The Power and the Money

Attack of the drones, updated

 New information emerged fast regarding that drone attack in Syria. From the Washington Post:

1. Nobody seems to know who was responsible. Yesterday we noted that the Islamic State controlled no more territory; experts suspect a different rebel group was responsible;
2. The Russians claim the attack involved 13 drones, 7 shot down and 6 disrupted by electronic countermeasures;
3. The drones appear to have traveled at least 50 kilometers.

In terms of the Syrian Civil War, this is a nothingburger. It does not represent a rebel resurgence. Nor is does it mean anything for the Russian presence, which was already being drawn down in the wake of Putin’s declaration of victory.

But in terms of the future of war, it’s a harbinger. I want to know more about those electronic countermeasures.

Attack of the drones

 One day we have to continue our fisking of Ghost Fleet. I don’t like panning anything, but the book was full of howlers. Fine for fiction, but it was dispiriting to see so many people take it so seriously.

But one thing the book got right was the use of drones in future conflict, including a good scene during the Chinese invasion of Hawaii (page 69).

It now seems that life is catching up with fiction, right on schedule.

The Islamic State used drones regularly as weapons. Sometimes they placed bombs on the drones themselves; other times they would drop mortar shells from the UAVs. Now, however, the remnants of the Islamic State appear to have upped their game and attacked Russian forces en masse. They claim to have destroyed an S-400 missile launcher.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians claim something rather different.

A more neutral take supports the Russian claim that their Pantsir S-2 anti-aircraft cannon was successful in shredding the attack by a small fleet of commercial quadcopters.

All this said, the Islamic State no longer controls meaningful territory and couldn’t be expected to mount much of an attack. But what happens as the drones get better? Like, say, by mounting a small kerosene jet engine on ‘em? Or, more frighteningly, by going the other way and making ‘em smaller and smaller and ever harder to detect?

I’m relatively sanguine about this development. It won’t bring down civilization. But it may revolutionize ground combat. I’m not sure what the defenses against slaughterbots will look like, but I am sure that we’re going to see some dramatic changes in military tactics over the next decade.

Thoughts?

¿Qué sigue en la madre patria?

The Catalan election descended into utterly predictable chaos. The secessionists won, on poor turnout. But the Spanish national police idiotically decided to wade in wearing full stormtrooper gear, and now nobody knows what will happen. The Catalan premier, Carles Puigdemont, has been coy about whether he will issue a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI, to use the abbreviation first used in 1965). 

So what will happen? Last night, in a bit of insomnia, I jotted down a game tree to help me think this through. I present it below. You can click to enlarge it. I have colored the boxes with the flag of the party making the decision to make things clear. (I am sorely tempted to write, “time for some game theory.”)

Right now the Catalans are deciding whether to declare independence. Their other option is to begin negotiations with Madrid on the precondition that secession will not be on the table. If they take that option, we can breathe a sign of relief: what follows will be contentious but not catastrophic.

But what if they declare independence? The ball goes into Madrid’s court. The Spanish government will have three options. The first would be to agree to negotiations. With a UDI in the background, that seems unlikely ... but if they agreed would could again breathe a sign of relief. 

The other options, however, are more likely. One is to do nothing, the bottom tree on the chart above. The other is to invoke Article 155 of the Constitution and suspend the Catalan government. What if Spain does nothing? Literally, just lets Catalonia go ahead and declare independence but takes absolutely no positive steps to remove Spanish authority. Well, that would give the Catalan authorities two choices:

1. Do nothing as well. That would leave Catalunya in a sort of limbo, with an autonomous  community exercising nothing more than its constitutional authority as part of Spain while claiming to be independent. Weirder things have happened. Life would go on, taxes would be collected, services would be delivered. Eventually they would talk.
2. Organize a parallel state. That would mean having Catalan bodies and bureaucrats take over functions currently carried out by the central government. Eventually, of course, there would be a conflict: a firm would refuse to pay Spanish taxes, two police forces would quarrel, a court order would be ignored, something. 

That would throw the ball back to Madrid. Assuming that voluntarily acquiescing to Catalan independence would not be an option, the Spanish government would have two choices:

1. Crack down with the full authority of the state. We got a taste of that yesterday.
2. Uncooperative withdrawal. Pull out without recognizing Catalan independence. 

Here is where backward induction is helpful. In both cases, the Catalans would have to deicde: give in to Spanish pressure or hold their ground. Problem is, by this point backing down would be political suicide. People would be angry. But resisting a crackdown means civil war. Not necessarily a repeat of 1936-39, but sustained political violence. 

And resisting an uncooperative withdrawal means complete economic collapse. First, the banks would fail as their headquarters pulled back operations; without ECB support euros would become scarce. Second, all contracts would be tied up in legal knots, dropping a paralyzing web of uncertainty. Third, all transfer payments from Madrid would stop; Catalunya would have to replace them ... only Catalunya would not have euros. So it would introduce a proto-currency, which would plummet in value, fueling a wave of defaults ... and so on, until you have something that looks like Greece, at best.

Except, well, backing down by the point would end the career of any politician who tried it, Thus, the big X’s through that option.

The lower tree does not look good. What about the upper one, where PM Rajoy invokes Article 155?

Well, that would give the Catalans a choice: acquiesce and fight it out inside the institutions of the Spanish State or organize mass civil disobedience. The first gets us into a nicely talking world. The second put Madrid in the position of deciding whether to negotiate in the face of mass resistance or resist Catalan demands. If they resist we are ... back on that lower game tree. (The upper and lower tree are the same after that point.)

The implication is that this is a no-win situation for the Catalans. Resistance ends in civil war or economic collapse. (Ironically, the European Union makes it easier to impose that economic collapse: the ECB cannot support Catalan banks if Catalunya is no longer a member.) The smartest thing is to do nothing. If there must be a UDI, then nobody should do anything. Nobody speak, nobody get choked!

Meaning that nobody should do anything, even if the other side does something. Nothing is the  best option. Do nothing at all. Nada. Nothing. 

I am hopeful that in this case that strategy will in fact dominate. But, well, game theory does not really a good record in these sorts of situations. If it did, the morons in Madrid would have never gotten us to this point. (In fact, I suspect that the Catalan nationalists are surprised at their own catastrophic success.) But here we are, so we can only hope that the politicos backwards induct correctly.

Unless ... gulp ... unless the game tree missed something, some option or payoff that makes the bad state good for someone. In which case we are jodi ... thoughts?

The hawks make their case to fight North Korea

 Steve Bannon made waves when he pointed out the conventional wisdom on a Second Korean War: a pyrrhic victory that would result in hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian deaths. Less noticed were some counter-comments by Trump administration officials, including Secretary Mattis and General McMaster. 

An old Army friend of mine has now suggested to me what they might be referring to. He heard the analysis in an unclassified setting, but one which reminded him a little bit of the run-up to the Second Gulf War. So here goes the scenario, stripped of any incriminating details. 

Seoul is within range of North Korean artillery. The North Koreans, however, have to defend their entire border. The DPRK has about 21,000 artillery pieces. The claim now circulating, however, is that only around 1,000 of those have the range to hit Seoul. Moreover, the bigger pieces have a relatively low rate of fire, and thus would be rapidly taken out of commission by U.S. forces. (This is true even of self-propelled artillery, which does not move that quickly and can be easily tracked from the air.) Multiple rocket launchers could fire much more rapidly, but their rounds are susceptible to anti-rocket defenses like the Israeli Iron Dome system.

In addition, goes the argument, the DPRK would want to target military installations and civilian infrastructure more than random apartment buildings. They know the literature on the inefficacy of terror bombing — no country has ever withdrawn from a war because the enemy was killing too many civilians — and are not about to repeat the same error the U.S. made against North Vietnam. 

Add that all up, and the civilian casualties drop to 30,000 if the North Koreans fire all their artillery at civilians and less than 3,000 if they target more intelligently. 

The report that birthed this analysis appears to be on-line here. The source is the Nautilus Institute, a reputable operation based in Berkeley. 

Of course, the analysis should not make me breathe any easier. First, who knows if the planners in Pyongyang have read the literature on the inefficacy of terror bombing? Maybe they would target civilians regardless. Second, the DPRK has lots of chemical weapons. Maybe they would use them only for operational purposes ... or maybe they would try to attack civilians. And finally there are those nuclear weapons. 

What worries me is not the analysis itself, it is that such analysis seems to be surfacing again right now as our current President continues to amp up his war of words with the DPRK. I do not think we are going to be at war with North Korea anytime soon, but the probability keeps rising ... and this information has caused me to ratchet my estimate up another few notches. 

Thoughts? 

“Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole feud to private industry.”

Thus spoke Major Milo Minderbinder in 1943.

Was he right? Does contracting out combat support functions save money? I mean, that is not quite the whole feud, but it is some of it.

The best answer comes from study published by John McGrath, at Fort Leavenworth. Below are the figures from Table B-2 for various American wars. The figures apply only to the Army but rightfully include staging areas in Korea and both Gulf Wars: Japan and Kuwait, respectively.

So what do we got? At first glance, success! A higher tooth-to-tail ratio, awesome sauce!

We are back to the levels of World War 2! (AEF = American Expeditionary Force of WW1; ETO = European Theater of Operations in WW2.) Hooah!

Only, well, that does not include the contractors. We really should put them back into the mix, since they did jobs that soldiers did in Gulf 1 and before.

Ah. Well. Not so good.

Now, to be fair, these figures do not include the extensive host-country support the U.S. received in Korea, which would make that war look pretty bad. (Korea would fall to 28% combat troops on a BOTE calculation.)

They also do not include potential cost savings. After all, if private contractors are cheaper, then you would expect that the military would use more of them. Calculating that, however, is incredibly complex, because American operations have become far more capital and resource-intense over time. The simple calculations show ever-rising real deployment costs, but that could be a reflection of the fact that the American soldier in Gulf 2 was rather more lethal (and well protected) than the American soldier of Gulf 1, who was both more lethal and better protected (and better fed) than the American soldier in Vietnam, who was more lethal than the American soldiers who beat Hitler.

It is hard to figure.

But the headline figures should induce skepticism.

This, note, is just for outsourcing support functions; we have not gotten into questions of outsourcing actual genuine combat. You know, what Major Minderbinder really wanted to see. That is an even less-satisfying topic for another post.

“We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service”

Thus spoke Erik Prince in 2007.

Looks like my decision to take a look back at Blackwater was prescient. (Well, I had some inside information.) Today the New York Times reported that people within the Trump administration persuaded Erik Prince to try to sell the Defense Department on expanding the U.S. operation in Afghanistan by using private military contractors.

This proposal begs several questions, not least: would it save any money? But let’s punt on that for a moment. Here I just want to briefly review America’s history with private military companies.

The first clear-cut use of American private contractors to carry out a core state function — perhaps the core state function, the use of violence to defend the people — dates back to the Revolution. The fledgling United States needed to interdict British supplies and defend its commerce with its French and Spanish allies. The problem was that the rebel states had no standing navy, and lacked the time to construct one. Congress solved the problem by issuing “letters of marque” to private merchantmen. Once possessed of a letter of marque, private merchantmen would finance the outfitting of their ships with weaponry and proceed to attack British and Loyalist shipping in return for a bounty per enemy ship destroyed. The Continental Navy never numbered more than 40 vessels — Congress commissioned only 64 ships over the course of the Revolution — whereas the number of privateers peaked around 450. Almost 1,700 private vessels conducted combat operations for the United States in 1776-82.

The U.S. again turned to privateers when it again went to war with Britain in 1812, Congress having refused to appropriate money for a standing navy. In that war, privateers earned approximately $40 million — 5.1 percent of the country’s GDP at the time.

