How can he say this stuff with a straight face?

I apologize for not picking up on this sooner. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University on Monday eclipsed most American coverage of President Bush's speech at the United Nations General Assembly the following day:

This great institution must work for great purposes -- to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and disease, illiteracy and ignorance, and poverty and despair. Every member of the United Nations must join in this mission of liberation.

First, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from tyranny and violence. The first article of the Universal Declaration begins, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." The truth is denied by terrorists and extremists who kill the innocent with the aim of imposing their hateful vision on humanity. The followers of this violent ideology are a threat to civilized people everywhere. All civilized nations must work together to stop them -- by sharing intelligence about their networks, and choking their -- off their finances, and bringing to justice their operatives.

In the long run, the best way to defeat extremists is to defeat their dark ideology with a more hopeful vision -- the vision of liberty that founded this body. The United States salutes the nations that have recently taken strides toward liberty -- including Ukraine and Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and Mauritania and Liberia, Sierra Leone and Morocco. The Palestinian Territories have moderate leaders, mainstream leaders that are working to build free institutions that fight terror, and enforce the law, and respond to the needs of their people. The international community must support these leaders, so that we can advance the vision of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security.

Its too bad the Palestinian people tried to vote those Palestinian leaders out of office a few years ago. Its also too bad that U.S. is doing nothing to prevent Israel from declaring the Gaza Strip an 'enemy entity' and closing it off to everything but humanitarian aid. But I digress. The speech only gets better:

Brave citizens in Lebanon and Afghanistan and Iraq have made the choice for democracy -- yet the extremists have responded by targeting them for murder. This is not a show of strength -- it is evidence of fear. And the extremists are doing everything in their power to bring down these young democracies. The people of Lebanon and Afghanistan and Iraq have asked for our help. And every civilized nation has a responsibility to stand with them.

Every civilized nation also has a responsibility to stand up for the people suffering under dictatorship. In Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration. Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma, where a military junta has imposed a 19-year reign of fear. Basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and worship are severely restricted. Ethnic minorities are persecuted. Forced child labor, human trafficking, and rape are common. The regime is holding more than 1,000 political prisoners -- including Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party was elected overwhelmingly by the Burmese people in 1990.

The ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable. This morning, I'm announcing a series of steps to help bring peaceful change to Burma. The United States will tighten economic sanctions on the leaders of the regime and their financial backers. We will impose an expanded visa ban on those responsible for the most egregious violations of human rights, as well as their family members. We'll continue to support the efforts of humanitarian groups working to alleviate suffering in Burma. And I urge the United Nations and all nations to use their diplomatic and economic leverage to help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom.

In Cuba, the long rule of a cruel dictator is nearing its end. The Cuban people are ready for their freedom. And as that nation enters a period of transition, the United Nations must insist on free speech, free assembly, and ultimately, free and competitive elections.

In Zimbabwe, ordinary citizens suffer under a tyrannical regime. The government has cracked down on peaceful calls for reform, and forced millions to flee their homeland. The behavior of the Mugabe regime is an assault on its people -- and an affront to the principles of the Universal Declaration. The United Nations must insist on change in Harare -- and must insist for the freedom of the people of Zimbabwe.

In Sudan, innocent civilians are suffering repression -- and in the Darfur region, many are losing their lives to genocide. America has responded with tough sanctions against those responsible for the violence. We've provided more than $2 billion in humanitarian and peacekeeping aid. I look forward to attending a Security Council meeting that will focus on Darfur, chaired by the French President. I appreciate France's leadership in helping to stabilize Sudan's neighbors. And the United Nations must answer this challenge to conscience, and live up to its promise to promptly deploy peacekeeping forces to Darfur.

Maybe these words would mean more if they were spoken before we opened an extra-judicial prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Or before we established secret prisons. Or before the abuses at Abu Ghraib happened. Or before we started torturing people. Or before we enlisted other states to torture on our behalf.

Setting aside the matter of whether all of the above had to happen in order to 'save lives,' does President Bush realize that making speeches like this only hurt America's image abroad? I'll be the first cop to hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy. It is a dirty business full of questions with no right answers.

But must President Bush use such self-righteous and indignant language in front of the whole world when he knows that is the U.S. is adding more 'War on Terror' skeletons to its closet every day? Why didn't he just talk about poverty or women's rights or some other issue that the U.S. is not actively disrupting. Heck, talk about global warming for all I care.

Just stop embarrassing the country with this hollow talk of freedom. It doesn't fool anyone.

Canada's sleeper hit: Trailer Park Boys

It appears that in the grand tradition of Kids in the Hall, American is once again ignoring a rich source of comedy gold coming out of Canada. Trailer Park Boys is a COPS-style mockumentary about the white trash who occupy the fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Cold Harbor, Nova Scotia.

The show centers around two ex-cons named Ricky and Julian, as well as their friend and neighbor Bubbles. The trio spend most of the series coming up with ways to make money, both legally and illegally. They are joined by a cast of characters that would be very recognizable on Jerry Springer, including a stripper who is also an unwed mother, a white wannabe-rapper cum porn director, and a drunk ex-cop who serves as the park's supervisor and frequent villain.

Most of the time, the show's plot centers around a money-making scheme hatched by either Ricky or Julian. That being said, there is a great deal of story continuity between episodes and the relationship between all of the characters evolves quite a bit over time.

I imagine bet the main reason Trailer Park Boys never caught on in the U.S. is the show's heavy use of profanity. With prominently displayed episode titles, such as "F*ck Community College, Let's Get Drunk and Eat Chicken Fingers," "If I Can't Smoke and Swear I'm F*cked," and "Where the F*ck is Oscar Goldman?" you can probably imagine the version briefly aired by BBC America was more heavily censored than the average episode of Jerry Spinger.

Profanity aside, the writing on Trailer Park Boys is cleverest I've seen in years. It makes America's take COPS mockumentaries, Reno 911!, look like it was produced by monkeys.

For those who are interested, episodes of the show can be readily found on Google Video, but I would highly recommend getting the DVDs because they are packed with hilarious special features. I can't put it on my site because of the profanity, but here is the 30-second clip that first drew me to the show.

Movie Review: The Kingdom

If I had to summarize Peter Berg's upcoming film The Kingdom in one sentence, it would be: "So good Jennifer Garner couldn't ruin it."

Before I dive into the meat of my review, here is a quick outline of the story. An attack similar to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and 2003 Riyadh compound bombing racks up huge death toll at a Western oil engineer enclave in Riyadh. Jamie Foxx plays the slick leader of an FBI terrorism task force that uses his bureaucratic wiles to get a himself and a small team (Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman) into Saudi Arabia to investigate.

The political and bureaucratic resistance that Mr. Foxx's team encounters in Riyadh becomes an interesting microcosm of the difficulties in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The Americans want to participate in the investigation and find the perpetrators. The Saudis keep Foxx's team at arm's length because they don't want to be seen by the Arab public as inviting Western paternalism.

In the end, Foxx makes a strong professional bond with a Saudi State Security colonel played by Paradise Now's Ashraf Barhoum that opens the right political doors for a energetic, joint Saudi-American investigation. The most gripping part of the film by far is a sequence where the U.S.-Saudi group battle to save a team member from a fate similar to Daniel Pearl.

While Foxx did a fairly good job, Barhoum's nuanced character really stands out in the film. In the same way that Foxx and Barhoum's relationship is a microcosm of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, Barhoum is microcosm of Saudi Arabia itself -- an earnestly pious nation that is being pulled apart by ineffectual leadership and an unyielding radical minority.

The best bit part goes to Jeremy Piven, who plays a stereotypically fast-talking, risk-averse deputy chief of mission for the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. Jennifer Garner even did a good job in her role as a quiet, conservatively-dressed forensic pathologist for the FBI. As my girlfriend said, Garner's performance was enhanced by the fact that she kept her enormous, uh, 'talent' underneath nondescript black T-shirts.

Altogether, The Kingdom is a great movie. Think of is as a far more subtle and less didactic version of Syriana. It is easily worth the price and hassle of seeing it on opening night (September 28th).

Oh and before you ask, the huge building used as the set for a Saudi palace is not actually a palace. It is the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi.

The problem with the phrase 'evil-doer'

I had conversation with a friend over lunch last week that got me thinking about how the word 'evil-doer,' specifically how use of the word has become more common in foreign policy discussions. This friend has been working for Program Executive Officer Soldier since he finished undergrad in 2005. He had limited exposure to politics or history as an accounting major, so he was picking my brain about the 'surge' and the War on Terror more broadly.

It is difficult to discuss U.S. foreign policy towards the Near East in the abstract, so before delving into my views, I asked him about how much he knew about the region. Not surprisingly, his response was 'very little,' so I refined my question to 'Do you know why a guy like OBL is a terrorist'? The response to that was 'He hates America and wants to take over the Near East. I don't know why he uses terrorism though. Evil is kind of hard to understand.'

At this point, I gave him a 20 minute primer on the origins of linkage between Islamic fundamentalism and grand terrorism -- starting from Sayyid Qutb's Milestones to today. He was particularly surprised to hear that even though Osama bin Laden and Saddam are not explicitly linked, al Qaeda's existence and mission are deeply intertwined with the 1991 Persian Gulf War and its aftermath.

[Explainer: Part of bin Laden's hatred towards the Saudi royal family comes from the fact that they chose American support over his offer to wage an Afghan-style guerrilla war in defense of Kuwait. Bin Laden's 1996 fatwah states that the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil as an affront to Islam. It also claims that the U.S. is culpable for the deaths of the millions of Iraqi children due to sanctions.]

We need to move away from terms like 'evil-doer' because they allow people to paper over the murky elements of politics and war. We're not facing-off against an opaque, cartoonish foe, such as Cobra Commander or Skeletor. Bin Laden and his ilk more like Tony Soprano or even Tony Montana. They ruthlessly pursue a set of fairly clear objectives in a manner that is bounded by their own twisted sense of right and wrong.

After mentioning this conversation to another friend, she suggested that I photoshop Cobra Commander into the photo of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein shaking hands in the 1980s.

Update: SG has just been brimming with great ideas. Here is a rough breakdown of what goes into G.I. Joe's definition of the "The Battle":

Memo to BG Mike Brogan

In response to Marine Brigadier-General Mike Brogan's comment that press coverage is inflaming insurgent interest and turning the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle into a 'symbolic target,' I have the following response:

BG Brown is forgetting one issue, namely that dead soldiers are the 'symbolic targets' that the insurgents are actually after. Getting the insurgents to concentrate their attention on the handful of MRAPs that will enter the arsenal over the next year will take some pressure off targeting the more plentiful up-armored HMMWV.

That will undoubtedly save lives and saving lives is the only reason why the public is allowing the Pentagon to grossly mismanage the MRAP program with few consequences. What he is really concerned about is looking bad when we drop $20 billion on a gas-guzzling monster of a wheeled transport that only offers a marginal advantage in protection.

In a sense, the MRAP is symbolic -- it is a symbol of the military's complete inability to recognize that peace-enforcement and peacekeeping have been very common military operations since the end of the Cold War. In order to make up for the two years we spent in Iraq without a cogent counterinsurgency manual or effective military strategy, they are dropping a huge wad of cash to field a weapons system at the 11th hour that isn't even really ready.

Don't get me wrong, I feel strongly that we should issue our troops with gear that will provide them with a generous amount of protection. My heart is always crushed when I see those poor wounded vets that come by the Pentagon every week.

I just think the Pentagon's acquisition strategy over the last six years has been to schizophrenically jump from one technology to the next in search of silver bullets. As a result, we let the insurgents set the technological tempo in Iraq, forcing the U.S. military to expend a premium of blood and treasure playing catch-up.

Why am I so incensed by this issue? Because I know that folks in the Army Secretariat periodically examined the issue of mine-protected vehicles going back to at least 2002. Instead of dusting off the concept in 2003 or 2004, the Pentagon blindly focused on IED jammers instead of simple armor issues.

But hey, I'm the crazy one, remember. Someone get me a straitjacket and a comfy padded room.

Book Review: Survivor

Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk's second novel. It came out about three years after Fight Club was published, but around the time the movie adaptation came out in theaters.

It also shares many of Fight Club's style and themes. A socially marginalized narrator hero overcomes the emptiness of today's post-modern, materialistic society by becoming a humorous Nietzsche superman. The writing style uses a short, conversational format that is loaded with pop culture references and neologisms.

This time, the narrator hero is the sexually-repressed survivor of a religious cult that is part Puritan and part People's Temple. The New York media machine quickly descends on him to harvest his fame and morph him into a made-for-TV religious icon.

As his 15 minutes of fame wind down, he is approached by the sister of man he convinced to commit suicide name Fertility. She shares her deceased brother's ability to see into the future, as well as the depression that comes with knowing everything.

