. They were offering themselves as kindling, to get something bigger, colder, more effective started.
So — Sorry, General Patton, sir, and I admit I’d never have the courage to tell you this to your face — but the fact is, you CAN win a war by dying. There are several ways you can do that: in conventional war.
Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published in 1959, is aging remarkably well, because it offers practical lessons for modern warfare:
What Is War Good For?
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.”— Mr. Dubois, Johnnie’s history and moral philosophy teacher.
Mobility Is Essential
“An infantryman can fight only if someone else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential as we are.”
— Johnnie RicoFocus And Automation
“If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, someone a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone ax — will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier”
— Johnnie RicoThere Are No Dangerous Weapons, Just Dangerous People
“Maybe they’ll do without us someday. Maybe some mad genius with myopia, a bulging forehead and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition and force it to surrender or die — without killing the gang of your own people they have imprisoned inside. In the meantime, until they do, my mates can handle the job.”
— Johnnie RicoA War By Any Other Name Can Still Kill You
“Everything up to then and still later were ‘incidents,’ ‘patrols’ or ‘police actions.’ However, you are just as dead if you buy the farm in an ‘incident’ as if you buy it in a declared war.”
— Johnnie RicoTrue Professionals Control Violence
“The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing… but controlled and purposeful violence.”
— Johnnie Rico
Steel is useful because it is strong and cheap, but it is also heavy, so the obvious solution is to alloy steel with a lighter metal:
And the obvious one to choose is aluminium, which is, like iron (steel’s principal component), cheap and abundant. An alloy of iron, aluminium and carbon (steel’s other essential ingredient) is too brittle to be useful. Adding manganese helps a bit, but not enough for aluminium-steel to be used in vehicles.
Dr Kim and his colleagues have, however, found that a fifth ingredient, nickel, overcomes this problem. To a chemist, an alloy is a mixture of materials rather than a true chemical compound. But metals do sometimes react to form real compounds, and one class of these, known as B2 intermetallic compounds (which have equal numbers of atoms of two different metals within them), lies at the heart of Dr Kim’s invention. The nickel reacts with some of the aluminium to create B2 crystals a few nanometres across. These crystals form both between and within the steel’s grains when it is annealed (a form of heat treatment).
B2 crystals are resistant to shearing, so when a force is applied to the new material they do not break. This stops tiny cracks propagating through the stuff, which gives it strength. That strength, allied with the lightness brought by the aluminium, is what Dr Kim was after.
So, no copper, and no greenish-blue hue.
When you eat may be just as important as what you eat:
In the latest paper Dr. Panda worked on, published in December in the journal Cell Metabolism, his team put obese mice on a variety of unhealthy eating regimens, including high-fat and high-fructose diets. One set of mice ate at all times, while another set ate only during periods of nine, 10, 12 or 15 hours. Both sets were given the same unhealthy food options, and both sets ate all the food available, according to the research.
Because the restricted mice could still eat as frequently as they wanted within the given time frame, none of the research tracked the effects of large meals versus smaller, or of frequent snacking.
The benefits of restricted eating times were proportional to the amount of time fasted, said Amandine Chaix, a Salk researcher who works with Dr. Panda. The narrower the window for eating, the more weight the mice lost.
The researchers think this is partly because the restricted schedule aligns with the body’s circadian rhythm, or internal clock. Eating happens at times when the body is more efficient at breaking down foods.
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A second benefit comes from fasting itself, says Mark Mattson, chief of the Cellular and Molecular Neurosciences Section at the National Institutes of Health. After fasting, the body starts to use fat, instead of glucose, as a source of energy. This leads to faster weight loss, among other benefits, he explained.
Kinship is the organizing principle of small human societies, and this is as far as cultural evolution has gone in much of the world. Peter Frost notes that there are two paths toward higher civilization:
Cultural evolution has gone farther in two parts of the world: Northwest Europe and East Asia. The outcomes are rather similar — peaceful, orderly societies encompassing large numbers of people — but they have come about differently. Northwest Europeans could pursue this trajectory because they already had relatively weak kinship when they began to develop larger and more complex societies in the 12th century. There was a pre-existing tendency to live outside kinship structures, as seen in the Western European Marriage Pattern: men and women married relatively late and many never married; children usually left the family household to form new households; and many individuals circulated among non-related households, typically young people sent out as servants (Hajnal, 1965; Hallam, 1985; Hartman, 2004; Seccombe, 1992). This weak kinship environment was made possible by three mental adaptations: greater capacity for involuntary guilt and empathy; greater receptiveness to absolute moral norms, as opposed to relativistic ones based on kinship; and stronger desire to punish, exclude, and even kill violators of these norms (Frost, 2014a; Frost, 2014b).