Congress again turned to contractors during the Mexican-American War. When the Army needed to make an amphibious landing at Veracruz in March 1847, it chartered 54 private steamships and 249 other boats. The Army also hired teamsters, laborers, and mechanics for service in Mexico. Civilian personnel, however, refused to serve for longer than six months, demanded exorbitant wages, and many proved to lack the skills they claimed. Reports complained of price gouging. [1] An embarrassed Quartermaster-General suggested that the Army establish a corps of enlisted laborers and proposed that the Navy should operate transports: “[I was] constantly embarrassed by the want of that practical knowledge which nautical men only possess.” [2] Congress did not follow his suggestion, and the Army again employed contractors against the Seminole Indians in Florida during the 1850s. [3]

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, both sides found themselves unprepared. Confederate privateers attacked Northern shipping. The U.S. side, however, broke with the past and did not employ privateers. Rather, Congress drafted 600 civilian vessels into armed service, and recruited 70,000 sailors to man them. Congress did, however, contract with civilians to move military supplies. One entrepreneurial New Yorker purchased a used ship for $12,000 and earned $833,000 from the government — the modern equivalent of $1.2 billion. [4]

The U.S. may not have employed armed contractors at sea during the Civil War, but it did on land. The Army of the Potomac under George McClellan hired Allan Pinkerton’s “National Detective Agency” to gather intelligence in the South and conduct counterintelligence operations in the North. A problem arose, however, when the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army, Winfield Scott, contracted with Lafayette Baker to provide similar services. In at least two cases, agents of one contractor wound up arresting employees of the other. More seriously, when President Lincoln fired McClellan in 1862, Pinkerton also resigned and took with him all the intelligence that he possessed about Confederate operations. [5] The Army eventually wound up bringing intelligence functions in-house. [6]

After the Civil War, military contracting went into eclipse. [7] The U.S. chartered private ships for use in the Spanish-American War of 1898, but only under strict military control. The federal government allowerd merchant vessels to arm themselves during both World Wars, but the centralized structure of the Merchant Marine bore little resemblance to the private contracting of the 19th century. In the Korean War, the South Korean government provided the U.S. Army with 50,000 civilian laborers to move supplies to the front, but the “Civilian Transport Corps” was never really a private organization, and the U.S. and Korean governments soon reorganized it into the paramilitary Korean Service Corps. [8] During the Vietnam War, the Military Sea Transportation Service hired private vessels to transport materiel to the war zone, but their crews were given Naval ranks and uniforms and came under military discipline while in-theater. [9] The Army employed private contractors to construct bases and ports in Vietnam, but military engineers outnumbered civilian ones 2-to-1. [10]

And that was that until the late 20th century. When the NATO occupied Bosnia and later Kosovo, the Clinton administration was reluctant to make the sort of mass reserve call-ups needed to sustain the occupying troops in the field. The figures are rather muddled and they include all sorts of non-support personnel, but about half of all DOD-funded people in the Balkans were technically civilians employed by somebody other than the U.S. government.

Which brings us to the modern era and another post.

Department of Things That Will Obviously End Well

Many years ago, in what seems like another life, I wrote a case about Blackwater. When I began researching the case in 2008, not long after my time in Afghanistan, the company was at the peak of its ambitions. It’s training ground in Moyock, North Carolina, was very impressive — and it still is — but the amazing part of Erik Prince’s vision was that he wanted the company to manufacture, deploy and operate a panoply of advanced hardware. These included the Grizzly APC (interior pictured), an armed frigate (see page 53), armed reconnaissance blimps, and a small private air force.

There is a rationale behind the idea of privatizing some military functions. Much of what is called “combat service support” has a civilian equivalent. In theory,  a private company could maintain a large reserve support capacity and rent it out to various clients, including the military, for less than it would cost any of those clients to maintain such capacity internally. In practice, it’s less clear that outsourcing logistical and support functions generates savings or improves readiness, but that’s an issue for another day.

The issue for today is that Russian Federation appears to be deploying private organizations to take and hold Syrian territory in return for oil and mining concessions. (The link is to the New York Times.) This is bad on about a hundred different levels. The small problems have to do with the problems of outsourcing core military functions to private organizations. The big ones have to do with the incentives.  

Not only do these contracts encourage Russian companies to go buccaneering, they encourage Moscow to broaden the war as much as possible. They also encourage Moscow to pressure Damascus into fighting to the bitter end and give corrupt Russian officials incentives dump public resources into subsidizing ostensibly private military operations. The officials don’t even have to be corrupt in a Venezuelan bribe-taking sense; all you need is an open-door between public service and lucrative private posts in the companies that stand to benefit.

Private military forces are, sadly, a thing. Erik Prince is running a small private air force for the UAE in Libya. But I’m not sure that I’ve heard of mercenaries paid with contingency fees financed out of the spoils of war. That seems new. I am sure that there must be a giant hole in my logic and this experiment with profit-driven pacification will end well.

Victory conditions in a Korean war

Over on the Twitter, Noah Smith wrote: 

"We're going to lose to North Korea??", people who have obviously never read the history of the Korean War are asking me

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) April 5, 2017

The context is a discussion of whether the Trump administration might use a war with the DPRK to prop up its sagging fortunes. I tend to think not. That said, it is possible that we might strike the North, setting off a war. Which would be horrible. But a defeat?

Since I do know a few things about the Korean War, I had to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. It seemed like one of those annoying slatepitchy provocations.

North Korea can, at best, sustain an offensive for eight weeks. During that time, it would be trying to punch through the most-heavily defended line on Earth with outdated equipment and no air support. North Korea could and would devastate South Korea, not least through massive artillery barrages against occupied areas, but the country could not defeat the South. (See Robert Farley.)

So maybe he is averring that a counteroffensive into the North would be a slow and terrible thing? Maybe he was. And it would be. A good friend of mine from Fort Benning, Curtis Marmolejo, spent a long chunk of time patrolling the DMV. What kept him awake at night, more than the fear of a North Korean army barreling over the border, was the possibility that North Korea might collapse forcing him to go North. And if that scenario is bad, a contested invasion would be worse.

But it still would not be a defeat. It is hard to see how an all-out counteroffensive could end in anything other than regime change.

And while some people may find it fun to concoct scenarios of Chinese intervention, the PRC is not going to try to rescue a collapsing regime that just started a war with the ROK and USA. 

But there is a way in which an attack on the North could amount to defeat. The North could respond to an American airstrike ... judiciously. Artillery barrages that avoid populated areas. SOF operations. A confrontation over the Yellow Sea blue crab fishery. Something else. And then after just enough time to establish that a war is indeed on, the North declares victory and sues for peace with Chinese support. The ROK government agrees, not wanting to see Seoul wrecked. 

This would not be easy. It might not work, tactically or operationally. It certainly might not work strategically. (Worst case.) But it is a scenario that could be portrayed as a defeat for the United States.

Thing is, the above is not what Noah seemed to have in mind. It certainly has nothing to do with anything that actually happened in 1950-53. So again, Noah, please, what the hell did you have in mind??

The failure in Yemen and the President

By now, most of you have heard of the tragic fiasco in Yemen. An attempted U.S.-Emirati raid went badly wrong, resulting in unnecessary loss of military and civilian lives. 

On one hand, the fault lies with the U.S. military, which proposed the operation.

But the buck stops with the President. It is easy to imagine a Commander-in-Chief disapproving or postponing the raid. This particular Commander-in-Chief chose not to do so, and thus the failure lies with him, just as it lay with President James Carter in 1980. There is no way around that.

Tragic mistakes happen. Failing to own up to them is inexcusable. The President has the authority and the responsibility. Regardless of the other failures on the chain of command, he is the one who needs to learn from the mistake and force his underlings to do the same. 

Escapism: A 19th-Century science fiction novel and a 21st-Century science fiction TV series

 First, this is the weirdest thing that I have ever read. It’s a science fiction novel from 1889. It’s badly-written. (I mean, it’s badly-written for 1889. For comparison, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published around the same time.) The technological extrapolations are weird and wrong and barely affect the plot, which concerns bizarre machinations around the succession to the British Empire and some weird-ass scheme where the President of the United States is trying to marry off her daughter to the Emperor. It ends with Canada beating the U.S. in a war.

Anyway. Why did I read it? Well, besides insomnia most of the major characters are women, and women who were not trying to impress a man. That is pathetically rare, even today, let alone 1889. Plus the author went out of his way to point out all the awesome people in the book who just also happened to be Jewish. For something so old-fashioned, it was also strikingly modern.

Second, I finished watching Occupied on Netflix. I recommend it! The main scenario is improbable, but slightly significantly less so than before November 8th. An energy-independent U.S. has pulled out of NATO and established a valued relationship with the Russian Federation. In the midst of a massive surge in energy prices prompted by wars in the Middle East, a Green government in Norway decides to shut down the country’s oil and gas production in order to combat climate change. Panicky Europeans green-light a Russian seizure of the Norwegian fields to restart production. The Norwegian prime minister reluctantly allows this in order to avoid a war, but his county finds itself entrapped in a slow-motion conquest as the Russians slowly assume more-and-more authority. 

It is quite well done. My only quibble? Well, whoever plays the American ambassador to Norway has a Canadian accent. You know, with that weird caught=cot sound you can hear from Justin Trudeau. Given that a pretty massive plurality of Canadians don’t have a recognizable Canadian accent, it’s an impressive bit of miscasting. (If somebody finds out that the actor who plays the ambassador is actually from Massachusetts, I will be embarrassed.)

The accent screw-up is all the more inexplicable considering how good British and Australian actors have gotten at mimicking spot-on American accents, even American regional accents.

But not Russell Crowe. See minute 1:12 in this clip from an otherwise great movie. Points to the person who guesses the word he screws up in the context of getting everything else right. The mess-up is all the more pronounced considering as he is in a scene with Denzel Washington, who has a perfect New York accent considering as that is how he naturally talks.

Actually, a television show about a Russian occupation of Norway might not be all that escapist these days, considering. 

Where to now in Colombia: the law and the polls

This post, unlike the previous one, is a backgrounder.

Plebiscites in Colombia are governed by Title IV, Chapter 1 of the Constitution, aka Articles 103-106. Essentially, it allows the President to call a referendum with the approval of the Senate. The chapter does say, “The decision of the people shall be binding,” but it vague on everything else.

And so, the Constitutional Court was called to issue an opinion as to the referendum law.  It said that a no would only prevent the President from implementing this accord. Another one could be negotiated or Congress could overturn the referenda and pass the accord via legislation. Similarly, with the approval of the Senate and his cabinet, President Santos could amend the accord and send it back out for a vote. 

There is still a mystery about the polls. Early polls in June recorded 53-point margins. But that soon changed. By mid-August, polls were all over the map. Cifras y Conceptos and the Centro Nacional de Consultoría indicated “yes”; Ipsos and Datexco projected “no.” In September, however, the polls were back to showing support, although one tracking poll showed support declining in the middle of the month. (Page 3.) That said, by the end all the polls projected a victory.

One facil explanation is low turnout. And it is true, turnout was shockingly low at 37%. But that only pushes back the mystery: the polls expected 67% turnout. At the end of the day, it is still a mystery. More data analysis is needed ...

How Colombia voted

The Colombia referendum result was a huge shock. We still don’t know why the polls were wrong and wrong by no small margin. But that’s a second-order question. The first-order question is: why did Colombians vote against the peace pact?

Jim Robinson, an expert on Colombia and a friend of mine, has some cogent things to say:

At minute 0:45, he states that the places where the FARC guerrillas have been active the longest voted against the peace treaty. Given that those are the places that would benefit the most from peace, he says, it’s telling as to how much distrust there must be towards the Marxist forces.

But is he right? Did the areas with most experience of the FARC vote against the pact? A former executive-education student of mine, David Ibáñez, is an economist with the Colombian Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism. He recently sent me data indicating that Robinson is wrong. The areas most afflicted by the fighting voted no. Rather, it was the center of the country, where the government long ago battled the FARC into impotence, what voted against the pact.

Lets start with these two maps:

The map on left shows the election results, by province. Green means yes, orange means no. The map on the right shows the intensity of political violence: the redder, the more deaths in political violence. There is a remarkable amount of overlap between the two maps ... with the most afflicted areas voting for peace. 