Fertility promises to feed him with predictions that catapult him back into the lime light. The strategy works and he becomes an enormously popular icon with his own radio and television programs, prayer books, and dashboard figurines. He even lends his name to a landfill for America's used pornography.

A shadow from his past appears and changes everything. The story ends with the protagonist in the pilot's seat of hijacked airliner that is going to crash somewhere in the Australian outback. In fact, the book is written in reverse as the main character dictates the tale of his rise and fall into the airliner's flight data recorder. Even the chapters and page numbers count backwards to the end at page 1 of chapter 1.

Although the porn landfill is interesting, my favorite part of the book is where the author describes crossing the country by hiding in 18-wheel borne sections of prefab trailer homes. That is definitely a means of covert travel that I would have never envisioned. The best phrase from Survivor comes from the narrator's agent, who states that "[t]he only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage." I find that phrase disturbingly relevant today.

If you reading experience encourages you to write Chuck a letter, go with those feelings. He goes to great lengths to answer his fan mail and is know for sending odd gifts with his replies.

A friend of mine from college who first turned me on to Palahniuk was sent an autographed toilet seat and a reply written on 12 restaurant napkins.He had both pieces framed and hung them up in his dorm room. They made for an interesting conversation piece.

All in all, Survivor was an interesting break from my usual stack of history texts and journals and I would recommend to anyone with an unexpired library card or 14 bucks to burn.

Although I am going to finish that Gunther Rothenberg piece on Napoleonic warfare next, Survivor made me want to read more of Palahniuk's works. I think I will tackle Choke sometime in the near future, before the upcoming film adaptation hits theaters.

Dunlap is right, but does his point matter?

For my readers who don't feel like reading through the recent essays written by Air Force Major General Charles J. Dunlap, I can summarize his point in two sentences:

Advocates of traditional counterinsurgency doctrine argue that air power is not as effective as ground presence when fighting an insurgency. They are wrong because ground troops can cause just as much collateral damage to the local population.

He's right to a certain degree. Ground troops can easily harm just as many civilians as a pilot in an F-18. If you abstracted Dunlap's logic to its furthest extent, ground forces should actually be causing the preponderance of civilian casualties because there are more of them and operate closest to them. I'm even willing to accept that statement on its face value.

The only problem with Dunlap's argument is that it is missing one key element: The objective of counterinsurgency is to establish and maintain public order, not merely fight off insurgents. Just read this statement:

Consider, for instance, this astonishing statement from a ISAF spokesman: “I am assured by uniformed colleagues in NATO that there is a marginal difference to the potential for civilian casualties between using a 500lb bomb and a 2,000lb bomb."

If military people really believe that there is only a “marginal” difference between a 500 lbs. bomb and a 2,000 lbs. bomb, then the depth of misinformation is truly disturbing. Accordingly, my article will examine the technologies and processes that operate today to limit collateral damage from air-delivered munitions.

What does collateral damage matter when you accidentally bomb a wedding? Or someone's home? Does an Iraqi care whether the Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb in his neighborhood or is a quarter-ton okay?

Setting aside accidents and collateral damage, how would General Dunlap feel if bombs rained down on his hometown at random intervals? Does he think he could live a normal under such conditions?

The key to winning a counterinsurgency is understand both the military and the social dimensions of the conflict. An aircraft can attack insurgents, drop leaflets and provide humanitarian relief, but it can't establish trusting relationships with the locals, gather intelligence, or ensure basic order like ground troops can.

Unless the Air Force is willing to get out of its collective cockpit and spend some serious time working with the locals, it will never be flexible enough to play anything more than a supporting role in stability operations.

Figures...

Due to Matthew Scully's tell-all on Micheal Gerson in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, I take back anything nice I have ever said about the former White House speechwriter:

By page 3, a “solemn quiet” has fallen over the Oval Office, and we have one of those crossroads moments that come in every White House memoir. Large and consequential matters were in the balance, “the keepers of the budget” were about to crush the hopes of millions, only truth well spoken could save the day, and guess who had the courage to speak it? The conviction and idealism of his words were so characteristic that, in Mike’s telling of the story, President Bush declared, “That’s Gerson being Gerson!”