When the Dark Ages came to an end, Northwest Europeans were well positioned to exploit the possibility of creating a larger and more complex social environment. Their mental makeup “pre-adapted” them for a trajectory of increasingly radical change: strengthening of Church and State, expansion of Christian guilt culture, pacification of social relations, and reorganization of these relations independently of kinship to create new forms of social organization (market economy, nation state, ideological regime, etc.).
East Asians have followed a different trajectory to a similar end, relying less on internal means of behavior control (guilt, empathy) and more on external means (shaming, family discipline, community surveillance, notions of moral duty). The main difference is in the relationship between self and society. Whereas a greater sense of self has helped Northwest Europeans to transcend the limitations of kinship and, thus, build larger societies, East Asians have relied on a lesser sense of self to create a web of interdependence that extends beyond close kin. There is a stronger tendency toward holistic attention, emphasis on social (versus personal) happiness, and suspension of self-interest. Conversely, there is a weaker tendency toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (Kitayama et al., 2014).
This trajectory may have been particularly favored by rice farming, which requires community planning of water use and community construction of irrigation networks. Even when neighboring districts are compared in China, individualism seems to be much weaker where rice is grown than where wheat is grown. This pattern holds up even in urban residents who have never actually lived on a farm and whose connection to rice farming is only genealogical (Talhelm et al., 2014).
Daniel Reeve’s Middle Earth calligraphy can be surprisingly metal:
Pay-in-advance models have been around practically forever and are the most straightforward of the five customer-funded models. Most service businesses run this way. Do you want to remodel your kitchen? You’ll pay at least part of the fees to your designer and builder in advance, to help them cover their costs for the project. Do you want to fly to Denver next Tuesday? You’ll pay for your airline ticket today.
Thus, implementing a pay-in-advance model is as simple as finding a good reason why a customer would be willing to pay in advance — at least in part — and having the courage to ask for the money.
Take Bangalore’s Vinay Gupta, who founded Via in 2006 and proceeded to build it into a giant in the Indian travel industry. How? By asking India’s mom-and-pop travel agents for a $5,000 deposit in return for real-time ticketing capability and better commissions than the airlines were giving them. Signing up 200 agents in the first few months gave Mr. Gupta $1 million in cash, his customers’ cash, with which to start and grow his business. Last year, Via generated a reported $500 million in revenue, serving travel agents in India, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Decades earlier, Mel and Patricia Ziegler got Banana Republic started by getting their customers’ money up front — $1 for the Banana Republic mail-order catalog, please — and setting up 30-day credit terms with suppliers. The business took off when media personalities, including WOR radio’s John Gambling, got intrigued enough by the merchandise, and Mel’s vivid and quirky prose, to talk about the new catalog on air.
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Krishnan Ganesh started TutorVista in 2005 with three Indian teachers and a VOIP Internet connection reaching American teens who needed help with their homework. He quickly learned that $100-per-month subscriptions for “all you can learn” — paid monthly in advance — were just what the teens’ parents wanted. When renewal rates after the trial period quickly materialized at north of 50%, growing the business was simply a matter of adding more fuel. Venture-capital funds provided it, and the business took off.
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Today’s matchmaker poster child is Airbnb. Brian Chesky and his co-founders put the site together in 2007 as a way to pay their rent, by offering up space in their own San Francisco apartment for local conference-goers. By narrowly focusing on events that were too big for the local hotel inventory, they built their business one step at a time until they landed a CNN interview at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008. They won a spot in Y Combinator, and landed venture capital, allowing the fledgling business to ramp up its growth, and the rest is history: over 1 million listings in over 190 countries.
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Consider vente-privee.com’s Jacques-Antoine Granjon and his partners, who created the flash-sales phenomenon in 1985, and then moved online in 2001. The company offered a limited quantity of goods — unwanted or overstocked inventory from Parisian designer-apparel makers — at discounted prices in three-to-five-day sales.