More anecdotally, but tellingly, locales known for particularly bloody battles and massacres all voted yes by large margins:

Caloto	73%
Cajibio	71%
Miraflores	85%
Silvia	73%
Barbacoas	73%
Tumaco	71%
San Vicente del Caguan	62%
Apartado	52%
Mitú	77%
Valle del Guamez	86%
Macarena	73%
Puerto Asis	57%
Turbo	56%
Toribio	84%
Bojaya	96%

The correlation holds up at a more fine-grained level, using the proportional amount of internal displacement as an indicator of the intensity of the violence:

The correlation is even more strong between rich jurisdictions and poor ones, measured by the unsatisfied basic needs index. Poor jurisdictions in Colombia voted yes rather dramatically:

It is a reasonable working hypothesis that poor areas were more vulnerable to FARC violence, even if they had not experienced it in the recent past. 

Finally, most of the remaining variation can be soaked up by Colombia’s unfortunate political polarization. (That is something very depressing for an American to report; I like to hope that our country’s recent descent into maddening political tribalism isn’t a universal phenomenon.) Consider these two scatterplots. The plot on the left compares the size of the yes vote with the share that President Santos won in the last election. (Santos negotiated the pact.) The plot of the right compares the size of the yes vote and the size of the vote share for former-President Uribe (who vociferously opposes the pact) with the yes vote. The correlation is striking.

Uribe really has been vociferous in his opposition. The linked story (which you should read!) does not quite communicate just how vociferous he has been. He did not just argue that a vote for “the Santos deal” was a vote for impunity (which he did), or paint it as a general referendum on the Santos administration (which he did), or that it was insane to allow the FARC to become a political party (which he did), but also that the pact would change the very definition of family ... this in a country where the Constitutional Court only ruled for marriage equality this April in a very contentious decision. 

This data brings home why referenda are generally a terrible idea. In this case, people in wealthier areas, where the FARC had long been defeated and excluded, could turn the referendum into a proxy vote on the Santos administration or gay marriage. Others could indulge their understandable revulsion at forgiving the FARC. I understand the feeling, but it is not one conducive to ending civil wars.* Perversely, the referendum failed because the FARC was near defeat ... in the places where the guerrillas were still a threat, people held their noses and voted for peace. 

Thoughts? There is clearly an article here ...

A terrible surprise from Colombia

More later. But right now, this is unexpected very bad news. For those of you who do not want to click the link, the Colombia peace deal to end a half-century of civil war just failed in a 50.2-49.8 percent vote. The polls predicted an overwhelming victory. May God save Colombia.

The above photo is from two years ago, at a hotel in La Guajira which only existed because of the peace process. I think it will survive the failure. In fact, one reason the referendum may have failed is that peace had already arrived in many locations (but not all!) and that may have made voters complacent.   

There is a good case to be made that referenda work well as legitimizing a decision to undertake a peace process, but are a terrible way to try to finalize peace deals once made. That case just became quite a bit stronger.

There is also a case that the polling industry may be in trouble.

Thoughts on Turkey

 Turkey is in the middle of an old-fashioned military coup, in the same league as the 2014 one in Thailand. This is not at all like recent events in our hemisphere. Honduras in 2009 was a complex and confusing situation where the constitution failed to contain political disputes. Paraguay in 2012 was only a coup in the fever dreams of the Brazilian government; the impeachment likely violated the spirit of the constitution, but it adhered to the letter. A coup may happen in Venezuela, but it will be a result of a complete collapse of order. We do not do things this way in this hemisphere.

With the kids in bed (they are tired!) I am watching television. I think there is an interesting question about whether Erdogan’s ability to get out messages via the Internet has made a difference as to how the coup has unfolded. There is a research project there ... coup leaders always moved to seize the television and radio stations back in the day, but do we know whether such seizures mattered? Is there data?

There is another interesting question about conscript militaries. It is clear that conscript militaries can pull of coups; it has happened all the time. But do we know whether conscript militaries decrease or increase the likelihood of a successful coup given other factors, like education or the legitimacy of democracy (the latter being hard to measure).

Worth studying.

Oh, and Turkey is not the only Muslim-majority nation in NATO. (Sorry Rachel!) I spent a lot of time in the other and blogged far less about it than I should have. Ni modo, I was tired at that time in my life.

Ghost Fleet #5½: Why post now?

 Well, Foreign Policy just reminded me that people in the Pentagon are taking this book very, very seriously.

Sigh.

Ghost Fleet #5: A matter of tone

 This series has not been forgotten; other things have simply intervened. We still owe posts on the implausibility of the naval technology, the outright impossibility of the space battles, and the ridiculousness of the tactics used by the Hawaii occupation and resulting insurgency. 

Right now, a short post on tone. 

One problem for all books presenting a villain is how to get into that sweet spot where the villain is competent enough to be frightening, but not so competent as to become caricature. Some readers don’t mind caricature, of course. But Ghost Fleet bills itself as plausible, so it has to hit that sweet spot or fail.

In terms of what the Chinese actually do in the book (and ignoring the technical flaws) the authors more-or-less accomplish their goal. The Chinese of Ghost Fleet are improbably but plausibly competent, and such competence is required for the plot. The book suffered more from making their American opponents implausibly incompetent, at least at the beginning, rather than making the Chinese superhuman. 

That said, there are ways to make competence seem like just that, normal old competence, rather than silly steely Nietzschean power-willing. The book did okay on the substance (ignoring its technical impossibilities) while failing in tone. It tossed in throwaway lines about the Chinese Directorate’s super competence for absolutely no reason — well, no reason other than playing on the implicit prejudices of readers primed to fear China in order to make them more scared of the villain. 

And that was a major disappointment, especially since I believe that the authors were convinced that they were doing the opposite. 

The United States has always been at war

 The New York Times had an article today about Obama’s “war presidency.” It isn’t a bad article, but it makes much of the idea that there is something new in the idea of a U.S. fighting foreign enemies in less than “an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam.” 

The article went on to say, “The longevity of his war record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition of war.”

Except, as I wrote in 2012 in response to the debate around Rachel Maddow’s Drift, the definition of war hasn’t changed! I was disappointed that none of the people engaged in that debate recognized that history didn’t begin in 1945. So, it has lurched up again the idea that there is something new about having the U.S. continuously engaged in small-scale low-casualty low-footprint military actions, let me repeat what I said in 2012:

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that with the exceptions of Mexico, Siberia, and Cuba, most of the American interventions were not sold as protecting what we would today call the Homeland. But those are three large exceptions! 

In short, President Obama’s experience as a “president at war” rather than a “war president” is nothing new. McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover would find it very familiar. 

Does Mexico need a traditional military?

 Mexico’s armed forces are tasked with all sorts of law-enforcement missions that elsewhere would be handled by police or gendarmerie forces. As a result, they are incredibly under-resourced, as Iñigo Guevara recounts here. It is an excellent article; if you have any interest in Mexican issues, you should read it.

But he does say one interesting thing with which I think I disagree:

For the last decade — 2006 to date — Mexico’s entire defense procurement has been limited to supporting its internal security and civil defense roles. Only very few items are actually considered military ... 

Mexico’s Air Force is running dangerously low in this capacity and requires a replacement for its obsolete F-5 supersonic fighters. Likewise the Navy will need to field a new generation of ocean going frigates and amphibious ships that can navigate beyond the exclusive economic zone and the Army will need to begin replacement of its museum-grade armor and artillery.

For those skeptics — I know you are out there — who will ask does Mexico really need a squadron of supersonic fighters? … or a squadron of blue water frigates? … or a brigade of armored fighting vehicles? … the answer is yes, absolutely yes. Mexico — like all other modern states of its size — needs at least a token defensive capability to provide a minimum deterrent against unknowns and uncertainties. Why? Because the best weapon in a country’s arsenal is the one that it never has to use.

I agree that the best weapon is one that never has to be used. But I do not understand why that means buying useless weapons! And it hard for me to envisage the circumstances under which supersonic fighters or an armored brigade would be useful for Mexico. (I can hazily see a use for blue-water frigates ... but only hazily.) Mexico pulled out of the Rio Treaty in 2004, but that treaty provided only the vaguest defense guarantees.* So nothing has changed. Mexico still falls under the American defense blanket in terms of extra-continental threats ... and cannot possibly defend itself against the United States.

Moreover, unlike Canada, the United States does not expect Mexico to help deal with extra-continental threats. And unlike Canadian voters, Mexican voters do not seem to expect their country to do so. 

Sure, Mexico can afford an armored brigade, a blue-water navy, and modern fighter jets, but they would seem to be utterly useless even for deterrence. So why bother?

I wish Jussi Jalonen still came around here; I think he may have thoughts on this issue.

Could Irish independence and the civil war have been avoided?

 Ireland celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising on March 27th. (The rising actually started on April 24th, 1916.) The Rising started the process of gaining Ireland its independence from the United Kingdom. The revolt was not popular in Ireland and the British easily suppressed it, but the heavy-handed British response after the violence mobilized Ireland in favor of independence. The rest was history.

But was it inevitable? There was a Home Rule deal on the table in 1914 that was highly favorable to Ireland. Moreover, the U.K. was in the process of creating the modern welfare state; the bill kept National Insurance in U.K. hands. Ireland could take it back ... but why would it want to? It was a pretty good deal. Ireland would have kept fiscal stabilizers, a full banking union and access to centrally-funded social insurance. 

On the other hand, history. The U.K. was slow to enfranchise Catholics, it tolerated discrimination until the bitter end, and the Famine. Memories of wrongs on that scale run deep. Moreover, the final 1914 home rule bill excluded northern Ireland for six years, which would have likely become permanent and become a running sore. It is entirely plausible that at some point after 1916 the United Kingdom would have split up despite any advantages for the residents of Ireland. 

So here is my question: had Britain been more intelligent in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and avoided the idiotic Conscription Crisis of 1918, would Ireland have remained part of the United Kingdom through the Second World War? Or was Home Rule destined to fail once the First World War postponed its implementation? 

P.S. I have read Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-22, by Ronan Fanning. He makes a solid case that partition was inevitable but does not really address the question of whether southern Irish independence was inevitable. He argues that no British government would have implemented the act (even without the war) but I do not quite grok why he believes that. Since I do not unfortunately regularly talk with Irish historians, this post is an honest call for schooling.

Was the Libyan intervention a failure?

 At Vox, Shadi Hamid argues no. He rightfully says that in order to evaluate the success of the intervention, we need to evaluate the Libya that is against the Libya that would have been without NATO airpower. He argues, pace Barack Obama, that “had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... and so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction.” 

Do we know that, however? It is also possible that the government would have invaded Benghazi, killed tens of thousands of people in reprisals and round-ups, and then re-established its authority. 

If you believe that a prolonged civil war was inevitable, then the intervention was not a failure. If you believe that the government could have re-established order, then the intervention succeeded only if the subsequent chaos led to fewer deaths than a government victory. 

Was it realistic to believe that the Libyan dictatorship could have (unlike its Syrian counterpart) re-established order and survived, or was the country doomed to fall into chaos once the rebels chased government forces out of eastern Libya in February 2001?

Any change to our assessment of the Syrian civil war?

 No change.

Back in 2012 we thought some of the other minorities might join the Alawites as relatively enthusiastic supporters, since their position in a post-Assad Syria would be pretty precarious. But this hasn’t really happened — support sometimes, enthusiastic no.
The majority of Assad’s combat troops are Alawites, because he can’t trust anyone else. That’s why he has to supplement with Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and whatnot. Even so, this means he’s perpetually, desperately short of manpower.

Sure, I could imagine a scenario where the government gradually rolls up the cities and large towns, one by one, and slowly strangles the various rebel groups or drives them out of the country. But it would require levels of administrative efficiency and resource mobilization that we haven’t really seen yet, and some diplomatic chops as well. (Or full-scale Russian intervention, which is not going to happen.)

My prognosis: no Assad victory this year. 2017 could theoretically happen but I would bet against it, even with a very generous definition of “victory.”

Caveat: replacement of Assad by someone more palatable or competent could throw things up for grabs. Assad is of course aware of this, which is why his personal security is very very tight.

Additional savings from going all America First

 The previous post looked at overseas basing costs and concluded that there were no real savings from shutting them down unless the United States also cut the military budget. Which, of course, we could do without ending our defense obligations.

The post did not account for the fact that NATO has a common budget, funded in part by the United States. That common budget comes to ... €2.1 billion, or $2.4 billion. The U.S. pays 22% of the common budget, or $523 million per year.

There are also individual NATO trust funds established for particular projects. They come to a grand total of €69 million, or $78 million. The U.S. share can vary, but assuming it’s around 22%, then you get a total U.S. contribution of $17 million. (The trust fund projects aren’t annual, but let’s run with that.)

So destroying the entire postwar Atlantic alliance system would save us $540 million per year. Call it a buck-seventy for every man, woman and child in the United States. 

That is not a lot of money. But hey, it is something. Make the Euros cough that up! Yeah! U-S-A! Winning!

DMZ comic book easter egg reveal

 The previous post reminded me of DMZ, an excellent comic book about a future American civil war. 

Towards the end of the series, we get to see the President of the United States, who leads government forces in that war. He is never named. But you see his face. And he is ... Dennis Kucinich.

It’s a nice touch. Read the books. James Nicoll should review them as part of his Military Speculative Fiction That Doesn’t Suck series.

Powerful

 Watch this.

Maybe terror attacks didn’t help Drumpf

 In comments, Logan suggests that perhaps the Trump surge wasn’t due to the Paris attacks, but rather Ben Carson’s collapse. It certainly does look like most of the support for Trump came from Carson:

The Pollster data isn’t as fine-grained as the Fivethirtyeight data, but it casts some doubt on the hypothesis that terror helped Trump. It is still possible, of course, that Carson lost support to Trump because frightened Republican voters decided that Trump was somehow stronger. But it is also possible that Carson crashed for other reasons and those voters went to Trump as the other anti-establishment candidate in the race.

Back to you, Logan. 

Keep calm and carry on ... please

 Terrorism in Europe was much worse in the 1970s and ‘80s, even discounting Northern Island during the Troubles.  The below chart of annual deaths from terror attacks has been updated to include Brussels (and one lone death in Northern Ireland, included since the Troubles officially ended with the Good Friday Agreement.) NOTE: An earlier version of this chart mislabeled the London subway bombings, which occurred in 2005, not 2011. The 2011 spike is due to the mass shooting in Norway by a white supremacist.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that American primary voters care about the historical perspective. On November 30th, we pushed back against a breezy statement by Kevin Drum in which he argued that the Paris mass casualty attacks had no impact on the primary election. Fivethirtyeight has now published a somewhat more sophisticated analysis demonstrating the same argument: both Paris and San Bernadino helped Donald Trump in the GOP primary. 

Hopefully, history will not repeat. It would be better for the country (and probably the GOP) for Donald Trump to go to the convention with less than a majority of delegates.

Mad Max is bullshit, people; disasters do in fact bring us together

 We have some unfinished posts fisking the World War Three novel Ghost Fleet. We are not fans of the book. And now one of the authors, August Cole, has posted this. 

“This” is a paean to Tom Clancy wargame in which there is a smallpox outbreak in New York City, after which society collapses and warlords take over. Or something. You can watch a trailer. 

Now, to be fair, Cole has nothing to say about whether a smallpox outbreak in New York would suddenly cause civilization to collapse into dog-eat-dog violence. He just thinks it’s useful to depict scenes of mass human suffering in video games because it will better prepare future soldiers for urban operations: 

“But scavenging in the confines of the New York subway system or winding up in a shootout with a local gang reinforces that your own worst enemy is all too familiar: fellow humans. The game lays bare how the odds are stacked against the survivors of such a calamity, and how even functional complex urban environments teeter and sway between chaos and order each day. Just as the novel World War Z by Atlantic Council senior fellow Max Brooks presents this uncomfortable truth through the premise of a zombie outbreak, this video game does so with close-quarters anarchy caused by catastrophic bio-terrorism ... The Division will appeal more broadly to gamers, given its formulaic progression of acquiring skills, weapons, and powers, which big studio games must incorporate in order to entice millions of players. That is also one of its strengths and perhaps greatest forms of utility in the defense realm: broad appeal. Megacity operations, be it relief or combat, will no longer be an abstract concept to young corporals or privates — or their commanding officers.”

I would like to point out here that there is remarkably little evidence that looting and unrest spike in disaster situations. The first paper of which I am aware pointed that out in 1968. A 2004 paper from the CDC reinforced the argument, showing that most looting involved necessary supplies rather than egregious attacks on other people or their property. “In contrast, researchers have found — at least in the immediate aftermath of disasters — that community resilience and unity, strengthening of social ties, selfhelp, heightened initiative, altruism, and prosocial behavior more often prevail. In short, when things are at their worst, disaster-stricken communities tend to rise to the occasion.”

This issue came up again in 2010, when preliminary reports of widespread disorder after the Chilean earthquake proved unfounded. The looting that did occur was easily controlled. No roving gangs taking over whole neighborhoods; for some numbers, we are talking about an increase in armed robberies from 52 in 2009 to 102 in the year of the earthquake. No houses were hit. It was not Mad Max. 

And again in the Philippines in 2013. Same general story.

In other words, I think our military would be very ill served if it were to promote training tools that gave soldiers the impression that organized violent gangs were going to be their main problem in post-disaster situations. 

Reality gets ahead of Ross Douthat speculation: Americans are from Venus!

 Ross Douthat is one of my favorite commentators at the New York Times. He comes from a fundamentally Catholic and small-c conservative background, from which he derives insights quite unlike my own. I rarely agree with him, but he does a very effective job of communicating how he arrives at his conclusions,  which I find very enlightening. You can see where common ground might be found. I encourage my readers to regularly peruse his stuff. 

Today Douthat is beginning an entertaining series of science-fictional tweets: 

Envisioning a future where the Bob Kagan of 2050 writes that "Europeans are from Mars, Americans are from Venus," and everyone nods.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 11, 2016 

Dateline, 2035: Parisian tabloids scream "Yankee Cowards!" as socialist U.S. gov't opposes French invasion of Islamist-ruled Egypt.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 11, 2016

Dateline 2032: Democrat-Socialist candidates promise "U.S. out of NATO" after American peacekeepers die policing Russo-Turkish armistice.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) February 11, 2016

First, will humans still be peacekeeping in 2032? My guess is “yes,” but robots will be with them.

Second, it looks like fun!

Third, this blog got there first. His future has already come true! We just don’t realize it yet.

Fleet ghosting, or an American war on China?

 Recently, there has been some worry that a Chinese government facing internal challenges might choose to aggravate external conflicts. These worries are plausible, but it strikes me that it is far more likely that an American president might provoke a conflict with China than the reverse. After all, a war with China would be primarily at sea and in the air. It would provide the United States with clear victory conditions. And it is one that (as of right now) the United States would win.

So might an American president be tempted? Realistically, any scenario would need to fill several requirements:

1. No cognitive dissonance. I do not believe in a Reichstag fire scenario. Any series of provocative responses by an American president would have to be ones that she or he could justify in their own head. Which also means that they would be justifiable in the eyes of much of the public;
2. Provide electoral advantage. The lessons from George H.W. Bush are useful here. He came out of an amazing overwhelming victory in a popular war and still went on to lose in November of the subsequent year;
3. Retain East Asian support. Any series of American provocations against China would need to keep Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and (to a lesser extent) Vietnam on side at every stage. Lose them and you likely lose (2) as well;
4. Provide advantage short of war. Given the geopolitical circumstances, no single American action would lead to war. It would result from a cascading series of American actions and reactions. Each individual American action, however, would have to fill all of the above requirements, should the Chinese government not take the bait. In other words, the U.S. administration would need to believe that it would come out ahead regardless of the Chinese countermove.

One question, of course, is whether a short naval war with China would have adverse economic impacts on the United States. The answer to that question is surprisingly unclear. Chinese demand for U.S. bonds is irrelevant, given that we borrow in our own currency. A decline the U.S. dollar could be good for the American economy. Most Chinese imports are replaceable, certainly in the short run. The long-run consequences would not be good, but the assumption here is that the American administration is not worrying about the long run.

The question for you, then: what are the circumstances under which an American president might deliberately try to provoke a war with the People’s Republic of China?

Read this first.

The benefits of American empire

 “The United States provide the majority of security on earth. What would the world look like without that security? Would South Korea exist? Would they be selling us Hyundais and Kias? Would Taiwan exist? How would the Cold War have ended? Would Germany still be divided? Who would control the largest known oil reserves on earth? Would Israel exist? The armed forces of the United States guarantee certain conditions on planet Earth, conditions with which much of the Western world is happy. It is worth considering what the world would look like without them.”  

Those words come from a review by Adrian Lewis (U-Kansas) than damns with faint praise a book called State of War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1945–2011, by Paul Koistinen (Calstate-Northridge). Koistinen describes the rise of the national security state in the United States. He does not quite call the defense industry a “vampire squid,” but he does write: “The [defense] industry became characterized by inefficiency, waste, and corruption; defense contractors too often turned out defective or failed weapons and equipment. Over time, massive expenditures for defense have had a very deleterious effect on the economy. … Of crucial significance … DOD budgets have distorted public priorities and spending, denying adequate attention and resources to infrastructure, education, medical care, and other public services and interests.”

But Koistinen, like a lot of liberal critics, acts as though the national security state came out of nowhere and survives for no reason other than its ability to lobby. Lewis acerbically points out that Koistinen needs two more chapters. One should explain why the American people “continuously put into office political leaders who sustain the Military-Industrial Complex, and who, after the Vietnam War, failed to show up to fight.” The second should describe the threats that the national security state evolved to confront. The pithy paragraph opening this post comes from that second proposed chapter.

Lewis actually saves his final one-two punch for the end. It is a doozy: “I will recommend this book to some of my graduate students. There are a few points, however, with which I strongly disagree; for example: ‘Although the armed forces had acquired some new weapons and equipment, the military as a whole appeared to be in no better shape in 1989 than it had been in 1981’ (p. 29). Having served in the Army throughout this period, though, I know this is just not true.”

Ouch!

In short, State of War seems pretty mediocre, but Adrian Lewis has pithily penned one of the best and most succinct briefs in favor of the American empire (at least as it behaved until 1991) that I have read in a long time. 

In Soviet Russia, wars train for you

 From Putin’s annual Q&A, a question about the cost of Russia’s military operation in Syria, where its warplanes began a campaign of air strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on September 30:

“It does not impose additional pressure on the budget. We just used a portion of the finances we had allocated for training and military maneuvers to conduct our Military-Space Forces’ operations in Syria. It’s hard to imagine any better training ... We can train for quite a long time there.”

[Credit: Will Baird Doug Muir for news and Doug Muir Will Baird for title.]

Ghost Fleet #4: Anonymous is no match for the NSA

 Ghost Fleet’s climactic cyberwar scene reached a depth of stupidity suitable for a SyFy made-for-TV movie, only without the self-awareness. It would have been laugh-out-loud funny had the authors not been telegraphing what was going to happen for about 100 pages.

We have already covered most of what is wrong with the cyberwar climax on page 288 of Ghost Fleet. At the start of the scene, a Chinese superhacker is moving to shut off Akron’s power supply. The set-up, of course, makes no sense. The superhacker is attacking using software “modeled after the Americans’ Project Aurora malware.” You can go to this video to see what a cyberattack really looks like. She would not be flicking rings to “initiate attack protocols.” Maybe she would fool around with the utility’s control panel after the malware had executed, but she wouldn’t be “initiating” anything. 

Second, and more importantly, there is no way on God’s Green Earth that the United States would still be vulnerable to the Aurora vulnerability more than a year (or two; the book is remarkably unclear on chronology) into the war. Consider: “Mitigation is relatively inexpensive and straightforward. It entails placing a hardware device between each substation and its loads. That device monitors for the rapid out-of-phase condition associated with an AUORA event and isolates the substation from its loads before the torque of the grid can be applied to the equipment loads.” Sure, the United States might be vulnerable at the start of the war. But if the enemy doesn’t attack immediately, then it won’t be able to attack at all.

