The mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them

Saturday, November 16th, 2024

The apparent resilience of the Russian economy has confounded many strategists who expected Western sanctions to starve its war effort:

Russia continues to export vast quantities of oil, gas, and other commodities — the result of sanctions evasion and loopholes deliberately designed by Western policymakers to keep Russian resources on world markets. So far, clever macroeconomic management, particularly by Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, has enabled the Kremlin to keep the Russian financial system in relative health.

At first glance, the numbers look surprisingly strong. In 2023, GDP grew by 3.6 percent and is expected to rise by 3.9 percent in 2024. Unemployment has fallen from around 4.4 percent before the war to 2.4 percent in September. Moscow has expanded its armed forces and defense production, adding more than 500,000 workers to the defense industry, approximately 180,000 to the armed forces, and many thousands more to paramilitary and private military organizations. Russia has reportedly tripled its production of artillery shells to 3 million per year and is manufacturing glide bombs and drones at scale.

On the other hand:

Already, about around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine are from North Korean stocks. At some point in the second half of 2025, Russia will face severe shortages in several categories of weapons.

Perhaps foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons. According to open-source researchers using video documentation, Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average. Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges — massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each — that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month. Russia only possesses two such forges.

In other words, Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.

[…]

Open-source researchers have counted the loss of at least 4,955 infantry fighting vehicles since the war’s onset, which comes out to an average of 155 per month. Russian defense contractors can produce an estimated 200 per year, or about 17 per month, to offset these losses. Likewise, even Russia’s expanded production of 3 million artillery shells per year pales in comparison to the various estimates for current consumption at the front. While those estimates are lower than the 12 million rounds Russian forces fired in 2022, they are much higher than what Russian industry can produce.

[…]

Defense spending has officially jumped to 7 percent of Russia’s GDP and is projected to consume more than 41 percent of the state budget next year. The true magnitude of military expenditures is significantly higher. Russia’s nearly 560,000 armed internal security troops, many of which have been deployed to occupied Ukraine, are funded outside the defense budget — as are the private military companies that have sprouted across Russia.

[…]

Rather than demobilizing or bankrupting themselves, Russian leaders could instead use their military to obtain the economic resources needed to sustain it — in other words, using conquest and the threat thereof to pay for the military.

Plenty of precedents exist. In 1803, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ended 14 months of peace in Europe because he could not afford to fund his military based on French revenues alone — and he also refused to demobilize it. In 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein similarly invaded oil-rich Kuwait because he could not afford to pay the million-man army that he refused to downsize. In both cases, the mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 9 Comments »

Manifesto for the British Revolution

Wednesday, November 13th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythI mentioned recently that Larry Taunton had listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol and then went to take a closer look at certain passages — about how British democracy might be subverted from within via a classic “march through the institutions” — and found, first, that the book was out of print, and then, second, that the used copy he could find was missing those passages entirely.

Naturally, I listened to the audiobook myself and recommend it. There’s no Kindle edition, and I assume the mass-market paperback is missing the “offending” passages — but you can find them by searching for the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution:

The twenty-point plan is known as the Manifesto for the British Revolution — or MBR for short. The first fifteen points concern mass nationalization of private enterprise, property, and wealth; abolition of all private landholding, medical care, and education; subordination of the teaching professions, police force, information media, and law courts to state control; and abolition of the House of Lords, which has the power to veto an act of self-perpetuation by an elected government. (Evidently, the British revolution could not be stopped or put into reverse at the whim of the electorate.)

But the final five points of the MBR vitally concern us here in the Soviet Union, so I will list them.

1. Britain’s immediate withdrawal, regardless of any treaty obligations, from the European Economic Community.

2. The downscaling without delay of all Britain’s conventional armed forces to one fifth of their present size.

3. The immediate abolition and destruction of all Britain’s nuclear weapons and weapon-delivery systems.

4. The expulsion from Britain without delay of all United States forces, nuclear and conventional, along with all their personnel and matériel.