The president’s little tribute, however, would much better describe what happened after this incident, when the story of “Gerson being Gerson” found its way into a Washington Whispers item by a friend of Mike’s at U.S. News & World Report. Someone had to tell the reporter about this inspiring moment, and I have a feeling it wasn’t the keepers of the budget. It was always like this, working with Mike. No good deed went unreported, and many things that never happened were reported as fact. For all of our chief speechwriter’s finer qualities, the firm adherence to factual narrative is not a strong point. He has chosen the perfect title for his book, because in his telling of a White House story, things often sound a lot more heroic than they actually were.

I must have been naive to think that the Bush administration could actually attract senior staffers who are genuinely not interested in self-aggrandizement. This example really captures Scully's point:

My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

He yearned for escape sometimes and preferred the “buzz” of the coffee shop to the “solitude” of his White House office, Mike explained in a 2002 ABC News Nightline segment, “Up Close: Michael Gerson.” This is a lengthy discourse on the craft of speechwriting (and indeed on how speechwriting “cultivates a sense of humility,” as Mike told Nightline) that happily I missed at the time and only came upon recently. To fully appreciate the dramatic tension here, just remember that as a matter of undeniable fact—entered in the permanent records of the United States, which will include more than 10,000 different speech drafts saved on the computer we shared—every major Bush speech of the first term was written from start to finish in the office of John McConnell, by the good old team.

That is sad. Really sad. I guess the satirical commentary offered up in the 2004 comedy Saved! was right all along: Evangelism has nothing to do with being humble or good-natured.

Dump the 'Thayer System'? Yeah, like 100 years ago...

I normally don't read the Weekly Standard, but Op-For's John Noonan wrote an interesting piece about reforming the current professional military education (PME) system by dumping the 'Thayer System':

FOR NEARLY 200 years, cadets at the United States Military Academy have been guided by the "Thayer System," a rigid structure of unyielding regulation, austere discipline, fierce loyalty, and strong emphasis on math, science, and engineering. The method is calculated to produce Army officers of the highest caliber. And the system has worked. West Point graduates constitute some of the most celebrated, highly decorated officers in American history. No doubt if you traveled further back in time, West Pointers would rank amongst some of the finest combat leaders in the history of warfare.

Thayer's system has changed little since it was implemented shortly after the War of 1812. Like war itself, West Point traditions and culture slowly evolved over time to meet and conquer the new challenges that the profession of arms demanded. But today we stand at a point in history where technology, the decentralization of military force, and the abandonment of the established, traditional law of armed conflict is changing warfare in such a swift and profound way that the U.S. Armed Forces will either have to adapt or face a slow creep towards irrelevancy.

[snip]

The core of the Thayer system--discipline, honor, and ferocious loyalty to the Constitution--must never change. That's precisely why the system has stood as it is for so long; America will always need men and women who live by the stoic creed of duty, honor, country. However, one of the cornerstones of Slyvanus Thayer's system, his dated academic infrastructure, no longer meets the needs of the mission. The same can be said for nearly identical curriculums at Annapolis and Colorado Springs.

West Point and all of the service academies promote math and engineering above all other disciplines. Thayer wanted math savvy artillery officers. The Navy sought officers with a firm grasp of engineering to keep their ships running and navigate the seas under the harshest of combat conditions. And the Air Force desired officers capable of operating the service's cutting-edge technology. It's the perfect academic infrastructure for a young cadet, if we expect him to fight the Cold War.

I completely agree with Noonan and what's more, there is plenty of evidence to show that adherence to the engineer and math-heavy French tradition of PME has enabled a number of military disasters. First, a brief history lesson on PME:

Despite the sizable number of British-trained military officers in the Continental Army, the U.S.'s first military academy at West Point has been largely modelled on French PME traditions since the 16-year (1817-1833) superintendency of Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer was an engineer and mathematician by trade and his views of PME were heavily influenced by the two years he spent studying at the French military academy E'cole Polytechnique.

The French institution itself was founded by a pair of Revolutionary-era mathematicians. They established a curriculum that emphasized the sciences, civil engineering, and Vauban's classics on fortifications and siege warfare -- which ironically contrasts with the French army's exploitation of maneuver warfare under Napoleon.

Thayer's West Point curricula reflected much of what he had learned in France. His influence over the school was extended by Dennis Hart Mahan, a graduate during Thayer's reign who spent 40 years teaching from the French tradition at West Point.

