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 »

Live freaky, die freaky

Friday, November 15th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillPeter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told Tom O’Neill (for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) gave O’Neill some semblance of a lead:

“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”

This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders.

[…]

I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

[…]

I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’ s music industry. I’d been reading it for research — what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected — and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.

Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)

When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”

It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”

The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth — and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged — the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.

I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.

In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August — if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house — then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft

Sunday, November 10th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenThe phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

[…]

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse.

[…]

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG& G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars.

Posted in Technology, War | 2 Comments »

Polanski had invited along a psychic

Friday, November 8th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’Neill Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was Tom O’Neill‘s first interview for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties:

Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.

“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.

Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.

Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”

Polanski at Cielo Drive

Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

Who’s Yehoodi?

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024

I stumbled across an old wartime Disney cartoon about camouflage, and I noticed that the soldiers kept calling their lizard mentor “old now you see him, now you don’t Jehudi”:

Apparently Who’s Yehoodi? was a popular catchphrase at the time:

The catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” (or “Who’s Yehudi?”) originated when Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin was a guest on the popular radio program The Pepsodent Show hosted by Bob Hope, where sidekick Jerry Colonna, apparently finding the ethnic name inherently funny, repeatedly asked “Who’s Yehudi?” Colonna continued the gag on later shows even though Menuhin himself was not a guest, turning “Yehudi” into a widely understood late 1930s slang reference for a mysteriously absent person. The United States Navy chose the name “Project Yehudi” for an early 1940s precursor to stealth technology, also known as Yehudi lights.

A song with the title and catchphrase “Who’s Yehoodi?” was written in 1940 by Bill Seckler and Matt Dennis. It was covered by Kay Kyser and more famously by Cab Calloway. The final stanza of the song is:

The little man who wasn’t there
Said he heard him on the air
No one seems to know from where
But who’s Yehoodi?

Yehoodi makes an “appearance” in the 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon Hollywood Steps Out, sitting beside Jerry Colonna and watching exotic dancer Sally Rand. Yehoodi is depicted as an invisible man looking through a pair of binoculars. Colonna introduces himself by saying “Guess who?” then indicates his seat mate saying “Yehoodi”. 1942′s Crazy Cruise features the “S.S. Yehudi”, an invisible battleship.

Hollywood Steps Out is a great example of the kind of cartoon we watched as kids back in the day without getting any of the references:

Yehudi lights were a kind of diffused lighting camouflage.

Posted in Science, Technology, War | 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 »

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 »

Manson taught them that people in the straight world were like computers

Friday, November 1st, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillFormer members of the Family have often recounted Manson’s systematic “brainwashing” methods, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), beginning with the seduction of new recruits by “bombarding” them with love, sex, and drugs:

On the witness stand, Paul Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter,

Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”

If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”

Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me?, tells a similar story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents had programmed into us.”

Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars. Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”

Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions — often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks — during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.

Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled, Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.”

[…]

Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine — words came out of her mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”

For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”

[…]

What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case.

[…]

How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies — among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess — into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?

Posted in Crime | 4 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 »

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 »

The Manson Family intended to escape from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit

Friday, October 25th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillThe motive prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi presented for the Manson murders was, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), spellbindingly bizarre, combining racism, apocalyptic, biblical rhetoric, and the Beatles:

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.

When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate, O’Neill explains, the details were even more jarring:

Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.

It gets worse.

After they were found guilty, and the trial moved to its death-penalty phase, the three convicted women from the Manson Family — Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten — took the witness stand:

One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse.

[…]

To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love — it freed that person from the confines of their physical being.

Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”

Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know? “Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.”

“‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has happened. She is gone.”

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires

Thursday, October 24th, 2024

Next War by John AntalJohn Antal opens Next War with a look at the failure of imagination that left America vulnerable to Imperial Japan’s surprise attack and the imaginative planning that went into it — as well as some imaginative planning that did not:

With his usual thoroughness, Genda reported the highest dive-bombing hit rates in the past seven months of practice, by the Japanese Navy’s best carrier pilots, is only 40 percent.

[…]

“There is more than one path to get to the top of the mountain,” Yamamoto replies.

[…]

“The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Here, the path of life and death, victory and defeat, is clear.”

[…]

“It will take only six days to adjust the aircraft and we can do this while we are underway. With this new means, we will destroy the four American aircraft carriers, eight battleships, two heavy cruisers and the six light cruisers in the first wave. Conventional attacks will focus on attacking enemy airfields and destroying American planes on the ground. The second wave will target the dockyards and oil facilities. The third wave will involve conventional bombing and will hit any remaining targets.”

[…]

“We will lose 80 of our 353 aircraft through direct strikes,” Genda replies. “Ten percent more if the enemy antiaircraft and their pursuit planes are alert … but I believe we will achieve surprise, so I estimate our losses at 107 aircraft.”

[…]

“Yes, it is the only way to annihilate our enemy with one swift blow. It is a hard choice, I know, but these strikes will be like a Divine Wind that will blow the Americans from the Pacific.”

[…]

“Put your new plan into motion. We will hit the Americans and destroy their power in the Pacific with one strike of the sword. We will use your 80 kamikaze aircraft to change the face of war.”

[…]

The Japanese would only resort to kamikaze attacks in 1944, when their strategic military situation was dire, as they grasped for any means to strike back and delay the inevitable tide of defeat.

[…]

But what if Yamamoto’s forces had conducted the kamikaze strike strategy at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the US Navy was much smaller and unprepared for such a ferocious assault? What if the Japanese had realized they had to play their one roll of the dice differently?

[…]

The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires: missiles, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and loitering munitions.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

The Bolt-M from Anduril is, David Hambling explains, a high-end American take on the hordes of FPV kamikaze drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia:

In Ukraine, such drones are often assembled at kitchen tables from commercial components from China. Though unsophisticated, they are efficient engines of destruction, and at around $500 apiece are destroying tanks, artillery, trucks and foxholes at a high rate.

[…]

While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare.

[…]

An Anduril spokesman told Breaking Defense that “In round numbers, typical Bolt configurations are in the low tens of thousands of dollars,” depending on the exact payload and configuration.

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

[…]

Ukrainian journal Defence Express was quick to criticize the Bolt-M, stating that, like other American designs, it fails to incorporate the key lesson of FPV warfare “they are, first of all, cheap and produced at scale.” Instead they suggest the design might be adapted into a reusable, AI-enabled light bomber for conditions of intense jamming.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 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 »

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 »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »