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    Entries in Defense (210)

    Saturday
    13Mar2010

    No One is Amused by Your Little Pranks

    Way to go, dumbass:

    Panic gripped Georgia on Saturday when a pro-government television station broadcast a fake report that Russian tanks had entered the capital and President Mikhail Saakashvili had been killed.

    Imedi TV introduced the report as an “imitation of possible events,” but the warning was lost on many viewers as mobile phone networks crashed and residents of Tbilisi rushed into the streets.

    The report thrust the ex-Soviet neighbors back to August 2008, when Russia crushed an assault by U.S. ally Georgia on the rebel region of South Ossetia in a five-day war and sent tanks to within 28 miles of Tbilisi.

    Someone is hiding from the boss today; someone else is wondering where all of their bright ideas have led them. Still, others are wondering why they ever complained about Fox News. Do you think this goes on the resume? Or does it come off the resume? Does it go on the version of the resume that you send out when you don’t care if they hire you? It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?

    Friday
    12Mar2010

    Next Time You Look Up, Will You See a Drone Overhead?

    Predator

    I realize we sold our privacy rights down the river so that politicians could feel better about doing nothing to protect us, but I didn’t know we would reach this point. The point where the revelation that drones are flying over American citizens on a regular basis, trying to catch criminals and whatnot, would be met with indifference. I can predict the indifference. I can tell you, without hesitation, that the media won’t explain this and the American people won’t be told why this is not such a great idea and how it can lead to abuses of power. Is there anyone who will sit down and explain to you that the reason why we don’t let the cops listen to every phone call being made in the country is because, if they did, everyone in America would be in jail, including, of course, 99% of the cops?

    When you apply technology to law enforcement, you cannot apply a level of technology greater than the need to stop only the most reprehensible of crimes. You have to have a threshold where technology cannot become overkill. Yes, the police would like to have helicopter gunships. Do they get helicopter gunships to help them solve problems with high speed chases and grannies with canes who run amok through miniature golf courses? No, they don’t. This is because, once you give Johnny Law a helicopter gunship and tell him to solve his problems with it, you end up with Johnny Law using a helicopter gunship to shut down illegal lemonade stands. Human beings naturally abuse their power; when you have limited government, you throw a monkey wrench into that whole sort of thing. And, for good reason. Helicopter gunships really aren’t good for anything, other than shooting and killing vast numbers of people. And, do we really want that in our back yards? Let’s hope that answer stays “no” until I finally pass away out of this crazy world.

    Do you think it’s an accident that this sort of thing comes out just as American Idol kicks into high gear?

    It’s a frigid, dark night in the mountainous border region of southeast Arizona. A group of 31 suspected illegal immigrants are walking up and down rocky ridges toward Tucson, Arizona. They’re wearing small backpacks and stop to rest every few minutes.

    This isn’t a scene unfolding before the eyes of Border Patrol agents on the ground. It comes from a video image provided by a Predator B unmanned aircraft 19,000 feet overhead. In fact, the nearest Border Patrol agents are far away.

    Jerry Kersey is the Customs and Border Protection agent in charge of this night’s Predator mission. He and his two-man crew relay the information to Border Patrol agents from a small trailer 40 miles from the scene.

    Kersey directs the agents on the ground, who are wearing night-vision goggles.

    “Stop! Stop! They’re to your right,” Kersey firmly dictates over a radio transmission. “They must see you. The group is running.”

    Is this really where we want to go as a society and as a country? Are we really comfortable handing over such over-the-top technology to the border patrol?

    You might very well agree with the idea of using drones in this manner; well, why not use them to catch speeders, then? Why not use them to catch jaywalkers and punks with spraypaint cans? Why not fly one over every home in America just to make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to do, and make it so that it can peek through walls so that we’re all comfortable with what’s going on inside?

    Once you let them do what they will, getting that genie back in the bottle becomes a little more difficult. Once you give your consent to being tracked, searched, recorded, databased, datamined and retained for all eternity, you don’t get that back. You cannot say “stop!” and you cannot make the case that they’ve “gone too far” because, we, as a nation, crossed that threshold years ago.

    Believe me when I tell you this—you don’t know how valuable your privacy is until you no longer have it.

    Monday
    01Mar2010

    Consigned to the Deep by a Danish Man O' War

    HDMS Absalon

    It’s about time:

    A NATO destroyer has sunk a pirate mothership in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast after allowing the crew to leave, the alliance said Monday.

    Shona Lowe, an anti-piracy spokeswoman, said the HDMS Absalon - the Danish flagship of the three-vessel NATO flotilla in the region - disrupted a pirate operation by “scuttling” one of the large boats used by Somali gangs to transport attack teams to piracy hunting areas far off the coast.

    The mothership was fired on and sunk after its crew members were transferred to a smaller boat in tow, which was allowed to return to the mainland, she said.

