A Second Hand Conjecture

Defense

• The Post has this right: “THE PENTAGON’S inspector general has concluded that seven current or former military officers, including two major generals and the Pentagon chaplain, violated ethics rules when they appeared in uniform in a promotional and fundraising video for the evangelical group Christian Embassy.”
• DAPRA is looking into using scattering and multi-path radars in a distributed environment. It’s all well and good until you realize two things: those blimp things are sitting ducks for anyone with a reasonably advanced (and still cheap) MANPADS, and it would be (or should be) relatively trivial to outfit buildings and even individual units with additional plating (think spikes or small fins) that could dramatically increase the incidence of multi-pathing and render whatever new algorithms get derived from this testing useless, or at the least less useful. Still, it’s a neat, creative use of brain power.
• The Air Force is pissed off they don’t have much of a role in COIN ops… whether from wounded pride or a deep worry about their $35 billion paperweight airplanes, I don’t really know. But it’s amusing to watch the spoiled brats throw a hissy that we don’t chose to start wars with the Soviet Union or whatever, so they have to scramble to justify their existence.
• It’s telling the Navy is also seeking further justification for its DDG platform. The future of war, at least for the next few decades, is not in these large, multi-billion dollar vessels, but in smaller littoral craft (even smaller than the LCS). I can see the need for an ABM system in green and brown water missions (the INS Ani Hanit incident shared the DoN), but tacking another mission onto a bloated and unnecessary ship hull? More wasted money thrown down the drain for the wrong enemy. Planning for the enemy you want to fight, rather than the one you actually do, is not how a successful organization behaves.
• Also interesting is how the Pentagon is finally coming to grips with war stress—something our friend Bonnie Boyd has documented extensively. I would reckon the new 15 month deployments—which were to make up for a manpower shortfall many war supporters still refuse to admit exists—has not helped this. Plus, the entire process is murder on the families.

The War

• Defeatocrat rightly sees PR tour as PR tour… I suppose she’ll be denounced as a traitor hippie any day now.
• Meanwhile, what the hell is this? “Despite its many negatives, one benefit to the military of a lengthy, fluid war is the advances and improvements in battlefield equipment and technology which are fielded to meet its rapidly changing combat and security needs.” He goes on to lovingly quote The Don Rumsfeld and positively beam about the handheld Orwells (as I call them)—portable fingerprint and retina scanners meant to essentially tag and track every Iraqi they can enter into their database. If they think this is the way to win the war—by turning the country into a high-tech police state—then what the hell are we there for? I thought democracy and freedom used to be thrown about by the supporters?
• Meanwhile, learning about the war without the Pentagon-licking is sobering, to say the least, including the buried lede that al-Qaeda, described by President Bush as our “primary enemy,” is only about 15% of the insurgency. The news that much of the outlying regions are calmer is good… the trick just happens to be expanding that to the rest of the country. Saying people have war fatigue after 5 years is one thing; Afghans have been saying that since the 80s. How that turns into a mass movement for peace and reconciliation (say, down south) is another entirely.
• The NYT had a well-researched, long article on the failure of “the good war” in Afghanistan though fans of my own work on the country (there are, what, five of you?) won’t be surprised by anything. Still, it’s a great overview, kept in one place, that ably demonstrates the incompetence of the men who lead us for another year. There is, however, hope: just recently, a major Pashtun figure called for an end to the violence, singling out the Taliban as the aggressors. That’s a good sign, and I hope it continues.

Around the World

• Uncle Pervy admits to the blindingly obvious.
• China: a rising dragon chewing up Africa for untapped energy wealth, potentially at the whims of an inflated and destabilizing stock market, facing stiff competition from India in both East Asia and Africa. These are indeed interesting times (whether you find them a curse or consecration); I just don’t see them involving an ascendant America. And it is something about which I feel I must think long and hard.
• Tyler Cowen, whose new book I really want to read (why oh why is my queue so long?), is experimenting with wire charity in India.
• Oh look: they’re ignoring human rights violations in Somalia, again. I will refrain from saying it’s because they’re not White Europeans that we don’t care… but I did it anyway.
• A fascinating look at artists’ spaces in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and how the big construction boom is changing them. I can’t believe, from those pictures, how much nicer that city has turned since 2003.
• My Soviet decay fetish is in a constantly humming state, thanks to English Russia.

Back at Home

• OH DEAR LORD ITS SO BEAUTIFUL. I AM SO PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN RIGHT NOW. Me too, crazy bee man—me too.
• No more tonight—the Presidential election is angering me, and I’m very tired.

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