War « Isegoria

In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse

Friday, April 15th, 2022

In the old days, Edward Luttwak notes, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible:

But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

China also lives in a G7 world

Thursday, April 14th, 2022

But by the second day of the Ukraine war, Beijing realised that China also lives in a G7 world, Edward Luttwak notes, with its economy utterly dependent on the daily arrival of bulk carriers loaded with animal and human food:

China’s economy was self-sufficient if miserably poor in 1976 when I first visited, with a population on the edge of malnutrition. But today’s citizens will not grin and bear it without their meat, eggs, or milk. Last year, Xi Jinping’s naval groupies, including the jovial retired Admiral Luo Yuan, suggested that the US could be scared off from defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion by sinking a US warship or two, perhaps even an aircraft carrier. Now Xi must realise that if a US warship is sunk, the supply of animal feed would end.

Posted in Economics, Edward Luttwak, Policy, War | 6 Comments »

The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield

Wednesday, April 13th, 2022

The current war in Ukraine is causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets, Edward Luttwak remarks:

The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, War, Weapons | 13 Comments »

Strategy is perhaps the most abused word in Washington

Wednesday, April 13th, 2022

Strategy is perhaps the most abused word in Washington, Christian Brose notes (in The Kill Chain):

Government strategies are more often laundry lists of hopes and dreams that help leaders avoid making choices. They seek to be inclusive of everyone’s priorities and give every kid a trophy, rather than picking winners and losers among priorities that are all competing for finite resources. They say everything — and thus, nothing.

[…]

Instead, we will need to relearn a lesson of history that we largely forgot during our three decades of uncontested dominance: that great powers are capable of limiting one another’s ambitions and rendering many of each other’s goals impractical or unachievable, regardless of how desirable those goals may be for one side or the other.

Great powers force each other to define their core interests, the things each is truly willing to fight over, and then make compromises and accommodations as necessary over the rest, lest competition descend into conflict.

[…]

This is already the reality with China. It is unlikely, for example, that a US president would send an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait in a significant crisis with China the way President Bill Clinton did in 1996. US carriers would probably not even operate within a thousand miles of the Chinese coast in the event of a conflict.

[…]

China may be capable of denying dominance to America, but America can do the same to China. And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia, which might be accompanied by a growing global assertiveness that could lead to even more detrimental consequences for the United States and our closest allies.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

War is the domain of paradox, contradiction, and boundless surprise, Edward Luttwak likes to say:

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

[...]

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy, War | 12 Comments »

You’re not going to save everybody, but there’s a difference between 500,000 dead and 800,000 dead

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back the old question of how civil defense could help reduce the death toll from nuclear war:

But while a full-scale, US-Russia nuclear war would overwhelm target cities and devastate the global climate, up-to-date civil defense can make a difference in saving lives in what might be a more likely nuclear incident, like a terrorist bomb or a missile lobbed by a rogue state. “Yes, sadly, some people would die immediately and have no control,” says Kristyn Karl, a political scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology. “But recent models show us there are many situations in which a lot of people would survive.”

The first step to making civil defense useful in the 21st century is to help people overcome what Karl calls the “fatalism and apathy” that nuclear weapons can engender, which is why she and her colleagues launched a program in 2017 called Reinventing Civil Defense. Using everything from graphic novels to posters to websites — Karl’s colleague at Stevens, Alex Wellerstein, is behind the Nukemap site that allows you to simulate a nuclear strike of any size on any location — the project aims to reawaken the public to the still-existing threat of nuclear war, and “the actionable steps,” as Karl puts it, that can be taken to potentially save their lives.

That advice can be broken down into three main points: get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.

Should you receive warning of an incoming strike or detonation, get inside the nearest standing building — ideally one that is concrete — stay there for 12 to 24 hours, the amount of time when radiation levels from fallout will be at their worst, and wait for news about where to evacuate next.

More meaningful civil defense would require federal, state, and local governments to take the nuclear threat as seriously as they do others. When I spoke to Wellerstein in 2018 for my book End Times, he noted that while active shooter drills have become common in American schools, comparatively little is done on what actions can be taken after a nuclear strike. (Comparing the two threats is difficult, but one risk expert in 2018 put the chance of a student being killed by a gun while in a public school on any given day since 1999 at 1 in 614 million.)