    “NATO is not in the business of firing at skiffs with pirates in them,” Lowe said in an interview from NATO’s naval headquarters in Northwood, near London.

    Who knew that the Danes had such a warship? Where have they been hiding it? Why aren’t they using it more often? Where can I get one? Well, let me rephrase that: where can I get one that doesn’t have a garage door on the side? Does another Dane in a skiff pull up alongside, click it twice, and drive into the bay? They should paint a cougar or a shark on that thing, or, at the very least, a picture of a Danish fellow beating someone up with a beer bottle.

    That is certainly one badass-looking man o’ war, and I use that term loosely, knowing full well that it is not so much a warship as it is a vessel designed to enforce the peace and defend the Danish homeland. If more pirates were confronted by such a thing, maybe piracy would ease up a bit.

    Monday
    01Mar2010

    Will a Drone Start the Wars From Now On, or End Them?

    Heron TP “Eitan”

    How wise is it to use drones instead of manned aircraft?

    If you’re a military that places the elimination of risk to human beings at the highest level and doesn’t care what things cost, it means you’re going to have a lot of drones. If you’re the United States, you establish the practice of killing by remote control, and celebrate body counts while losing a handful of drones here and there. If you’re Israel, you eliminate a significant problem—the propaganda victory of an opponent that can parade one of your downed pilots before the news cameras of the world.

    In case you didn’t know, of course the Israelis have a drone that can reach Iran:

    This week (February 23) the Israeli Air Force (IAF) held a ceremony spotlighting the “operational acceptance” of its biggest unmanned aerial vehicle, the 4.5-ton Heron TP, or “Eitan.” The far-flying UAV, with a wingspan almost as long as a 737 airliner, appeared on the runway with a comparatively diminutive F-15 alongside it. The IAF already rushed this UAV into action during the 2008–‘09 war in Gaza, so the ceremony really served as a reminder to Iran that its drone fleets can reach the nation. But how will Israel use them?

    The Eitan can carry a ton of payload and can reach Iran’s nuclear facilities, which the United Nations last week determined is hiding an active weapons program. But that does not mean these will be used as bombers. The IAF has been buying and upgrading airplanes specifically for long-distance strikes such as a potential attack against Iran. At least 50 F-15 Raam and F-16 Soufa aircraft have been converted by installing extra fuel tanks for greater range and countermeasures to defeat radar and missiles. So maybe the warplane/UAV tag team presented at the “operational acceptance ceremony” speaks to how manned and unmanned aircraft will work together on missions: The drone provides information while the manned airplanes drop the guided munitions.

    Working from high altitudes, the Eitan will likely be used to provide prestrike information on targets, to eavesdrop on electronic communications and to send battle damage assessments back after an attack. It will also undoubtably be used to monitor any retaliation for the airstrike—seeking rocket launches and eavesdropping on Iran. The onboard power required to electronically jam radar and communications equipment is not in the Eitan, Israeli defense industry officials told the trade journal Defense News. But the ability to carry so much weight opens up questions about the drones’ ability to conduct long-range, high-risk bombing missions on their own.

    This is yet another weapon that “changes the face of warfare” without really dealing with the fact that there are a number of ways to counter drones and take advantage of their weaknessess. They don’t solve anything permanently. They give one side a temporary advantage in projecting power. They do not make up for the absence of a strategic vision, or a diplomatic capability.

    And, no. It’s not by chance that you don’t see a version of this aircraft that carries weapons. You’re not ready to see it if it did exist.

    Israel has a right to defend itself; does any nation have the right to use a weapon like this? Should there be any difference between using a manned or unmanned plane to attack another country? Or should we simply look at the false promise of incredible new weapons that don’t solve anything through their use?

    Sunday
    28Feb2010

    Nothing So Banal as the Evil Spread by Incompetents

    I cannot read this without laughing, even though the subject is no laughing matter:

    There’s nothing unusual about partisans of the Bush administration defending waterboarding as a useful form of “enhanced interrogation.” Others will go even further, calling the technique “torture,” but saying it may be a necessary evil. What is a bit unusual is the case being made by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

    In “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack ObamaIs Inviting the Next Attack,” Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.

    This does not square, to put it mildly, with the common understanding of Catholic teaching. In the past month, Catholic bloggers and writers from across the political spectrum have united to attack his views, and to defend their own: that waterboarding is torture, and that Roman Catholics are not supposed to do it.

    Mr. Thiessen makes two basic arguments. First, he says that waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and others, is not torture. “I didn’t get into the Catholic theological stuff of it until I sat down to write the book,” Mr. Thiessen said in a phone interview. So when Mr. Bush asked him, in 2006, to write a speechexplaining the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, Mr. Thiessen asked himself other kinds of questions.

    “There’s a standard of torture in civil law,” he said, “which is severe mental pain and suffering. I also have a common-sense definition, which is, ‘If you’re willing to try it, it’s not torture.’ ”

    Thousands of American soldiers have been willing to undergo waterboarding as part of their resistance training, Mr. Thiessen notes; therefore, it stands to reason that it is not torture.