But the real idiocy is at the end of the scene, where our Chinese attacker is thwarted by … Anonymous. Yes, freedom’s secret weapon. Anonymous get a very Hollywood moment where the Chinese hacker’s virtual reality gear and interface to her hacking tools is obstructed by a rendering of a wall of Guy Fawkes masks. Anonymous then proceeds to take over the systems that keep her drugged up (WTF?) and kills her and all the rest of the cyberwarriors.

Anonymous is presented as an ally of convenience than “good guys” or “patriots” for the U.S. At that point, the accuracy stops.

The book paints Anonymous as a coherent and effective force. The truth is rather different. Fact checking their cohesion and ability is not terribly hard. In fact, Anonymous just conducted an operation. One deemed #OpParis.

After the attacks in Paris, Anonymous announced they would go after Daesh, aka “the Islamic State.” They planned to take down twitter accounts associated with Daesh and compromising forums and systems associated with the same. After a week of their #OpParis, Anonymous reported taking down more than 20,000 twitter accounts and claimed to have doxxed several Daesh recruiters. (“Doxxing” means posting private information about names, locations, generally personal details, etc.)

Already one might start to wonder whether the authors of Ghost Fleet were grinding an ideological axe or (more likely) writing a scene they knew was immensely stupid in the hope of getting a movie deal. Taking down Twitter feeds and doxxing Daesh sympathizers is a long way from killing Chinese government operatives by remote control.

Except Anonymous is even less capable than than its claims about OpParis reports would indicate. After all, accounts that were supposedly taken down included such Daesh supporters as the New York Times, U.S. President, BBC and Hillary Clinton.

Wait! What?

Indeed.

Multiple sources reported most of the twitter accounts were active still after the so-called attacks. Twitter stated the lists of supposed Daesh accounts provided from some Anonymous members were wildly inaccurate. So is the claim they took down 20,000 accounts complete hogwash? Is there a way to reconcile Anonymous’ statements with the observations of the outside world?

Yes, actually, there is. At least for some of their claims.

To do so though will require examining how Anonymous attacked its targets. While there are a number of skilled hackers, the majority of Anonymous is little more than what we call script kiddies. These are users of prepackaged software meant to compromise systems. How such software works, we’ve talked about before. Such software is not, however, anywhere as near as sophisticated as Stuxnet or other real cyberweapons.

Anonymous essentially spammed the Twitter accounts so people could not, while under attack, use them. They sent wave after wave of messages including Rick Astley’s 1987 Song “Never Gonna Give You up.”

Yup.  Essentially Anonymous rickrolled the supposed Daesh accounts, spamming all incoming communication and making conversation impossible. The accounts were taken out … but only temporarily. As soon as Anonymous stopped their attacks, the accounts were usable again. This is what is called a denial of service attack, and, frankly, it’s a weak one. In other words, Anonymous didn’t take anything out. All it did was make a few accounts temporarily unusable until Twitter’s management stopped the nonsense.

That brings us to the greatest problem with Anonymous: its a volunteer organization attracting support based on enthusiasm and interest. Its a militia, of a sort. But it not a militia driven by concern for people’s homes or life. Rather, most Anonymous volunteers do what they do for the “lolz;” their own amusement. When they get bored, they stop. #OpParis petered out. The Islamic State steams on.

I’ll mention here that when Anonymous decided to doxx people who collaborated with the Zetas, they learned right quick that it was a bad idea. As for other ways of cyber-attacking the cartels, so far there has been nothing. The cartels are not running scared of Anonymous. 

To be sure, there are probably talented hackers out there affiliated with Anonymous, but the vast majority of them are not. That majority is the cyber equivalent of bunch of high school kids egging a house. Nothing more.

And certainly not the insanely powerful group portrayed in Ghost Fleet. And I see no way for the current group to somehow transmogrify itself into an all-powerful collective in only nine years ... or ever.

In short, the way the authors portrayed cyberwar may succeed as a way to catch a Hollywood agent’s attention. It failed on every other metric. Which is really quite disappointing, given that they have the knowledge to have written a good book.

Ghost Fleet 3½: Really, it makes no sense that the U.S. would not strike back

 Things are slowing down professionally, and so this series will continue. But I just finished re-reading the book ... and man it looks much worse than the first time through. Really shoddy work by the authors in what should have been a classic. I am befuddled by the positive reviews.

Any way, here is Politico (of all places!) reporting on America’s arsenal of offensive cyberweapons. Key quote: “One thing everyone I spoke to agreed on: The U.S. has the most powerful cyber arsenal in the world.” 

Weirdly, the article quotes one of the authors of Ghost Fleet. I know that they know all the stuff Will Baird explained here. So why does the book pretend that they don’t? They really could have done much better ... and realism would have introduced more drama, not less. It is weird.

Next up: the silliness of the way the book treats insurgency and counterinsurgency, followed by fisks of how it presents international politics, conventional military capabilities, and space travel. (Oh, God, the space travel.)

The Paris attacks seem to have helped Donald Trump

 After the Paris massacres, there was a lot of chatter that GOP primary voters would now get serious and turn away from Donald Trump. I think there is now a consensus that two weeks on there is no sign of that happening.

Kevin Drum just wrote that the attacks seem to have changed nothing. And using poll data from all voters, that is true. But if you limit the universe to the likely voters who make it through the polling firms’ filters, you get a different story:

This is not conclusive, of course, since it took several days for the jump in Trump’s standing to show up. But I do think that it means that Drum can’t really conclude that the attacks have had no effect on the race. From here, it looks like they have helped the Donald. 

Ghost Fleet #3: Cyberwar is symmetric

 One of the most disappointing things about Ghost Fleet was the dog that didn’t bark: the massive immeidate American cyber-counterattack against China. It’s one thing to write an exaggerated warning against a threat that you believe your country is neglecting. It’s quite another to ignore the loud and massive preparations for cyberwar that the United States has already made — and that those very authors have reported upon extensively. It was weird; weird enough to remove much of our ability to enjoy the book.

One thing that the authors get completely right is that much of any future cyberwar will be fought using malicious programs that are pre-positioned inside hardware. Trojaned electronics are a very real concern. It is entirely conceivable that in a future conflict, the Chinese government could do serious damage to the American civilian infrastructure. Moreover, with the advent of the “internet of things” such an attack — when combined with the more “traditional” operations described in our last post — such an attack would consist of a serious Weapon of Mass Annoyance, as toilets seized up and heating systems went haywire. To their credit, the authors evocatively show just such effects: a home front dealing with unfixable automated refrigerators.

Unfortunately, the authors jumped (a lot of sharks) far away from the great fictional war classics like Red Army or Arc Light or The War in 2020. They moved out of the realm of the plausible. Let’s start with the idea that the Chinese could install Trojan horses in most of our military systems. They couldn’t. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on how some of this works. Adding a modification to a chip is a pretty profound process. It is highly likely to add glitches that would be easily detected. It would likely add significant time to delivery as well … and sudden additional delays for manufacturing a relatively generic chip would catch people’s attention.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are even less susceptible to Trojan horses. (Elsewhere, the authors of Ghost Fleet have pointed out in ominous tones that two-thirds of all the U.S. military’s field-programmable chips are made in China and Taiwan. We’ll ignore the fact that Taiwan is not in fact a part of China but an ally of the United States and pretend that all the key chips come from the People’s Republic.) FPGAs are not where you need to worry about Trojan horses because FPGAs are blank slates: the customers can put whatever programs they want on the chips. There is no way for the manufacturer to know what the customer (whether the U.S. Air Force or Intel) plans to put on the chips.

Remember, in order to subvert a program, a hacker must have an understanding of a program. But there is no way to know what program will be placed on a FPGA. Furthermore, many FPGAs allow for a program to be permanently loaded —  written once, read many –  such that any attempt at overwriting with a new subverted program would be impossible.*

Moreover, the United States has a trusted foundries program administered by the National Security Agency to make chips for the military. (Bizarrely, the authors have the trusted foundries play a key role in the successful U.S. counteroffensive.) Now, the trusted foundries do not make the United States invulnerable. But it does make a breakdown on the scale depicted in Ghost Fleet very hard to believe. The worst case scenario is an attack allowing for the crashing of the software through understanding the hardware —  garnered through espionage.

Recovering from a cyberattack based on Trojaned electronics would “merely” require resetting the software. The scare quotes are because such a reset would be far from simple and would take a substantial amount of time. During a battle, such an attack could be catastrophic. We believed in the U.S. defeat during the initial offensive. (Save perhaps the actual invasion of Hawaii: more on that later.) But over the course of a war, the problem is entirely addressable, and the U.S. should have gotten a handle on the issue much faster than it did in the book.

But to be fair, while the scale of the attack may have been hard to believe, but it was not impossible to believe. Yes, the details were wrong, but the United States could in fact get punched in the nose as hard as it was in the opening battles of a future war.

What was impossible to believe was that the United States would not strike back, hard. The U.S. is already training offensive cyberteams. And this is the latest part of a long-standing program — viz the fact that the only documented cyberattacks in the history of the world have come from the Israel and the United States. Hooah, indeed.

As for Trojan Horses hidden in hardware, the Chinese have far more to fear than we do. They don’t know what they are manufacturing! It’s far more likely the U.S. is slipping in something into their chips than vice versa. Not because the U.S. is miraculous, but because we are doing the design. Chinese firms, for the chips made there, do the manufacture. It’s easier for us to verify that a design is what we think it is than it is for them to verify that a design does what they think it does.

Now, perhaps the United States isn’t installing Trojan horses in Chinese electronics. We’re perfectly willing to accept that as a premise. (Even if it’s improbable.) And we are willing to accept that the Chinese could inflict enough damage on American systems as to allow them to win a naval campaign in the Pacific. What we’re not willing to accept is that the United States would be unable to strike back against Chinese infrastructure.

A realistic counter strike would cripple the Chinese in a manner in parallel to the United States. Those same fridges taken out in the U.S. are likely to be taken down in China. The irony of the Chinese situation is with their modern infrastructure, they are likely to have far more of their critical infrastructure taken down in a cyberwar scenario. The analog systems of yesteryear are completely immune to the hacking of digital systems. Digital upgrades will be very uneven in the U.S. They will be almost ubiquitous in China. The Chinese could pummel the United States. The United States would equally pummel the Chinese in a cyberwar. The authors highlighted Los Angeles and the problems with fridges, a metropolitan area currently of 13 million people. What happens when Beijing’s 21 million can’t store food either?

A realistic scenario for cyberwarfare would be the race of the cripples: compromised systems on both sides will cripple each side’s military and homefront in unexpected ways. Both sides would go into battle with their equipment malfunctioning. Both sides would find some of their premier weapons unusable. No one has a monopoly on cyberwar. As of 2015, the U.S. has a significant lead, despite what the authors imply. It is certainly possible that the U.S. would lose that lead by 2024, but it is simply impossible that America would lose the ability to strike back.

The revelations about Stuxnet and the Equation Group have made it clear that the United States has adapted its Cold War approach to nuclear warfare to the new world of cyberwar. During the Cold War, it was theoretically possible to defend against nuclear weapons on a large scale. (Using nuclear tipped interceptors, for example.) But the costs — and there were many! — were deemed too large.

Instead, American war planners adopted an approach that worked surprisingly well: mutually assured destruction (MAD). If a power launches nuclear weapons against the U.S., then the U.S. will literally destroy them in response.

The U.S. could construct an economy invulnerable to cyberattack, but that would slow progress in development of computers and the internet to a crawl. Moreover, it would require civilian discipline unprecedented outside of the two World Wars: does your grandmother always update her computer? Or your uncle his phone? Your child her tablet? Or your husband his new smart thermostat?

Rather than attempt the impossible, the U.S. has applied MAD to cyberwarfare: China unleashes cybernetic hell on the U.S. and the U.S. will unleash it in turn on China.

Finally, there is no way that a cyberwar on this scale wouldn’t go global. The authors themselves have noted in other venues how Stuxnet spread to systems far outside Iran. The same would happen with Chinese and American cyberweapons unleashed in a Third World War. To some extent, that’s a minor point: why should the reader of a good WW3 yarn care whether municipal sewers and automated metros in Lyon are going haywire? They shouldn’t. But the rest of the world will be affected and they will be angry … and in a scenario where China strikes first, they will be angry at China. Maybe America’s NATO allies would refuse to invoke Article 5. (We’ll get to whether that is believable in a later post.) But there is no way on God’s green Earth that they would pretend as though nothing has happened.