“These sorts of activities can cause people not only to behave in their better interest during an emergency, but also to take it more seriously,” Wellerstein told me then. “You’re not going to save everybody, but there’s a difference between 500,000 dead and 800,000 dead.”

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Zoom and Amazon fed on the carcasses of mom-and-pop businesses

Monday, April 11th, 2022

When COVID hit, the stock market took a deep dive, but it subsequently recovered:

Why did it recover? Because we used the Internet as a substitute for activities that were curtailed by COVID. And the Internet services we used were provided by corporations with shares traded on Wall Street. The economy shifted in the direction of bits, and this redistributed profits toward shareholder-owned companies. Zoom and Amazon fed on the carcasses of mom-and-pop businesses, so to speak. So even though overall wealth declined, the share of wealth accounted for by large corporations increased, and this buoyed stock prices.

As with COVID, the Russia-Ukraine war and the responses to that war are disrupting the economy. As I write this, though, the stock market seems to be relatively unconcerned. It is as if speculators are saying, “Corporate America thrived on the virus. It can thrive on the war, too.”

But the economic adaptation to the virus was to substitute bits for other means of getting goods and services. You used Amazon to get stuff delivered to you instead of going to the store to get it. You used Zoom to meet with work colleagues or out-of-town friends and relatives instead of going to the office or engaging in travel.

Instead, Zeihan predicts that the war will result in a scarcity of food. It’s not easy to see how we substitute bits for food. I cannot point to a corporation that is positioned to profit from mass starvation the way that Zoom or Amazon were positioned to profit from social distancing.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Hiding will be harder than ever and finding will be easier than ever

Monday, April 11th, 2022

As sensors of all kinds become ubiquitous, Christian Brose notes (in The Kill Chain), hiding will be harder than ever and finding will be easier than ever, making it more difficult and riskier to penetrate another country’s territory:

In 2014, for example, the Russian government emphatically denied what most of the world knew to be true: that Russia’s Little Green Men had actively intervened in Ukraine. What revealed the truth (though Moscow never admitted it) was a flurry of pictures and videos of Russian forces and equipment that had been captured and shared on social media, including by Russian soldiers posing for selfies.

This was also how it was revealed that Russia had supplied Ukrainian separatists with the surface-to-air missile system that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. Civilians with smartphones captured the weapon moving away from the scene of the crime, which revealed its Russian military markings, and then they photographed the same system on its way back toward the border of Russia.

Similarly, when the Chinese government denied in 2016 that it was installing military capabilities on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, commercial satellite imagery showed the truth in high resolution.

Militaries in the future will have little hope of hiding large traditional ships, aircraft, or ground force movements.

Posted in Technology, War | 5 Comments »

What Bloch foresaw with stunning prescience was a future battlefield that would be far more lethal than most of his contemporaries imagined

Saturday, April 9th, 2022

In The Kill Chain, Christian Brose tells the story of Jan Bloch:

Jan Bloch was not a soldier. He was a banker who was born into poverty in Warsaw in 1836 but worked his way up to become a wealthy railroad financier in Russian-controlled Poland. He never served a day of his life in uniform. But he was passionate about military issues and for years obsessively studied how the new technologies of his era would change warfare.

Bloch examined the introduction of the machine gun, smokeless gunpowder, long-range artillery, new types of explosives, railroads, telegraphs, steamships, and other innovations. And he traced their increasingly devastating effects from the Crimean War in the 1850s through the American Civil War a decade later, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Russo-Turkish War that began in 1877, and the start of the Boer Wars in 1880. He poured the results of his lifelong study of technology and warfare into a six-volume doorstop of a book that he published in 1898, four years before his death. He called it The Future of War.

What Bloch foresaw with stunning prescience was a future battlefield that would be far more lethal than most of his contemporaries imagined. The invention of smokeless gunpowder would literally lift the fog of war that had hung thick over past conflicts so that, unlike in previous skirmishes, opposing armies would remain dangerously exposed after the initial volleys of gunfire. Rifles could shoot farther, faster, and more accurately than ever. For centuries, the best professional soldiers could fire a few accurate shots per minute. At the end of the nineteenth century, average conscripts could fire dozens of accurate shots per second. And because bullets had become smaller, soldiers could carry more of them into combat.