Mahan emphasized the ideas of Antoine-Henri Jomini, a French-Swiss military theorist who attempted to capture Napoleon's genius by reducing it to elements of geometry. Having taught virtually every Union and Confederate commander of the Civil War, Jomini's emphasis on interior lines and strategic bases is fairly evident in many Civil War engagements. For those who have picked up Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appamattox, you can imagine that many of the trenches around Petersburg resembled the teachings of Vauban.

It would not be a stretch to argue that the French PME tradition and French conceptions of strategy and maneuver factored two of the bloodiest, least decisive land wars in history: the American Civil War and World War I. American commanders in the 1860s were so indoctrinated by Mahan's teachings that Abraham Lincoln to turn to a drunk and someone who had had a nervous breakdown in order to wage total war against the South.

The French commanders that presided over the meat grinders that were the Battle of the Somme, the Great Retreat and the first Battle of Ypres were also students of Ecole Polytechnique and disciples of Jomini.

The take-home message of all of this history is that the French PME tradition has a poor history of success and should have been abandoned a long time ago. Understanding the science and engineering of warfare is important, but as Sun Tzu aptly put it, so is understanding your potential adversary. It is high time West Point (and the other military academies for that matter) offer more robust curricula in the social sciences, history and (gasp!) the humanities.

Hypotheticals for presidential debates

Hart Seely at Slate wrote this hilarious article lampooning this ridiculous question Brit Hume asked during the May 15 Republican debate:

Here is the premise: Three shopping centers near major U.S. cities have been hit by suicide bombers. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. A fourth attack has been averted when the attackers were captured off the Florida coast and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they are being questioned. U.S. intelligence believes that another larger attack is planned and could come at any time. First question to you, Senator McCain. How aggressively would you interrogate those being held at Guantanamo Bay for information about where the next attack might be?

Here are a few of the questions Seely wrote:

Candidates, pay attention: An international financier has smuggled an atom bomb into Fort Knox. He loves only gold. Only gold. After an amazing sequence of events, including car chases, sexual conquests, and your defeat of the assassin known as Oddjob, you find yourself staring at the interior of a nuclear device. The final seconds are ticking down. This goes to you, Senator Clinton: Do you cut the blue wire, or do you cut the red wire?

***

Three criminals from Krypton, freed by a nuclear blast in outer space, have come to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal man. Worse, Superman has disappeared. The criminals' leader, General Zod, orders you to kneel before him as a symbol of America's defeat. I'll start with you, Senator Brownback. If the act means saving millions of lives, and perhaps buying time until the Man of Steel returns, would you forsake your belief in Jesus Christ and bow before this evil alien?

I've got one myself:

This question is Senator McCain: Aliens have destroyed most major cities across the country. You are camped out in an disclosed location, but the aliens will eventually discover your location through an irresponsible leak of classified information to the press. You have sent a small multiracial team of comedians to disable the enemy's network, but it is uncertain whether they will succeed. Would you jump into cockpit of a fighter jet to help defend America and risk of leaving the country leaderless at this critical hour?

***

Updated: In exchange for spinning straw into gold on three occasions, you promise a magical dwarf your first born child. When he comes to collect the child years later, you convince him to abandon this debt if you can guess his name. If there isn't enough time to obtain a court order to wiretap his phone, do you do have the National Security Agency do it anyways? Alternatively, do you have special forces cross into a neighboring friendly country to capture or kill the dwarf? If you capture him, would you subject him to enhanced interrogation techniques, to include waterboarding, in order to obtain the information you need?

***

Due to an altercation with some ruffians in your hometown of Philadelphia, your mother has sent you to live with you aunt and uncle in California. After arriving at LAX, you hail a suspicious-looking cab with an odd licence plate. Do you get in the cab or report the cabbie to federal immigration authorities?

Watch this space, I may come up with some on the way home. Please feel free to submit your own via e-mail or comment.

So disappointing...

Michael Gerson wrote a very thoughtful, but misguided piece on atheism in today's Post:

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

If God were dethroned as the arbiter of moral truth, it would not, of course, mean that everyone joins the Crips or reports to the Playboy mansion. On evidence found in every culture, human beings can be good without God. And Hitchens is himself part of the proof. I know him to be intellectually courageous and unfailingly kind, when not ruthlessly flaying opponents for taking minor exception to his arguments. There is something innate about morality that is distinct from theological conviction. This instinct may result from evolutionary biology, early childhood socialization or the chemistry of the brain, but human nature is somehow constructed for sympathy and cooperative purpose.

But there is a problem. Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits.