5. Britain’s immediate withdrawal from, and repudiation of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

I need hardly underline, Comrade General Secretary, that these last five proposals would wreck the defenses of the Western Alliance beyond any possible hope of repair in our lifetimes, if indeed ever. With Britain gone, the smaller NATO nations would probably follow suit, and NATO would wither on the vine, isolating the United States firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.

Obviously, everything I have outlined and described within this memorandum depends for its full implementation on a Labour Party victory, and for this the next election, expected in the spring of 1988, may well be the last opportunity.

All the above was, in fact, what I meant by my remark at General Kryuchkov’s dinner that the political stability of Britain is constantly overestimated in Moscow “and never more so than at the present time.”

Yours sincerely,

Harold Adrian Russell Philby

I purchased a used hardback copy of Dogs of War a decade ago and quite enjoyed it. It seemed to be completely out of print, aside from the audiobook — which may or may not include any excised passages — until I stumbled across it under the slightly different name of Dogs of War: A Spy Thriller.

Posted in Media, Policy | 5 Comments »

The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea

Tuesday, November 12th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall The birthplace of Chinese civilization, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain:

A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River and down past the Yangtze River, which both run west to east. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating floods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet “scourge of the Sons of Han.” The industrialization of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless, the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt — the cradle of its civilization, where its people learned to farm, and to make paper and gunpowder.

To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the southeast and the south lies the sea.

[…]

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and — crucially — the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that — if the Han could reach them and establish control — would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.

[…]

Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze.

[…]

It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved — but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.

[…]

The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences.

In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province.

[…]

But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate that befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans.

[…]

A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region.

[…]

By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese, respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security, and plan for its great move out into the world.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration

Monday, November 11th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État (Council of State), “which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine”:

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’

Napoleon gave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.

He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’

[…]

When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’

(After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’)

Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness — whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall — to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision.

‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’

He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’

[…]

Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye.

[…]

Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion than a seat in the Senate.

[…]

‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’

[…]

Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy

Tuesday, November 5th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallTim Marshall opens his chapter on China (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with this anecdote:

In October 2006, a US Naval Super Carrier Group led by the thousand-foot USS Kitty Hawk was confidently sailing through the East China Sea between southern Japan and Taiwan, minding everyone’s business, when, without warning, a Chinese navy submarine surfaced in the middle of the group.

An American aircraft carrier of that size is surrounded by about twelve other warships, with air cover above and submarine cover below. The Chinese vessel, a Song-class attack submarine, may well be very quiet when running on electric power, but, still, this was the equivalent to Pepsi-Cola’s management popping up in a Coca-Cola board meeting after listening under the table for half an hour.

The Americans were amazed and angry in equal measure. Amazed because they had no idea a Chinese sub could do that without being noticed, angry because they hadn’t noticed and because they regarded the move as provocative, especially as the sub was within torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk itself. They protested, perhaps too much, and the Chinese said: “Oh! What a coincidence, us surfacing in the middle of your battle group that is off our coast, we had no idea.”

This was twenty-first-century reverse gunboat diplomacy; whereas the British used to heave a man-of-war off the coast of some minor power to signal intent, the Chinese heaved into view off their own coast with a clear message: “We are now a maritime power, this is our time, and this is our sea.” It has taken four thousand years, but the Chinese are coming to a port — and a shipping lane — near you.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, but revolutionary in secondary education

Monday, November 4th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back in the hands of the clergy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), but revolutionary in secondary education, which began at age eleven:

In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.

All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees. Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose.

[…]

By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

It never happened in an exercise before

Saturday, November 2nd, 2024

The Washington Post recently obtained Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper‘s report about the Millennium 2002 war game in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request:

I first learned of this classified document by reading a 2002 Army Times article in which Van Riper criticized Millennium Challenge 2002 as “rigged” and mentioned “a 20-page report” that he had submitted to his superiors.

With this information, I filed the declassification request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2013. At the time, I was working for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based at George Washington University that fights to make government records of historical significance public.