The business collected immediate credit-card payment from “members” but didn’t buy stock until it had already been purchased by members. That meant Mr. Granjon didn’t need any additional capital to grow what became France’s most popular fashion brand.
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Bill Gates and Paul Allen got started by writing customized software for most of the early PC makers, which I would call a service business. Then they made the transition to a product business when they started selling Windows, Word, Excel and the rest in shrink-wrapped boxes. That’s when Microsoft’s value really took off, as selling millions of copies of software-in-a-box is far more scalable than writing operating systems one at a time. The cash earned from the original service business largely funded the development of the application software.
Claus Moseholm and Balder Olrik launched GoViral, a viral-video production company, in 2003. They funded their company’s startup and growth with the proceeds of one successful campaign after another. Two years later, a new partner, Jimmy Maymann, helped steer the company out of video creation and turned its attention to building the necessary technology platform to host such content and to effectively measure the reach each virally distributed video achieved. In 2011, GoViral was sold for $97 million.
Dr. Mullins, an associate professor at London Business School, is the author of The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers’ Cash.
Disney is getting its first Hispanic princess, Elena of Avalor:
Elena lives in “an enchanted fairytale kingdom inspired by diverse Latin cultures and folklore,” according to an announcement from the company. She will be introduced first as part of Disney Junior’s hit show “Sofia the First.”
The supporting cast of the show includes Elena’s grandfather Tito, grandmother Cici, adviser Duke Esteban, and wizard-in-training Mateo.
The show will tell stories “influenced by culture and traditions that are familiar to the world-wide population of Hispanic and Latino families and reflect the interests and aspirations of all children as told through a classic fairy tale,” Disney Junior general manager Nancy Kanter said in a statement.
To remain auténtica, I’m sure she’ll be devoutly Catholic, and the villains will be dastardly moros.
The surest way to win limited wars is to win them quickly:
Time is our greatest enemy and our enemy’s greatest friend. Yet as our experience in Kosovo has shown, we still lack the means to transport decisive landpower to even a local theater of war in time to preempt or preclude the offensive actions of a minor tyrant.
We seek to win at minimum cost. During wars in this century the overwhelming majority of battlefield deaths have been suffered by infantrymen in close combat. The greatest killer of American infantry has been the homely and unglamorous mortar, followed closely by the rifle and machine gun. Yet while today we possess the technology to remotely locate strategic targets in Belgrade or Baghdad, a platoon leader must still rely on DePuy’s tactic of direct observation and contact in order to locate a machine gun position. We can strike strategic targets with precision from thousands of miles distance but our platoon leader has no way to destroy a mortar over the next hill with any degree of precision.
Recent post-Cold War experience in Kosovo and Iraq have shown that even an army of inept petty tyrants can, if given time, adapt and learn to counter our unique method of fighting limited wars. Add to this uncomfortable truth the realization that the American people will continue to demand cheap victories and it seems absolutely apparent to those who have studied recent history that the United States will no longer have the luxury to improvise on the battlefield.
That was was written after a visit to Albania in May 1999.
Matt Ridley recounts his life as a climate lukewarmer:
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
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In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
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I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming more than 26 years ago, as science editor ofThe Economist, I thought it was a genuinely dangerous threat. Like, for instance, Margaret Thatcher, I accepted the predictions being made at the time that we would see warming of a third or a half a degree (Centigrade) a decade, perhaps more, and that this would have devastating consequences.
Gradually, however, I changed my mind. The failure of the atmosphere to warm anywhere near as rapidly as predicted was a big reason: there has been less than half a degree of global warming in four decades — and it has slowed down, not speeded up. Increases in malaria, refugees, heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods have not materialised to anything like the predicted extent, if at all. Sea level has risen but at a very slow rate — about a foot per century.
Also, I soon realised that all the mathematical models predicting rapid warming assume big amplifying feedbacks in the atmosphere, mainly from water vapour; carbon dioxide is merely the primer, responsible for about a third of the predicted warming. When this penny dropped, so did my confidence in predictions of future alarm: the amplifiers are highly uncertain.
Another thing that gave me pause was that I went back and looked at the history of past predictions of ecological apocalypse from my youth – population explosion, oil exhaustion, elephant extinction, rainforest loss, acid rain, the ozone layer, desertification, nuclear winter, the running out of resources, pandemics, falling sperm counts, cancerous pesticide pollution and so forth. There was a consistent pattern of exaggeration, followed by damp squibs: in not a single case was the problem as bad as had been widely predicted by leading scientists. That does not make every new prediction of apocalypse necessarily wrong, of course, but it should encourage scepticism.