[Snip]

Some argue that a careful determination of our long-term interests -- a fear of bad consequences -- will constrain our selfishness. But this is particularly absurd. Some people are very good at the self-centered exploitation of others. Many get away with it their whole lives. By exercising the will to power, they are maximizing one element of their human nature. In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them? Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

So as long as you throw out consequentialism, atheism looks flimsy? If you threw out the idea of the supernatural theism would look pretty flimsy as well. When will atheists and theists realize that they waging a metaphysical war that neither side can win. Theists can't disprove atheists and atheists can't disprove theists. Both sides just need to realize that they are at their best when they carry out their unending war in the minds of men and at their worst when such battles are fought in the halls of government.

So why Azerbaijian and does it matter?

I imagine that by now, most of my readers have had a chance to read Noah Shachtman's piece on FCS and Azerbaijan. For those who have not, I will summarize: As part of the Operational Requirements Document used to justify the efficacy of Future Combat Systems, the Army prepared a summary mission profile for a hypothetical set of missions. These hypothetical missions just happen to take place in the oil-rich former Soviet state and now Republic of Azerbaijan.

At this point, some of my readers are probably asking themselves: "Azerbaijan, is that like where Borat goes for summer vacation or something? Why did the Army pick that place?" To be certain, Azerbaijan wasn't selected for political reasons. Azerbaijan isn't exactly the most democratic ex-Soviet state, but the government of President Ilham Aliyev is pretty friendly with the United States. Plus, the U.S oil firm Unocal (now part of Chevron) also owns about a 9% stake in the $3.6 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline.

Azerbaijan may be a friend, but is one of the roughest and most volatile neighborhoods in the world. The Azeris and the Armenians fight over Nagorno-Karabakh, the Georgians and the Russians fight over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Armenians and the Turks fight over whether the Ottoman Empire committed genocide against ethnic Armenians in 1915-1917 (I am definitely not going to wade into that one). To top that off, all of this strife crammed into a small mountainous region sandwiched between Iran and Chechnya. Sometimes I'm surprised that countries stopped bickering long enough to allow the 1776 kilometer Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline get off the drawing board.

Small, U.S.-friendly, oil-producing state locked in a far-off, volatile region of the world. Doesn't that sound like another country in the Near East, one that we've successfully liberated before? Kuwait perhaps?

In my view, Azerbaijan was picked because its size, terrain, and political environment fit the assumptions that shape FCS. They picked a relatively small country to accentuate the ability of a single FCS Brigade Combat Team to rapidly achieve "decisive maneuver" against a larger opposing force in 48-60 hours. Azerbaijan is also a relatively remote, mountainous area bordered by few U.S. allies. This reflects the Army's emphasis on performing combat operations on short notice and without pre-positioned equipment. Finally, there is the potential (however remote) that the Army may be called upon to one day liberate the Azeris from an encroaching neighbor. Remind anyone of an incredibly successful "left-hook" the Army pulled off a little more than 15 years ago?

My main concern with the Azerbaijan scenarios is that they highlight a fundamental flaw of FCS. This billion-dollar force recapitalization project is focused on refining existing capabilities at a time when the Army needs to develop entirely new capabilities. To me, being able to successfully conduct stability operations campaign the day after a 72 hour blitzkrieg is worth far more than shaving that blitzkrieg down to 48 hours. Does the Army honestly expect a brigade of 4000 troops trained and equipped for maneuver warfare against a modern opposing army to manage 8 million people spread over a country the size of Maine? We have multiple brigades in Baghdad (a city of 7 million) and they can't even keep the peace without support from the Iraqi military.

At the very least, one would hope that as soon as images of the National Carpet Museum in Baku being looted by anonymous brigands are splashed across CNN the hypothetical Secretary of Defense overseeing one of these imagined combat operations would have something more conciliatory to say than 'Stuff happens.'

I'm not saying the Army doesn't need to recapitalize the force and I'm not exactly opposed to the idea of network-centric warfare either. I'm just arguing that the Army's vision of the future force is shackled by a set of overly narrow assumptions about what kind of wars it will fight. As Colin Gray asked in a great monograph published by the Army War College back in 2005, if the Army is putting all of its development dollars into FCS, is FCS robust enough to counter the broadest set of future war scenarios? In terms of fighting a major urban counterinsurgency campaign (Iraq) or managing a fractured, poor state (Afghanistan), I think the evidence is pointing towards 'no.'