Eleven years later, I got my answer — an email explaining that the record I had requested had been declassified in part. The released report demonstrates why it is important to push back against government secrecy: Unearthed records may reveal to the public critical information omitted from official government narratives.

Van Riper’s write-up contradicts portions of an official 752-page final report on Millennium Challenge 2002 released by the military more than a decade ago that called the war game a “major milestone” and described the loss of an entire carrier group as only “moderately unsuccessful.”

The story of what happened definitely got out:

In the exercise, Van Riper played the “Major General” of a country resembling Iraq or Iran that “possessed natural resources critical to the world community.”

His report notes that he used a strategy of ambiguity, asymmetry and denial of territory to have his forces, known as “Red,” defeat the superior U.S. military. He wrote that because the U.S. forces, designated “Blue,” appeared determined to go to war, he “saw no option except to strike Blue first.”

To plan his attack, Van Riper wrote that he “employed a command and control methodology specifically designed to thwart” American technological advantages, including the ability to intercept electronic and phone communications. He relied on couriers to relay sensitive messages and communicated to aircraft with lanterns to avoid radio chatter.

After his surprise attack simulated the destruction of the carrier group, the atmosphere at Norfolk command, where Van Riper led his team, was “shock,” he told The Post in an interview. “It was just quiet. It never happened in an exercise before. … I don’t think [Joint Forces Command] knew what to do.”

Van Riper wanted to continue to attack U.S. forces, pressing forward with his asymmetric advantage, his report notes.
Instead, a war game adjudicator determined Van Riper’s successful attack “wouldn’t have happened” in real warfare and ruled that all but four of the virtual U.S. ships would be “refloated” and the war game would continue, according to his report.

[…]

After the U.S. carrier group was “refloated,” other restrictions were imposed on Van Riper, he noted in his report. His forces could not initiate combat, but U.S. forces could. Van Riper’s forces were also forbidden from using chemical weapons against the United States, which he considered his country’s “most significant” asymmetric military strength.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

The ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat

Tuesday, October 29th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Russia’s most powerful weapons now, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), are not its army and air force, but gas and oil:

Russia is second only to the United States as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports.

On average, 25 percent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent. About half of Germany’s gas supply comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticize the Kremlin for aggressive behavior than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 percent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

[…]

In the north, via the Baltic Sea, is the Nord Stream route, which connects directly to Germany. Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline, which feeds Poland and Germany. In the south is the Blue Stream, taking gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. Until early 2015 there was a planned project called South Stream, which was due to use the same route but branch off to Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy. South Stream was Russia’s attempt to ensure that even during disputes with Ukraine it would still have a major route to large markets in Western Europe and the Balkans. Several EU countries put pressure on their neighbors to reject the plan, and Bulgaria effectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as Turk Stream.

[…]

Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then benefit not just from American liquefied gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East. The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps off.

[…]

LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue, Russia is planning pipelines heading southeast and hopes to increase sales to China.

[…]

A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $ 50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget—and predicted spending for 2017—was based on prices of $ 50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $ 2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark.

[…]

The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan.

[…]

What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean. Beijing’s push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe. Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast. In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples.

[…]

The average life span for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea).

[…]

It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist — the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Is this fair? Is this useful?

Monday, October 28th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAt the end of January 1801, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon inaugurated an ambitious project of legal reform whose consequences would outlast even the Concordat:

The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north. Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.

His first and most important task was to unify France’s forty-two legal codes into a single system. For this monumental undertaking Napoleon had an invaluable ally in Cambacérès, who had been the secretary of the committee which had been given the task of overhauling the civil law code back in 1792 and was the author of the Projet de Code Civil (1796). ‘If the whole Code were to be mislaid,’ Napoleon once quipped, ‘it could be found in Cambacérès’ head.’

[…]

Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’

[…]

The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading. The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society. Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution.