What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph, which purported to show that today’s temperatures were higher and changing faster than at any time in the past thousand years. That graph genuinely shocked me when I first saw it and, briefly in the early 2000s, it persuaded me to abandon my growing doubts about dangerous climate change and return to the “alarmed” camp.
Then I began to read the work of two Canadian researchers, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They and others have shown, as confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, that the hockey stick graph, and others like it, are heavily reliant on dubious sets of tree rings and use inappropriate statistical filters that exaggerate any 20th-century upturns.
What shocked me more was the scientific establishment’s reaction to this: it tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. And then a flood of emails was leaked in 2009 showing some climate scientists apparently scheming to withhold data, prevent papers being published, get journal editors sacked and evade freedom-of-information requests, much as sceptics had been alleging. That was when I began to re-examine everything I had been told about climate change and, the more I looked, the flakier the prediction of rapid warming seemed.
I am especially unimpressed by the claim that a prediction of rapid and dangerous warming is “settled science”, as firm as evolution or gravity. How could it be? It is a prediction! No prediction, let alone in a multi-causal, chaotic and poorly understood system like the global climate, should ever be treated as gospel. With the exception of eclipses, there is virtually nothing scientists can say with certainty about the future. It is absurd to argue that one cannot disagree with a forecast. Is the Bank of England’s inflation forecast infallible?
Incidentally, my current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The consensus is that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous. The latest IPCC report gives a range of estimates of future warming, from harmless to terrifying. My best guess would be about one degree of warming during this century, which is well within the IPCC’s range of possible outcomes.
Early battles in Korea began with the application of doctrinally correct proportions of firepower to maneuver inherited from the Second World War:
Very quickly, however, field commanders increased their demand for artillery and air power to support ever more compact and self-contained assault forces. What began as traditional dismounted infantry assaults in 1950 soon became elaborate tank, infantry, and firepower intensive demonstrations intended to gain the objective with minimum cost in lives.
During the Battle of Soryang in the spring of 1951, twenty-one battalions of artillery fired over three hundred thousand rounds in five days in support of a single push by X Corps. Two years later, at Pork Chop Hill, nine battalions fired over thirty-seven thousand rounds in less than twenty-four hours in support of a single regimental assault. As the weight of firepower increased, the densities of infantry formations decreased in proportion. By the winter of 1950-51, General Ridgway conducted most of the Eighth Army counter attacks at regimental level. That spring, Ridgway consistently used nothing larger than company teams to spearhead his advance to the Han River.
Similarly in Vietnam commanders learned quickly and adapted a European style, maneuver- centric method of war to match the realities of limited war in constricted Asian terrain. Close combat units gradually increased the proportion of supporting fires and lessened the exposure of lead elements moving into contested areas.
General William DePuy, commanding the First Infantry Division in 1966-67, realized quickly that artillery and tactical aircraft were responsible for most enemy casualties. His casualties, on the other hand, came principally from three sources: enemy mortars, concentrations of enemy small arms fire delivered against infantry units in set-piece ambushes, and mines. His common sense solution was simply to use much smaller infantry units to locate and fix the enemy, usually squads or platoons, and then orchestrate a varied medley of supporting firepower systems to do most of the killing.
Once the enemy was located, the infantry’s task was to stay out of the killing zone, avoid decisive engagement and pull back just far enough to allow effective delivery of ordnance, but not so far as to allow the enemy breathing space to disengage and escape the firepower trap. The old infantry adage “close with and destroy the enemy” became simply get close enough with as few forces as possible to “find, fix, flush and set up the enemy for destruction by fire.”
DePuy was among the first to grasp the fact that modern firepower technology and the imperative to win at lower cost together were sufficient to cause a shift in the relationship between firepower and maneuver. In later years he was fond of saying “On a battlefield increasingly dominated by lethality, if you can be seen you can be hit, if you can be hit, you will be killed.” Whether traditionalists liked it or not, DePuy believed that the balance had in fact shifted to the point that firepower systems, not infantrymen, had now become the central instrument for achieving decisive effect on the battlefield. To DePuy, the doctrinal maxim that firepower supported maneuver may well have been reversed.