Modern fast-loading artillery, equipped with range finders and high-explosive shells, were 116 times deadlier, by Bloch’s calculation, than guns from just a few decades prior.

[…]

For Bloch, this meant that battlefields would become killing fields, where combatants would never “get within one hundred yards of one another.” War would cease to be “a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority.” Instead, Bloch predicted, “the next war will be a great war of entrenchments.”

[…]

Much of the war was waged with modern technology but antiquated doctrine.

[…]

Another factor that made the war so calamitous was the military technological parity that existed between the great powers.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Lethal autonomous weapons have existed for a long time

Thursday, April 7th, 2022

Lethal autonomous weapons have existed for a long time, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

Such systems, with varying degrees of capability, are currently in use by at least thirty different states. The US Navy, for example, has used the Phalanx gun and Aegis missile defense systems to defend its ships for decades. Though far less capable than the intelligent machines of today and tomorrow, these systems can be switched into a fully automatic mode that enables them to close the kill chain against incoming missiles without human involvement. The decision to trust those machines to do so was born of necessity: it was unlikely humans could respond fast enough to counter incoming missiles. That inability was deemed a greater danger than the option of turning the kill chain over to a machine that could shoot down missiles in time-sensitive situations more effectively than humans could.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Both militaries had tanks, radios, and airplanes

Tuesday, April 5th, 2022

History is replete with examples of military rivals that had the same technologies, and what set them apart is how they used them, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

The archetypal case is that of France and Germany in the 1930s. Both militaries had tanks, radios, and airplanes. But whereas the French chose to employ those technologies as part of their effort to build better versions of the fortifications they had relied upon in World War I, Germany combined those capabilities into a new concept called blitzkrieg, which enabled the German army to maneuver rapidly through France’s defensive positions, capturing Paris in roughly one month in 1940.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 11 Comments »

The information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself

Sunday, April 3rd, 2022

The information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

It is either stored on the system and then processed hours or even days later when the machine returns from its mission. Or it is streamed back to an operations center in real time, terabyte by terabyte, which places a huge burden on military communications networks.

Either way, it is the job of humans, not machines, to comb through most of that data and find the relevant bits of information. In 2020, that is the full-time job of literally tens of thousands of members of the US military.

[…]

In reality, these supposedly “unmanned” systems require dozens of people to pilot each one remotely, steer its sensors, maintain it on the ground, and analyze the information that it collects, much of which is discarded because there are simply not enough people to process all of it.

Indeed, for years, the US military has supplied only a fraction of the drone missions that its commanders in combat have demanded. The problem has not been a lack of drones, but a lack of people.

[…]

In the absence of machines that can share information directly with other machines, this is how the United States connects its battle networks: a lot of people sitting in a lot of large rooms.

[…]

More often they use a computer-based instant messaging program called mIRC chat. I have watched individual servicemembers juggling a dozen separate chat windows, which can often involve taking information generated by one machine and manually transferring it to another machine. They call it “hand jamming” or “fat fingering.” It is slow and prone to human error.

A friend of mine who recently did targeting in the US military told me that the best way his unit could get on one page in identifying a target was with Google Maps. They had to gather up all of their different streams of information about the target from their assorted sensor platforms, come to a time-consuming decision on where the target actually was located, and literally drop a pin in Google Maps to direct their shooters where on earth to fire their weapons.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

This was how America acted when it was serious

Friday, April 1st, 2022

It is difficult to overstate the all-encompassing sense of urgency that Washington felt in the early years of the Cold War, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

The way Eisenhower saw it, Washington’s primary role was to get the big things right. That started with picking the right people—not necessarily good people or nice people, but exceptional people, the kinds of people who might today be called “founders.” Eisenhower believed in empowering these founders by giving them broad authority to solve clearly defined problems, providing them all of the resources and support they needed to be successful, and then holding them strictly accountable for delivering results. In short, it was a strategy of concentration—of priorities, money, effort, and, most importantly, people.