The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within. (‘One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’) It guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state. It allowed all adult men to engage in any occupation and to own property. Laws had to be duly promulgated and officially published, and could not apply retrospectively. Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law. Fearing the disintegration of the family as the basic social institution, the framers of the Code gave the paterfamilias almost total power, including over the property of his wife. Under Article 148 the father’s permission was required for the marriage of sons up to the age of twenty-five and daughters to twenty-one, and the marriage age was raised to fifteen for women, eighteen for men. Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.

The major criticisms levelled at the Code over the past two centuries have been that it was socially conservative, too supportive of the middle classes, of the individual and of the paterfamilias, that it made wives too dependent on their husbands, and that its inheritance provisions were damaging for an agrarian economy.

[…]

The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was only one of several legal reforms promulgated by Napoleon, though undoubtedly the most important. By 1810 it had been joined by the Code of Civil Procedure, the Commercial Code, the Code on Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code.

[…]

It was this body of law together that came to be known as the Code Napoléon.

[…]

It survived in the Prussian Rhineland until 1900, and Belgium, Luxembourg, Mauritius and Monaco, as well as France, still operate it today. Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

Satellites had an inherent limitation in the world of espionage

Sunday, October 27th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenSatellites had an inherent limitation in the world of espionage, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51) — they worked on fixed schedules:

This would forever negate any element of surprise. The average satellite took ninety minutes to circle the world, and overflight schedules were easily determined by analysts at NORAD. The ironically named Oxcart was an attack espionage vehicle: quick and versatile, nimble and shrewd, with overpasses that would be totally unpredictable to any enemy. But most of all, in terms of clear photographic intelligence, nothing could compete with what Oxcart was about to be able to deliver to the president: two-and-a-half-foot blocks of detail made clear by film frames shot from seventeen miles up.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 4 Comments »

President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallPresident Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):

He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow—thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw.

For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership in the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership in NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests that were eventually to overthrow him.

[…]

In the east, crowds came out in support of the president. In the west of the country, in cities such as L’viv, which used to be in Poland, they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian influence.

By mid-February 2014, L’viv, and other urban areas, were no longer controlled by the government. Then on February 22, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the president, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice—he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but most important the port of Sevastopol. This geographic imperative and the whole eastward movement of NATO is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said “Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.”

[…]

The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited-supply and replenishment base, not a major force.

[…]

Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. They are building up the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol and constructing a new naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, which, although it does not have a natural deep harbor, will give the Russians extra capacity. Eighty new ships are being commissioned as well as several submarines. The fleet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is increasing. In July 2015, Russia published its new naval doctrine and, there, right at the top of the list of threats to Russian interests, was NATO. It called NATO’s positioning of troops and hardware closer to its borders “inadmissible,” which was just short of fighting talk.

To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the United States encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea while relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus.

Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being granted to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by President Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow forever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, nor even pro-Russian—Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of rule A, lesson one, in “Diplomacy for Beginners”: When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence.

A generous view is that the United States and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view that does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century and that Russia does not play by the rule of law.

[…]

Approximately 60 percent of Crimea’s population is “ethnically Russian,” so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he “had” to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again de facto a part of Russia.

[…]

No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbors knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, and Washington, DC, is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could.

The EU imposed limited sanctions—limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off.

[…]

It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO.

Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more important, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, “Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.”

The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its “near abroad.” It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene and Crimea was “doable.” It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula.

[…]

In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO’s position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, armed aggression against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: “An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and goes on to say NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan.

[…]

At the beginning of 2016, the Russian president sent his own signal. He changed the wording of Russia’s overall military strategy document and went further than the naval strategy paper of 2015. For the first time the US was named as an “external threat” to Russia.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope

Monday, October 21st, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAfter his victory at Marengo, Andrew Roberts notes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon decided to push his luck:

‘The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign’, wrote Jean Chaptal, ‘was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.’ Napoleon wanted to ensure that no independent Church would provide a focus of opposition to his rule, and the simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope.

Anti-clericalism had been a driving force during the French Revolution, which had stripped the Catholic Church of its wealth, expelled and in many cases murdered its priests, and desecrated its altars. Yet Napoleon sensed that many among his natural supporters – conservative, rural, hard-working skilled labourers, artisans and smallholders – had not abjured the faith of their fathers and yearned for a settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Consulate they were growing to admire. Any settlement, however, would have to ensure that those who had acquired biens nationaux previously owned by the Church (known as acquéreurs) should be allowed to retain their property, and there could be no return to the old days when the peasantry were forced to pay tithes to the clergy.

Napoleon had for some time respected the Pope’s ability to organize uprisings in Italy, telling the Directory in October 1796 that ‘it was a great mistake to quarrel with that Power’.

[…]

Napoleon appreciated how invaluable it would be if the person who played an important social role as the centre of information in those communities, who was often the most educated person and who read out government decrees, was also on the national payroll. ‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’ His treaty with the Papacy has been accurately described as attempting ‘to enlist the parish clergy as Napoleon’s “moral prefects” ’.

[…]

‘Jesus should have performed his miracles not in remote parts of Syria but in a city like Rome, in front of the whole population.’

[…]

‘Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the sun – the source of all life – the real god of the earth.’

[…]

‘I like the Muslim religion best; it has fewer incredible things in it than ours.’

[…]

A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’

[…]

‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor … Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’

[…]

‘If I ruled a people of Jews, I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon!’

[…]

Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’

‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’

‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’

[…]

‘One should render unto God that which is God’s,’ Napoleon was later to say, ‘but the Pope is not God.’

[…]

Although the Concordat was officially signed in July, it wasn’t ratified and published until nine months later, once Napoleon had tried to calm the deep opposition to it in the army and legislature. ‘The Government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens,’ the Concordat began. ‘His Holiness, in like manner, acknowledges that this same religion has derived, and is likely to derive, the greatest splendour from the establishment of the Catholic worship in France, and from its being openly professed by the consuls of the Republic.’

[…]

Ten archbishops (each on a 15,000-franc annual salary) and fifty bishops (10,000 francs each) would be appointed by Napoleon and the Pope together; bishops would swear to do nothing to ‘disturb the public tranquillity’ and would communicate all information about those who did to the government; all divine services would include a prayer for the Republic and the consuls; although the bishops would appoint the parish priests, they couldn’t appoint anyone unacceptable to the government. The Concordat cemented the land transfers of the Revolution; all former Church property belonged to the acquéreurs ‘for ever’.

[…]

The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rest; the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1806; children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names; salaries were paid to all clergy; orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit.

Meanwhile, the Church would sing Te Deums for Napoleon’s victories, read his proclamations from its pulpits and depict conscription as a patriotic duty.

[…]

Generals scraped their spurs and sabres on the floor of the cathedral, refused to give up seats to the clergy and talked during the ceremony, making plain the anger of the very anti-clerical army over the Concordat. Augereau requested permission to be absent, which Napoleon refused. Moreau simply ignored the order and smoked a cigar ostentatiously on the Tuileries terrace. When General Antoine-Guillaume Delmas was heard to remark, ‘Quelle capucinade [what banal moralizing], the only thing missing are the one hundred thousand men who died to get rid of all this!’ Napoleon exiled him 50 miles from Paris.

[…]

In the hamlets and small towns across France it had its intended effect. ‘Children listen with more docility to the voice of their parents, youth is more submissive to the authority of the magistrate, and the conscription is now effected in places where its very name used to arouse resistance,’ Napoleon told the legislature in 1803, illustrating that he primarily saw religious reconciliation in terms of propaganda and public discipline.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses

Sunday, October 20th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenBefore he became president of the United States, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Lyndon Baines Johnson liked to ride through rural Texas in his convertible Lincoln Continental with the top down:

According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them.

It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant anti-Communist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird.

[…]

“Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.”

[…]

The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality, explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using a high-powered optical device.

[…]

Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians?

[…]

Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s interceptor version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program — its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar — would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007.

Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs.

[…]

Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | No Comments »

Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas

Tuesday, October 15th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallAlthough 75 percent of Russia’s territory is in Asia, Tim Marshall emphasizes (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), only 22 percent of its population lives there:

Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland.