In short: the scale of the effect of the initial cyberattack on the U.S. is believable, even if the depictions of how it was carried out make no sense. But it is improbable. And it is completely impossible that the U.S. wouldn’t strike back. We can believe a Chinese victory in the first phase of the war. But one of on the scale depicted was laughably silly and the lack of an American counterstrike was ludicrous fantasy.

And so, once again, our disbelief was desuspended. If you can’t believe the scenario is possible, then what’s the point? These guys know enough to have done much Much MUCH better.​

Europeans are from Mars, Americans are from Venus

 The reference is to a 2003 book by Robert Kagan, where he argues that Americans are more bellicose than Europeans simply because their country is more powerful. Americans from Mars, Europeans from Venus, get it?

Which is why I cannot help but note that a second pre-Paris attack poll showed that 61% of the French favored sending ground forces to take on the Islamic State, whereas according to a new Gallup poll, 53% of Americans oppose sending American soldiers into ISIS territory. 

Venusians, indeed. 

A French poll you may have missed

 According to an Ifop poll, 56% of the French public favors sending the Armée de terre française into Syria.

That is, they did two months ago. You can only imagine what opinion looks like now. 

For comparison, back in August about 52% of the American public favored sending ground forces against the Islamic State. 

In short, people, Europeans are from the same place on Mars as we are over here. For better or for worse.

The French dilemma

 I found out about the attacks in Paris the old-fashioned way: reading about them on the front page of a Mexico City newspaper. (I was there briefly for a conference on organized crime; an in-and-out two-day visit.) I would like to make two points, both of which I am sure are being made elsewhere.

First, the attack was not unprecedented. Mass casualty events of this size are rare, but they do happen. The below figure uses data from the Global Terrorism Database and removes all incidents in Northern Ireland. (The Troubles would otherwise drive the results; they more resembled a low-level civil war than “terrorism” per se.) Political violence was far more common in the 1970s and 1980s. There were fewer mass-casualty attacks, but they did occur. After removing airplane bombings in 1970, 1974 and 1988, you have 76 people dead in the 1980 explosion at the Bologna train station, 61 dead in the botched hostage situation at the Rome airport in 1973, 37 dead in the 1980 London nightclub firebombing, and 19 other incidents with double-digit death tolls over those two decades.

If the Islamic State manages to make this the first of a wave of attacks, then it would be something new ... but I would be surprised if they have the operational capability to carry out multiple mass casualty assaults.

Second, France is limited in what it can do. French airstrikes are not likely to accomplish more than the U.S. coalition has already accomplished, as Kevin Drum has pointed out. Now, the air war against the Islamic State is not played out. The coalition has only now started to target the oil trade, which will weaken the Islamic State’s finances. But it is not clear how stepped-up French participation in the air war will alter the correlation of forces. It is more likely to simply let the USAF ease up a bit on its operational tempo.

Now, with U.S. airlift and cooperation from neighboring countries, France could assemble three brigades to invade and destroy the Islamic State. Inasmuch as attack planning happens in Syria, that might even have a salutary security effect. (The U.S. really did disrupt Al-Qaeda’s ability to plan after it invaded Afghanistan.) France has fallen behind its 1999 commitment to be able to deploy 30,000 troops on short notice, but with American airlift and ISR support it has enough capacity to deploy and sustain half that figure (see also here and here and here). Consider how rapidly French deployed to Mali (including allied African forces):

But what then? Three brigades could probably disrupt ISIS forces on the ground and retake all of the territory it occupies. But it would not be enough to hold it. You could turn the area over to the Syrian National Army, but that seems impossible (on multiple levels) unless you had a political settlement of the civil war.

You could also try to magically cook up a third force capable of holding the area, but good luck with that ... it did not work terribly well in Iraq the first time around. Invite in the Egyptian army? Paging Marco Rubio: That would be a bad idea even were it possible, as the commentator here argued convincingly.

You could leave the area in chaos, but then you would have accomplished precisely nothing in terms of preventing terror attacks against the Hexagon or other parts of the West. 

Moreover, with such a small footprint, it is hard to see how the collateral damage from retaking Iraqi and Syrian cities would be anything less than enormous. Which means a lot of angry civilians and some awful propaganda losses.

So you could settle in for a long-term occupation, but I do not believe that anyone in their right mind wants to try that again.

In short, while the French (with American help) probably could dispatch the Islamic State in short order, they won’t. 

Unless there is another attack, in France or in the United States. Now, I doubt that it will come to that; it seems unlikely that ISIS has the capability to launch multiple mass attacks. Moreover, intelligence and law enforcement is now on high alert. But unlikely does not mean impossible. It just means mildly improbable.

Should another attack happen I fear that a ground war would be politically inevitable. Futile and likely counterproductive, but inevitable. A terrible dilemma for whomever is in charge.

A request below the fold.

American aid and Greek economic growth

 Two years ago, I wondered about the importance of property rights in economic growth. The reason for my doubt was the example of Greece. The country has terrible property rights, yet managed to grow remarkably quickly between 1950 and 1980. As illustrated in the below figure (nicked from here), its annual output per worker rose from the level of Colombia to the level of France, before falling slightly behind. 

Well, what happened? One useful line of inquiry might be to dig deeper into history. In 1950, Greece had suffered greatly from World War 2 and the subsequent Greek Civil War. It is entirely plausible that the country possessed reserves of human capital far in excess of its contemporaneous Latin American counterparts. Maybe there is nothing miraculous about its catch-up economic growth in the subsequent decades.

But then I came across a recent paper by Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch. On page 11, I spotted this rather stunning figure:

Wow.

Now, the aid between 1946 and 1949 went to fight the war, but it meant that the opportunity cost of equipping the Greek National Army was essentially zero. It also meant that Greek civilians avoided much privation that might otherwise have been expected. In fact, the economy managed to grow during the war, albeit from the depressed levels at the end of the Axis occupation. (See page 30 here.) 

American aid continued after the war, however. In fact, it was not until 1961 that high levels of direct support metamorphosed into (rather soft) loans. 

To be frank, I do not think that American aid caused rapid Greek postwar growth. I am still not sure what caused that. But even had Greece avoided a Communist takeover without the aid, the chances are very high that the country would have slid into counterproductive redistributionist battles had American taxpayers not agreed to cover Greece’s continuing current account deficits. My prior would be that a counterfactual Greece without American aid would go the way of Argentina, at best. Some catch-up growth, rapidly petering out, followed by relative stagnation at the level of a wealthy Latin American country. 

Of course, we did it to keep the Communists at bay, not promote Greek economic growth. But it makes you wonder. Could foreign aid at the right time have kept Argentina, for example, from running off the rails in the postwar decade?

And what was it about Greece, anyway, that let it catch up so fast to the rest of Western Europe once aid covered the cracks? There had to be something else different about the place compared to Argentina or Mexico. No? 

Vox likes peace, we get it, but they need to think harder about war

 Vox has not covered itself in glory when it comes to issues of war and peace. The reason, I think, is that they really want to believe that war is generally pointless. That leads them to seize on evidence that state violence is failing to achieve its goals even when such evidence is weak. 

For example, they seized on an opinion poll stating that most Ukrainians did not want to have a civil war as evidence that there would not be a civil war. 

Now they have seized on  “evidence” to argue that Russia’s intervention is failing. (That sound is my head hitting my desk.) Their evidence? In one week of ground action with Russian air support, the SAA has only advanced a few miles on one northern front.

Do they know the Russo-Syrian operational concept? No. Do they recognize that the Syrian government is fighting on multiple fronts? No. Do they recognize that the Syrian government is worried about rebel enclaves inside its territory? No. Do they know anything other than unsourced claims from the Institute for the Study of War? No. (The ISW is not terrible, and ironically it holds the exact opposite opinion to Vox on most war-related issues, but it is not an unbiased source.) 

Since they call the offensive a “fail,” I think it is fair to call the post a fail for a site that aims at explaining the news in a thorough, rigorous and wonky way. 

Russia’s intervention may yet fail to stabilize the front lines and give the Syrian government a defensible frontier. But the evidence from Vox tells us nothing about that. For opposing evidence, read today’s New York Times. 

Ghost Fleet #2: Cyberwar is boring

 Neuromancer set the template for fictional depictions of hacking: colorful icons swooping through cyberspace in a glorified videogame. Sometimes the depiction is a little more sedate, but only a little: hackers frantically banging at keyboards as they break enemy defenses. Films like Swordfish or Hackers and many, many others make it seem rather glamorous, even visual. 

Ghost Fleet falls right into that trap early on. Page 41: 

“The young hacker focused on her attack, navigating the malware packet through the DIA networks while fighting back the desire to brush a bead of sweat off her nose with her gloved hands. The Pentagon’s autonomous network defenses, sensing the slight anomalies of her network streams, tried to identify and contain her attack. But this was where the integration of woman and machine triumphed above mere ‘big data.’ Hu was already two steps ahead, building systems components and then tearing them down before the data could be integrated enough for the DIA computers to see them as threats. Her left arm coiled and sprung, her fingers outstretched. Then the right did the same, this time a misdirect, steering the defense code to shut down further external access, essentially tricking the programs into focusing on locking the doors of a burning house, but leading a small ember on the outside for them to stamp on, so they’d think the fire was out.”

Needless to say, this is not how hacking works. 

Hacking comes in two major flavors. The first is the all-out assault. The second is the stealthy compromise.

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is a prime example for the all-out assault. A large number of software bots are surreptitiously placed on computers all over the world, usually by getting someone to click on an infected link or attachment. The software then automatically downloads itself and send reports into a controller server (itself likely another hacked system). The number of bots can range up to the hundreds of thousands and be directed by a small handful of servers. When the attack is launched, all those computers fire off requests in such volumes to cause the receiving computers to lock up. This is somewhat like having several hundred 5-year-olds ask questions of one person at the same time.

A variation on this is a massive port scan: using the same botnet, hackers can check all the different places software listens to for communication. The bots will then try to crash the software listening on that port, hopefully getting the system to cough up another entryway in response, like a username or password. The botnet is effectively looking in all the computer’s pockets for a hole from which it can swipe the key. Again, the hacker “merely” pulls the trigger after aiming the botnet. You could, I suppose, have a scene of the hackers feverishly writing the code before they launch the attack. But nobody is going to be sitting in a room swooping through 3-D displays. No typing, no visuals.

Then there is the stealthy attack. The special forces to the DDOS tank army. The classic is stealing access to passwords, preferably from a network administrator. The attacker then moves through the network slowly and carefully. The problem with this method is lots of places log their access and strange places often get flagged. If it happens too often, they lock accounts. That is part of the reason why many sites require periodic password changes.

The problem with this model — the hacker working hands on — is that it’s far more traceable and slow. Better is to compromise a system and let a bot go to work. In fact, far better is to let a bot just plain do all the work. It’s faster and safer.

The most common bot for this is the infamous “malware”: viruses, worms, Trojan horses, etc. The single most famous example of malware that went above-and-beyond was Stuxnet. The authors of Stuxnet didn’t sit and click or wave their hands in real time as they manuevered their way into the Iranian nuclear facilities. They had someone pop in a USB drive and the rest was automated. 

This makes it tremendously unsexy. The Stuxnet infection took a significant amount of time before it compromised the systems at the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. And once it was in, there was no way to know if it had worked until the U.S. received human intelligence that the centrifuges it targeted had actually broken. The infected Iranian facility wasn’t hooked up to the internet, but even if had been, it would have been very, very dangerous to report back. Communications can be intercepted.

Now, the Chinese hacker is working in nine years in the future. Why couldn’t she use virtual reality to hack systems in 2024? Well, maybe she would write code using a V.R. headset and virtual keyboard, although I’m unclear as to why. But she wouldn’t interact with the cyberattacks once they were underway. That would just result in detection once the communications were intercepted. Moreover, the time it would have taken to send back data about what was happening and send back the response could be up to ten seconds on the round trip. Add another ten seconds for her reaction time. That is a lot of time for the DIA to realize something is wrong and start shutting the doors. 