    Well, that may be true, but there is a difference between a controlled training environment where someone can simply raise their hand and have the practice stopped as opposed to having the practice continue at the whim of the person in control. Our troops are subjected to it in order to show them what others may do; they are not subjected to it because that’s what we do.

    When you have some control over your fate, it’s not torture, now is it? When you have no control over what is being done to you, then it is torture. A child can grasp the difference. Mr. Thiessen cannot.

    Second, he invokes Catholic teaching to defend what he calls “coercive interrogation.”

    The catechism states, “the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to do harm,” and Catholic tradition accepts that this might involve killing. And, Mr. Thiessen writes: “If this principle applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.”

    To justify killing in self-defense, Catholics point to Thomas Aquinas’s principle of double-effect: the intended effect is to save your own life; killing is the unintended effect. By the same logic, Mr. Thiessen argues, “the intent of the interrogator is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather, it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society.”

    Mr. Thiessen must wonder why we don’t willingly live in the Middle Ages anymore; things were easier then. The infallibility of a Church that could destroy anyone it wished must have been so much more pleasant to swallow. This is the perversion of religion, writ large. Religion is not about torturing or destroying people; religion has gone wrong when it delves into such things.

    As a conservative and now an Independent who remembers the Cold War, and voted for Reagan, I can tell you that these intellectually dishonest leaps of fancy are hilarious. This is what happens when the Bushies try to run things, I’m afraid to say. I’m ashamed to also add that I voted for them; had I known, no, I would never have voted for them or raised money for them. There is nothing conservative about them. A republic cannot torture without becoming a dictatorship. This nation stands for everything that opposes the torture of people; that’s why so many Soviet dissidents looked to the United States for some sort of help.

    Tuesday
    23Feb2010

    Killing Admiral Yamamoto Was Not an Assassination

    Admiral Yamamoto on the Cover of Time, December 22, 1941

    George Friedman is an excellent thinker, but I have to take exception to his piece at Stratfor and refute some of what he is saying. I don’t know why, but this bothers me to no end:

    We should begin by defining what we mean by assassination. It is the killing of a particular individual for political purposes. It differs from the killing of a spouse’s lover because it is political. It differs from the killing of a soldier on the battlefield in that the soldier is anonymous and is not killed because of who he is but because of the army he is serving in.

    The question of assassination, in the current jargon “targeted killing,” raises the issue of its purpose. Apart from malice and revenge, as in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of assassination is to achieve a particular political end by weakening an enemy in some way. Thus, the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto by the Americans in World War II was a targeted killing, an assassination. His movements were known, and the Americans had the opportunity to kill him. Killing an incompetent commander would be counterproductive, but Yamamoto was a superb strategist, without peer in the Japanese navy. Killing him would weaken Japan’s war effort, or at least have a reasonable chance of doing so. With all the others dying around him in the midst of war, the moral choice did not seem complex then, nor does it seem complex now.

    Such occasions rarely occur on the battlefield. There are few commanders who could not readily be replaced, and perhaps even replaced by someone more able. In any event, it is difficult to locate enemy commanders, meaning the opportunity to kill them rarely arises. And as commanders ask their troops to risk their lives, they have no moral claim to immunity from danger.

    Since when is shooting down an enemy transport plane in a theater of war dominated by the strategy of interdicting air and sea transport an “assassination?” In the South Pacific, virtually every battle combined the need to stop the enemy on air, land, and at sea by any means possible. Every aircraft, every ship, and every soldier was a target and was “fair game.” For the American military, to simply allow an enemy transport plane to fly from one place to another without trying to shoot it down would be a tragic neglect of the need to stop the enemy at all costs.

    The killing of a man in the uniform of his country on the battlefield is legitimate. To call it “political” is to ignore the fact of the uniform and the reality of the conflict at hand.

    The intercepted intelligence that gave the Americans the chance to intercept the plane carrying Yamamoto was an advantage we held and used whenever possible; someone had to calculate the risks involved. If we had missed killing Yamamoto, that might have tipped off the Japanese military that we were reading their communications traffic. If we had passed up the chance to take out the plane, we would have been guilty of negligence. Suppose that transport had vital intelligence on it, or some other vital piece of weaponry. Suppose it had chemical weapons on it, designed to allow the last few defenders on an island the ability to kill hundreds of attacking Americans. Absolutely, we should have shot down that plane, and any other plane we could reach.

    Generals died regularly during the war; they died in plane crashes and they were killed on the battlefield. They were, and have always been, the target of sharpshooters and artillery and whatever other weapon can be brought to bear. To kill Yamamoto meant utilizing a complicated strategy of deciding whether or not we could project enough airpower into the flight path of his transport plane. Risks were taken, and men were put in danger to accomplish this mission. It wasn’t an assassination. It was war. Period. End of story.