[…]

China may well eventually control parts of Siberia in the long run, but this would be through Russia’s declining birthrate and Chinese immigration moving north. Already as far west as the swampy West Siberian Plain, between the Urals in the west and the Yenisei River one thousand miles to the east, you can see Chinese restaurants in most of the towns and cities. Many different businesses are coming. The empty depopulating spaces of Russia’s Far East are even more likely to come under Chinese cultural, and eventually political, control.

When you move outside of the Russian heartland, much of the population in the Russian Federation is not ethnically Russian and pays little allegiance to Moscow, which results in an aggressive security system similar to the one in Soviet days. During that era, Russia was effectively a colonial power ruling over nations and people who felt they had nothing in common with their masters; parts of the Russian Federation—for example, Chechnya and Dagestan in the Caucasus—still feel this way.

[…]

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in support of the Communist Afghan government against anti-Communist Muslim guerrillas, had never been about bringing the joys of Marxist-Leninism to the Afghan people. It was always about ensuring that Moscow controlled that space in order to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Crucially, the invasion of Afghanistan also gave hope to the great Russian dream of its army being able to “wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean,” in the words of the ultra-nationalistic Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and thus achieve what it never had: a warm-water port where the water does not freeze in winter, with free access to the world’s major trading routes. The ports on the Arctic, such as Murmansk, freeze for several months each year: Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is ice-locked for about four months and is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power. In addition, waterborne transport is much cheaper than land or airborne routes.

[…]

This lack of a warm-water port with direct access to the oceans has always been Russia’s Achilles’ heel, as strategically important to it as the North European Plain. Russia is at a geographical disadvantage, saved from being a much weaker power only because of its oil and gas. No wonder the forged will of Peter the Great advises his descendants to “approach as near as possible to Constantinople and India. Whoever governs there will be the true sovereign of the world. Consequently, excite continual wars, not only in Turkey, but in Persia…. Penetrate as far as the Persian Gulf, advance as far as India.”

[…]

The exception to this rule are the “stans,” such as Tajikistan, whose borders were deliberately drawn by Stalin so as to weaken each state by ensuring it had large minorities of people from other states.

[…]

In the pro-Russian camp are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Armenia. Their economies are tied to Russia in the way that much of eastern Ukraine’s economy is (another reason for the rebellion there). The largest of these, Kazakhstan, leans toward Russia diplomatically and its large Russian-minority population is well integrated. Of the five, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan have joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (a sort of poor man’s EU), which celebrated its first anniversary in January 2016. All, including Tajikistan, are in a military alliance with Russia called the Collective Security Treaty Organization. The CSTO suffers from not having a name you can boil down to one word, and from being a watered-down Warsaw Bloc. Russia maintains a military presence in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

Later in his career he would believe that the goddess was spurning him

Monday, October 14th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsFor all his military genius, intellectual capacity, administrative ability and plain hard work, Andrew Roberts notes (in Napoleon: A Life), we should not underestimate the part that sheer good luck played in Napoleon’s career:

In May 1800 there was a gap in the weather for crossing the Alps, and in June the rains slowed Desaix’s march away from Marengo enough so that he could return to the battlefield in time to save his commander-in-chief. In 1792 Colonel Maillard’s report on the events in Ajaccio was swamped under war ministry paperwork on the outbreak of war; in 1793 the pike-thrust at Toulon didn’t go septic; in 1797 Quasdonovich’s ammunition wagon received a direct hit at Rivoli, as Melas’s did at Marengo; in 1799 the Muiron had perfect winds on leaving Alexandria; the same year Sieyès’ other choices for the Brumaire coup were unavailable, and Kléber’s report on the Egyptian campaign didn’t arrive in Paris before the coup, during which Thomé’s sleeve was torn enough to anger his comrades.

Napoleon recognized this, and spoke more than once of ‘the goddess Fortune’. Later in his career he would believe that the goddess was spurning him, but for now he was persuaded that she was on his side.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

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