The authors talk about her and her bots trumping Big Data. It’s a nice buzzword, but it is totally meaningless in this context. Big Data might have been used as a way to train the DIA’s intrusion detection system to recognize which data flow patterns are normal activity and which might indicate an attack. But I have no idea what it would mean for the Chinese hacker to be “building systems components and then tearing them down.” As a description of cyberwarfare, it’s not even wrong; it’s meaningless. 

In summary, the hacking in Ghost Fleet is derived from the silver screen, not the reality of today. It also is highly unlikely to be what comes about in ten years. 

Now, to be fair, these scenes are just window-dressing. There is, in fact, a scene on page 37 in which a Venezuelan refugee accidentally infects U.S. defense systems in a realistic way. (Although I have to admit I have some doubts that you could actually copy malware onto a security badge — the article cited in their footnotes does not describe anything like the scene.) But there are much more serious problems with the way the cyberwar develops in Ghost Fleet, which we will get to in later installments.

Comments and criticisms very welcome!

Ghost Fleet #1: That’s a really dumb way to attack the Panama Canal

 On page 55-56, the Chinese attack the Panama Canal by smashing a giant container ship into the locks. “Two ships ahead, the Xianghumen, a Chinese-flagged freighter, had turned on its engines. This was craziness. What was Xianghumen’s captain thinking, speeding up inside the transit zone? The canal master was screaming over the radio for the Xianghumen to acknowledge and stop. But there was no reply.”

After the Chinese freighter crashes into the locks, “crushing the doors inward,” a Filipino sailor watching it happen thinks : “[He] wasn’t sure how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess, but their investment had clearly gone down the tubes.”

This was the second moment where I was yanked out of the book, because the scenario is impossible on multiple levels.

The first problem is that ships are not allowed to enter Panama Canal waters under the control of their captains. A Panamanian pilot takes full control. The Xianghumen would have to start its kamikaze run several miles away from the locks, which would making smashing into them a pretty impressive feat of navigation. Moreover, it would give the game away hours before it crashed. The Canal Authority would mobilize tugboats to push the ship away. 

Now, the story is set in 2024. So maybe the Chinese ship has some sort of ghost computer system that can seize control back from the pilot and start its run close to the locks. Still, there will be plenty of warning; ships do not accelerate quickly. 

But that brings us to the second problem: it is goddamned hard to get to the locks. Look at the above picture. Better still, look at this video, which shows a ship clonking into the side of the canal as it approaches the locks:

How in the name of God is a kamikaze vessel supposed to navigate that entrance? Even now, ships cannot safely transit without being hooked up to those locomotives that you can see in the video. 

Finally, we should point out that the Panama Canal has three separate lock systems. You would need three kamikaze vessels to crash simultaneously. That kills your robot scenario, since the Panama Canal Authority does the scheduling. Be hard to make sure that you have three ships in the right places at the right time. 

The scene is just fantastically silly.

If the Chinese really want to knock the Panama Canal out of action, then they should send a commando team to blow the Gatún dam. (Or just hit the damn thing with cruise missiles, as was pointed out in comments.) 

And it gets worse, because there is no reason to take out the Panama Canal in a hypothetical war. The Canal cuts the transit time from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but presumably the U.S. Navy will have the initiative in any counterattack. As Carlos Yu and I showed in our book, the Panama Canal had no substantive effect on anything in World War 2 other than the the marginal campaigns in the Aleutians and the timing of the Doolittle Raid. If the Canal had no strategic benefit in World War 2, why would it have one in World War 3? 

The final nail in the coffin of my suspended disbelief was at the end, where the Filipino sailor wonders “how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess.” Chinese companies do not run the Canal. The Panama Canal Authority runs the Canal. Chinese companies do run some of the port facilities on either side the Canal. But those ports are a different thing.

Ghost Fleet admirably has footnotes, so I checked the ones for this passage. They footnoted   “Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone” to an article in the Economist. Go read the article. Now come back. You will note that the Chinese interest the article cites is about the possibility of financing a fourth set of locks or building a competing canal in Nicaragua. How did they turn that into Chinese management of the existing canal?

It is a minor plot point, but it planted the skepticism that will blossom in this space over the next few days. 

Ghost Fleet

 Novels about great power war have long held fascination, particularly since the world hasn’t really seen one since the Korean War ended in 1953. Red Storm Rising is well known, as is Red Army and the Third World War. All three dealt with a conventional European war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. All wrestled with the specter of nuclear weapons and all got most of the technical stuff right. The best of the bunch is Red Army, in part for the characters, and in part because the author dared to have the United States lose.

All of those books, however, took place in what was more-or-less the present at the time they were written. Today, unlike the 1980s, the United States holds near-absolute military superiority. War is still possible, of course ... see, for example, Eric Harry’s Arc Light. It portrays an accidental war between the United States and the Russian Federation in the early 1990s. What makes Arc Light unique is twofold: it gets the politics and economics absolutely and it lets nuclear weapons out of the bottle without destroying the world. (I won’t spoil it by saying how; the book is worth reading. James should take a look at it for this series.) The war depicted was a great power war, of course, but it was accidental and it was not between peers. 

So to consider what a modern great power war between peers might be like we need to move into the future. On this blog, Martin Skold discussed what a near-future great power war might be like. But that excellent discussion was heuristic and only tangentially touched upon operational or technological issues, let alone the politics. (Go read!) 

And now we have Ghost Fleet, by P.W. Singer and August Cole! In it, China and the United States go to war in 2024. (The authors give away the exact year on page 48.) A real, genuine great power war. Both sides refrain from using nuclear weapons (for reasons I find plausible) and the conflict plays out over land, sea and space. It has gotten good reviews and it is a book that we really wanted to like.

But we have read it, and while it is a good gripping read ... we just cannot give it a thumbs up. The reasons are basically technical. The authors appear to get enough issues seriously wrong to make it impossible to keep our disbelief suspended. 

Over the next few days and weeks Will Baird and Noel Maurer will be collaborating on a series of short posts pointing out the problems with the scenario laid out by the authors. We are doing this for three reasons. First, it is a fun bit of procrastination. (The book is well-written and fun to read!) Second, the book has gotten a lot of attention in policy circles ... and if we are right about the flaws, then that is a problem. Finally, we think we might be able to learn something. These posts aren’t intended to pan or fisk the book; rather, we think of them as opening up a conversation. Are we missing something? Do the authors know something we don’t?

We have divided the apparent errors into three types:

1. “That’s Not How It Works” technical problems that affect verisimilitude, but not the main plot.  

2. “That’s Not How It Works” problems that don’t affect the plot, but are so major that they yank you out of the book completely. “WTF moments” is another good term.

3. Serious screw-ups that make whole sections of the book impossible as portrayed.

Watch this space.

Russia in Syria

 It is not easy to make sense of the Russian buildup in Syria, but here is what we think needs to be watched.

If the buildup stops soon, then this was some weird propaganda play on the not-so-cheap. But if it does not, then it would seem that the Russians have decided one of three things:

1. Assad’s regime is about to collapse. Since the Russians are not willing to see Assad fall, they are starting to throw Hail Marys.

2. Russian planners have convinced themselves that with a little bit of backing the front lines can be stabilized, after which they can go back to their barracks and broker a peace agreement. The Vietnam analogy here is with McNamara’s March 1964 memorandum. Obviously, there is no direct Syrian analogy for what McNamara proposed in Vietnam, but a rough parallel would involve a Russian buildup of a 10,700+ man intervention force and increasing direct involvement in SAA and NDF operations. (The SAA is the Syrian Arab Army; the NDF is an acronym used for state-financed defense forces.) 

3. Russia believes that the Islamic State poses a serious ideological threat inside the Russian Federation. The government has decided that the best way to deal with such a threat is to inflict a short sharp defeat on the ground, liberating territory from the Islamic State and breaking its preferred narrative. 

How to distinguish? Options (1) and (3) should show a sharper logistical ramp-up than option (2). And option (1) would, in the words of one analyst, “include militia units and a bunch of other high stakes risks that the others wouldn’t. A Berlin Airlift of crazy.” How would the armed forces of the Russian Federation sustain a Berlin Airlift of crazy? Not a lot of countries can do that at such distance; maybe only one these days. So a very large-scale intervention on the scale of the 1965 entry of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam seems unlikely. 

Right now, then, it looks like the Russians are going with option (2). Which assumes, of course, that they believe that public opinion at home will accept some small level of casualties and that the lines can be stabilized with relatively little effort. 

The problem, as pointed out by that same analyst, is that Americans are already deep in the field. If the Russians aren’t careful, they could wind up killing a bunch of American special forces. But that same analyst thinks they will be careful. 

Shades of 1964. But not 1965.

Syrians to South America?

 Here is a question for you: why aren’t flights from the Middle East to South America crowded with Syrian refugees?

On paper, most of the Southern Cone countries have remarkably liberal immigration regimes. Start with Argentina. Refugees are automatically accorded two years of residency and receive legal representation. (See the 2010 Migration Act.) Now, the law is not as liberal as American activists would have you believe: undocumented migrants can still be deported (page 17), but the Argentine government has explicitly opened its doors to Syrian migration. Uruguayan immigration law is even more liberal than Argentine. All you need to do to migrate to Uruguay is demonstrate an income stream of $500 per month. After that, naturalization comes within a few years. Brazil has a liberal new refugee law. 

The problem isn’t cost. A ticket costs around $800, rather less than the monetary cost of making it overseas to Europe. 

But in practice, all three countries are pretty much closed.

Start with the official Argentine program for Syrian refugees. The refugees need to have links to an Argentine sponsor either through family ties (out the fourth generation) or via a “pre-existing personal relationship based on whatever legal, reasonable, and justifiable reason: family, social, educational, work, etcetera.” 

Unless a Syrian in a camp somewhere can demonstrate a tangible documented link with somebody in the Argentine Republic, then they do not get a visa. This policy lets Buenos Aires claim that the doors are open while actually keeping them firmly shut. 

The policy may change, depending on how seriously Argentine authorities take the definition of a family link. Supposedly, 4 million Argentines trace some ancestry to Syria. In reality, no. In the peak years of 1897-1913, net migration from Syria came to about 103,000. To get from that to 4 million you have to assume almost total exogamy, which is not likely. (For the pedantic: if you assume the same birthrates as the general Argentine population, a generation of 35 years, and total exogamy, then about 3.4 million Argentines should have some “Syrian” ancestry by now.)

Moreover, a 1936 census registered only 11.2% of the Syrian-born residents of Buenos Aires as Muslim. (Page 17, once again.) Some of that is surely conversion, but it also implies that the “Syrians” came much more from Lebanon than from Syria.  

Nor is this policy in violation of Argentine refugee law. Article 10 exempts anyone under U.N. protection. Article 11 exempts anyone who has “voluntarily settled inside or outside the country which he left owing to fear of persecution.” Depending on the definition of “voluntarily settled,” that could include precisely every Syrian refugee. It certainly includes anyone in a UNHCR camp. Only a few hundred people have escaped under this not-so-generous regime. 

Uruguay is worse. After the country took in a whopping 42 refugee families, a counterreaction set in, and the door are now firmly shut. In theory, the country has pledged to admit ... wait for it ... 120. Now, Uruguayan law opens up an interesting way from European countries to send their unwanted refugees to Uruguay: give them an airplane ticket and a $500 per month stipend. That said, given what happened with the 42 refugees the law would be changed right quick if a European government tried to take advantage of it. 

Chile, meanwhile, has a liberal refugee law that only considers people who manage to make it to Chilean territory. So no visa for that plane ticket from Dubai. 

And then there is Brazil, which had settled 1,740 Syrian refugees as of March, and 2,077 as of this month. That is nice, but still a very small number. The Brazilian issue is that the bureaucracy is slow, so even without formal quotas few applications get processed. (The Brazilians also exempt anyone under U.N. protection.) It is probably the most open, but still not enough for a mass exodus.

The Brazilian case shows how much bureaucracy can turn an ostensibly open process into a closed one. The Mexican government is coming under a surprising amount of domestic pressure to accept 10,000 refugees. I bet there will even be a bill. And it will sound good.

But the devil will be in the details. Do not wait for Latin America to open its doors in any serious way.

Reports of Russian losses in the Donbass looking fake

 Courtesy of J.H. in comments, it looks like the Russian casualty data is probably fake. They were surprisingly high, but as Will Baird pointed out, quite plausible considering what we know about the number of high-intensity engagements so far.

The problem is that even if 2,000 combat deaths so far is plausible, a rather lower number is more probable. That is why I was surprised when the report first surfaced. 

Best to assume for the time being that the report is fake. That said, Forbes has not yet retracted the report. But Forbes may never retract it: the story showed up in one of their blogs and was sourced to a Russian news aggregator. Until they do, some doubt about the report will remain ... but as of now, the evidence is that Russia did not inadvertently (or advertently) publish an estimate of its casualties in Ukraine.

The barber of Kiev

 UPDATE: What a difference a year makes! At 14%, yes, yes it does. I started my analysis in 2014, which if you think about it, makes no sense since it is already 2015. The following has been rewritten to take that basic error into account. It has a big impact, as you will see.

So I get asked a question about the recent debt relief granted the Ukrainian republic. Is it a lot? A little? Since I was just in California enjoying the weather (or not, it is beautiful back east right now) I will attach a photo to set the mood. I hope I look properly contemplative.

So after about an hour of contemplation, the short answer is ... it is a fairly good restructuring, but it is not great. Kudos to the Ukrainians! Although they need more.

The Ukrainian finance ministry says that the value of the debt will be cut by 20% with no prinicipal payments until 2019. The coupon on the new bonds is increased from 7.25% to 7.75%. There is no break in interest payments. 

The right way to calculate the full amount of the “haircut” taken to creditors is to compute the change in the net present value of the debt. That depends, of course, on how long payments are extended for and at what interest rate. Without that, we can’t calculate the correct value of debt relief.

I got a rough idea of the principal payment schedule from Barclay’s. (You can find the key data in graphical form here.) I then calculated the country’s total payments through 2027 under the old deal and the new deal, assuming average coupon payments of 7.25% under the old deal and 7.75% under the new one. Total mickey-mouse, but enough to get some idea of the payment stream under the two deals.

The upshot? Ukrainian sovereign debt is currently yielding around 11.4%. It was yielding around 14% before the deal. If you use 14% as a benchmark, then the new deal is the equivalent of a 33% 44% haircut. 

How much is that? Christoph Trebesch of the University of Munich has put together an amazing database of every sovereign debt restructuring since 1970. The average haircut is 38%. The median is 33%. In 2004, Serbia got 71%. Greece recently got (an insufficient) 65%. The Russians got 51% back in 2000. Mexico got 31% back in 1990, at the end of the Latin American debt crisis. 

In short, this is about average pretty good! Ukraine does not look to be coming out much ahead. 

The deal looks a little even better if we restrict ourselves to the 17 restructurings that involved $18 billion or more. The average haircut on those was 30% with a median of 25%. Ukraine comes out between Venezuela in 1990 and Argentina in 1993. Ukraine does better than all the Latin American restructurings that came out of the 1982 debt crisis. It is bested only by Russia in 2000, Greece in 2012, Argentina in 2005, and Iraq in 2006. (The latter is not really comparable, since it involved odious debt.) 

Unless I am using bum data (entirely possible!) the point is made: Bloomberg is probably wrong when it calls the restructuring a wash for creditors, but no extraordinary concessions have been made given the scale of Ukraine’s problems. This deal looks pretty good. 

I should add here that creditors will have the option to exchange their debt for receive GDP-linked warrants! (The link goes an earlier discussion of similar instruments on this blog.) The warrants, it seems, will be granted to all creditors in addition to the restructured notes. Or at least that is my current understanding! 

The warrants essentially give investors an equity stake in Ukrainian economic performance. On the surface, they look incredibly attractive. As long as Ukraine has a nominal GDP over $125.4 billion, investors will get 15% of all real economic growth between 3 and 4% and 40% of all growth above 4%.

But who would take that deal? First, the payments will not start until 2021. Second, the World Bank estimates that Ukraine’s nominal GDP this year will come to about $94 billion at current exchange rates. Who knows when (or if) its economy will get back above $125 billion? Ukraine may come to regret including the warrants, but I doubt it ... and they are a nice sweetener for the creditors. After all, who knows? Maybe Ukraine will boom beyond dreams of avarice in the 2020s.

In short, this deal looks about average for debt restructurings. this is a good deal, but considering the problems Ukraine is facing, it strikes me as small beans. 

Finally, for those who want it, here are my guesstimates of the annual payments in billions of USD that Ukraine faces under the two deals. If anyone can correct them, I would be delighted! 

	New deal				Old deal
	Debt	Principal	Interest	Total	Debt	Principal	Interest	Total
2015	$ 14.4		$ 1.1	$ 1.1	$ 18.0	$ 1.5	$ 1.3	$ 2.8
2016	$ 14.4		$ 1.1	$ 1.1	$ 15.8	$ 2.3	$ 1.2	$ 3.5
2017	$ 14.4		$ 1.1	$ 1.1	$ 12.3	$ 3.5	$ 1.0	$ 4.5
2018	$ 14.4		$ 1.1	$ 1.1	$ 12.3	$ 0.0	$ 0.9	$ 0.9
2019	$ 12.8	$ 1.6	$ 1.1	$ 2.7	$ 12.3	$ 0.0	$ 0.9	$ 0.9
2020	$ 11.2	$ 1.6	$ 0.9	$ 2.5	$ 10.8	$ 1.5	$ 0.8	$ 2.3
2021	$ 9.6	$ 1.6	$ 0.8	$ 2.4	$ 9.3	$ 1.5	$ 0.7	$ 2.2
2022	$ 8.0	$ 1.6	$ 0.7	$ 2.3	$ 6.8	$ 2.5	$ 0.6	$ 3.1
2023	$ 6.4	$ 1.6	$ 0.6	$ 2.2	$ 5.8	$ 1.0	$ 0.5	$ 1.5
2024	$ 4.8	$ 1.6	$ 0.4	$ 2.0	$ 0.0	$ 5.8	$ 0.2	$ 6.0
2025	$ 3.2	$ 1.6	$ 0.3	$ 1.9
2026	$ 1.6	$ 1.6	$ 0.2	$ 1.8
2027	$ 0.0	$ 1.6	$ 0.1	$ 1.7

How bad are Russian losses in the Donbass war?

 The Russian authorities mistakenly released an estimate of the number of Russian soldiers killed in action in Ukraine, as of February 1, 2015. It came to roughly 2,000. That is a larger number than I would have expected.

How intense is the fighting? In part, that depends on when the bulk of the troops arrived. If we date the start of the fighting from the first armed clashes on April 7, 2014, then the Russian armed forces have suffered a casualty rate around 7 per day. If, on the other, we date involvement from the first known large-scale Russian troop movements on August 22, 2014, then Russian soldiers have been dying at a rate around 12 soldiers per day.

How intense is that compared to other wars? Well, it depends on our point of reference. The Correlates of War database classifies war into three types: interstate, intrastate, and extra-state. Interstate wars are wars between states. Intrastate wars are (basically) civil wars. Civil wars in which foreign governments send forces become internationalized intrastate wars. Extrastate wars are wars between a state and a non-state actor fought outside the metropolitan territory of the state.

Wars can and do shift categories. For example, a civil war can start off as an internationalized intrastate war. But if a foreign government takes over the bulk of the fighting from local forces, it switches to an extrastate war. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan provides an example. Similarly, if a foreign government takes over the bulk of the fighting from an insurgency, an intrastate war will switch to an interstate war. 

So far so good? The Donbass War, then, looks like an interstate war. (Is there is a political component to the choice of the number of “s’s” to put at the end of Donbass?)

How does it stack up to other post-1945 interstate wars in terms of Russian battle deaths? 

Short answer: A battle-death rate between 7 and 12 per day is surprisingly intense.

Longer answer: Israel lost 3 soldiers per day during the 146 days of the First Lebanon War (1982); their Syrian opponents suffered around 8. The United States lost 4 soldiers per day in Gulf War 1 (considering all 86 days, not just the 100 hours of intense combat) and 3 per day in Gulf War 2 (over the 44 days of the 2003 invasion). Vietnam took 6 losses per day over 471 days of fighting during the 1977-79 pacification of Cambodia. The Second Ogaden War of 1977-78 may be almost forgotten outside Cuba and the Horn of Africa, but it was not low-intensity by any measure: Ethiopia lost 8 soldiers per day and their Cuban allies lost 6. India lost 7 soldiers per day over 70 days of fighting in the 1999 Kargil War; Pakistan lost 10. Argentina suffered 9 battle deaths per day over the 81 days of the Falklands War. Ecuador took 11 deaths per day over the short 48-day Cenepa War in ‘95; Armenia suffered 12 per day during the (rather longer) 463-day Azeri-Armenian War of 1993. 

Putin can take some solace that the fighting is less intense than the 20 battle-deaths per day inflicted on American soldiers during the 2,912 days of the Vietnam War. (Which was an interstate war, by the way.) But it is in the range of the 12 per day suffered by Soviet forces during the 3,280 days of its fighting in Afghanistan. (Which was a classic extrastate war.) And it is at least as bad as  the 7 deaths per day that France suffered over the 2,695 days of the Algerian War of independence. 

As bad as the French in Algeria! 

On the other hand, France fought for a long time in Algeria, and an annual average conceals a lot: by 1960 its battle-deaths were almost nil. And we need not mention the Russians in Afghanistan or America in Vietnam. These casualty levels can be tolerated for a long time with enough political will. 

Does the relative intensity of the fighting say anything about the ultimate result in Ukraine? Probably not. Considering only the three wars listed in the above paragraph, the foreign government only lost one of the three. 

By 1959, France had pacified Algeria to a level of violence below that which many nations have endured for decades and then (wisely) decided over the next three years that the game was not worth the candle. The context for that decision does not apply to the Donbass, where continuing inter-ethnic violence after the end of the war appears unlikely.

In Afghanistan, the Soviets turned the fighting over to a client state which was capable of staying in power as long as it received continuing financial and logistical assistance. I do not know if the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk will ever reach that point, but it is not inconceivable. That would be a victory unless the Russian Federation suffers a USSR-like collapse. 

Only the United States can be clearly said to have lost its war against North Vietnam. The U.S. could no longer politically sustain a troop presence after 1973, but had no credible local force over to which to turn the effort. SVN forces started to crumble almost immediately after 1973. By the time Congress pulled the plug, South Vietnam was doomed.

Perhaps that could happen in Ukraine ... but consider how long the United States tried to win a war fought thousands of miles away amid a people to which we had no historical ties. The Donbass is right next door and populated by Russian speakers. No comparison.

To sum up: the Russians are surprisingly taking it on the chin in Ukraine, but that says very little about the ultimate outcome of the war. Even if the Ukrainians keep up the good fight, success is not guaranteed. If I had to bet, I would say the Donbass is lost ... and it is a tragedy that Ukrainian internal politics makes that outcome impossible to accept. 

The Russians are coming?

 No probably not. But this is funny:

The graffiti says, “Alaska, ask Crimea the way home!” 

(Hat tip: Will Baird.)

Actually, I’m reminded of this NBC miniseries from 1982. We all watched it. I remember it being pretty good, which is why I remain sure not to re-watch it as an adult.

We also all watched this other miniseries a few years later, which I would love to see again if I could find it in a modern format. I don’t remember it being good at all, which is why I think seeing it again would be a hoot.

Wolverines! 

Sticking by our prediction in Syria

 At some point, we need to go through this blog and mark all its beliefs to market. But right now, let us just say that this prediction from December 2014 is looking good. In fact, the prediction is actually from July 2012, where we ran the numbers and predicted that the Assad regime would eventually run out of manpower reserves.

Now it seems that Assad is publicly admitting that he is running out of manpower. Speculation is that this presages serious peace offerings. I would agree with such speculation. What I am less sure of is that any significant portion of the rebel forces, in their current form, will agree.