[…]

He awarded gigantic contracts with fat margins to companies and technologists and integrated them into one military-industrial team. He scraped a space launch center out of a boggy stretch of Florida wetland called Cape Canaveral. He repeatedly blew up rocket engines and missile prototypes on the launchpad. But along the way, Eisenhower defended Schriever, got him more money when he needed it, and protected him from bureaucrats and staunch rivals, such as fellow Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who tried to kill the project at every turn…

Eventually, Schriever and his team did the impossible: they developed the Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons to precise locations on the other side of the planet in minutes.

[…]

This was how America acted when it was serious. The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked.

[…]

This is how Silicon Valley originated: as a start-up incubated by the Department of Defense. Margaret O’Mara, a historian and former staffer for Vice President Al Gore, has observed, “Defense contracts during and after World War II turned Silicon Valley from a somnolent landscape of fruit orchards into a hub of electronics production and innovations ranging from mainframes to microprocessors to the internet.”

[…]

A sprawling bureaucracy materialized in the 1960s to administer and discipline the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower’s more personalized approach to military acquisition and innovation, which was based on picking winners and holding them accountable, became bureaucratized amid the broader adoption of the industrial age management practices that had come into vogue in leading companies.

No one did more to further this trend than Robert McNamara, a veteran of Ford Motor Company who ran the Pentagon for much of the 1960s. Under his tenure, in the spirit of improving efficiency, new layers of oversight, analysis, and management were added, and these grew and began choking off the ability to develop breakthrough technologies quickly.

[…]

The result was that the process of developing military technology became harder, slower, and less creative. This outcome only intensified in the early 1970s, when many engineers in Silicon Valley began growing uncomfortable working for the US government as the Vietnam War grew more divisive.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Over-the-horizon radar systems are very expensive to build and essentially immobile

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

China has set about building over-the-horizon radars to track American aircraft carriers as they make their long journey across the Pacific Ocean:

The frequency of radio waves used by most radars, in the form of microwaves, travel in straight lines. This generally limits the detection range of radar systems to objects on their horizon (generally referred to as “line of sight” since the aircraft must be at least theoretically visible to a person at the location and elevation of the radar transmitter) due to the curvature of the Earth. For example, a radar mounted on top of a 10 m (33 ft) mast has a range to the horizon of about 13 kilometres (8.1 mi), taking into account atmospheric refraction effects. If the target is above the surface, this range will be increased accordingly, so a target 10 m (33 ft) high can be detected by the same radar at 26 km (16 mi). Siting the antenna on a high mountain can increase the range somewhat; but, in general, it is impractical to build radar systems with line-of-sight ranges beyond a few hundred kilometres.

[...]

The most common type of OTH radar uses skywave or “skip” propagation, in which shortwave radio waves are refracted off an ionized layer in the atmosphere, the ionosphere. Given certain conditions in the atmosphere, radio signals transmitted at an angle into the sky will be refracted towards the ground by the ionosphere, allowing them to return to earth beyond the horizon. A small amount of this signal will be scattered off desired targets back towards the sky, refracted off the ionosphere again, and return to the receiving antenna by the same path. Only one range of frequencies regularly exhibits this behaviour: the high frequency (HF) or shortwave part of the spectrum from 3–30 MHz. The best frequency to use depends on the current conditions of the atmosphere and the sunspot cycle. For these reasons, systems using skywaves typically employ real-time monitoring of the reception of backscattered signals to continuously adjust the frequency of the transmitted signal.

[...]

OTH systems are thus very expensive to build, and essentially immobile.

[...]

A second type of OTH radar uses much lower frequencies, in the longwave bands. Radio waves at these frequencies can diffract around obstacles and follow the curving contour of the earth, traveling beyond the horizon. Echos reflected off the target return to the transmitter location by the same path. These ground waves have the longest range over the sea. Like the ionospheric high-frequency systems, the received signal from these ground wave systems is very low, and demands extremely sensitive electronics. Because these signals travel close to the surface, and lower frequencies produce lower resolutions, low-frequency systems are generally used for tracking ships, rather than aircraft.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space