Book Review: A Stillness at Appomattox

Last weekend, I finally finished reading the final book in Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, A Stillness at Appomattox. I picked this book up at a used book sale last year after it was mentioned during a debate in a military history class at GW. We were having a hypothetical discussion about the Schlieffen Plan and what lead the German General Staff to ignore the factors that would lead to the trench warfare that dominated World War I. My background is in Asian history, so I naturally pointed to the blood battles of the Russo-Japanese War just a decade earlier, while some of my classmates mentioned the German experience in the closing months of the Franco-Prussian War as further evidence.

At this point, our professor interjected to mention that the American Civil War had degenerated into trench warfare as early as the Battle of Cold Harbor in early June 1864. I remembered seeing some pictures of trenches from the Siege of Petersburg in an undergrad military history course that reminded me of the Western Front. They were shocking, but I didn't comprehend their true gravity until it was mentioned again at GW. How could the German General Staff completely miss warning signs warning signs, such as the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Mukden?

Since my knowledge of the final year of the Civil War was basically limited to a chapter from Russ Weigley's The American Way of War, I asked my professor for some recommendations. I was particularly interested in Catton's book because it fleshed out the actions of my favorite Civil War figure, Emory Upton. During the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, then 25 year-old Colonel Upton came up with a tactic that helped the Army of the Potomac overcome Confederate fortifications -- line up troops in a column formation and force them through a single weak point in the Confederate line. The German General Staff eventually used the same tactics during their Spring Offensive in 1918 and managed to make some serious gains late in the war. But I digress...

The book was compelling and well-written. You can really feel the exhaustion of the Union troops and you will probably also enjoy the quixotic relationship they develop with the Confederate troops in the opposing trench lines. I even found myself sympathizing with General Grant as he racked up huge casualties in each engagement. Breaking Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was a difficult task, particularly with the Union's absolutely poor standards of generalship. It also spends a fair amount of time describing just how tenuous Lincoln's re-election felt as late as March 1864.

That is not to say the book is entirely about Lincoln or his generals. Most of it is written from the perspective of front line soldiers and Catton draws heavily on the correspondence of enlisted troops to illustrate their attitudes and opinions. Although Catton offers a some insight into Grant's thoughts, the general is more often described from the perspective of his troops. Even the momentous meeting of Grant and Lee at the Appomattox Court House is a blip compared to a single Union soldier who crosses over to the Confederate line to chat with his former foes.

A Stillness at Appomattox clearly deserved the Pulitzer Prize it received shortly after publication in 1954. It is a wonderful read and is worth the time of anyone with even small interest in American history or the Civil War. The only problem is that it was last reprinted as an individual volume back in 1990, so you may have to buy the whole 'Army of the Potomac' trilogy just to get it -- and I hear the first two books aren't nearly as good.

Update: Has anyone read Stephen Ambrose's Upton and the Army? I want to know if its any good before I spend a weekend hunting down a copy.

A memo to Vlad and George

To:
George W. Bush, President of the United States of America
Vladamir Putin, President of the Russian Federation

From: The Robot Economist

Subject: Missile defense and arms control -- a grand bargain

It is clear that the United States and the Russian Federation are at an impasse over two issues related to the proliferation of missile technology and nuclear weapons. The first conflict is over the United States' plan to implement a missile defense system, some of which will be based in Europe. The second conflict is over the future of the U.S.-Russian arms control regime that evolved during the Cold War.

This impasse can be easily broken with a grand bargain designed to satisfy each nation's concerns and put U.S.-Russian cooperation on a strong, institutionalized footing. As part of the the bargain, the United States would agree to build both its planned interceptors and radar station within Russian territory. The Russian Federation will participate in managing the system's day-to-day operations, but will also allow the U.S. to protect sensitive technology in a U.S.-only facility on Russian soil. The Russians will also be given access to missile defense technology as part of a U.S.-Russian missile defense development program, but it will only be allowed to sell the resulting technology as part of U.S.-Russian joint ventures. The United States will reserve the right to expand its missile defense system outside of Europe.

The United States will agree to at least a 15-year extension of both the Strategic Ordnance Reduction Treaty (SORT) and the inspection provisions of the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). In exchange, the Russian Federation will drop its threats to abandon the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and defer discussions of additional arms control agreements for at least 10 years.

This bargain delivers what each country desires most. The United States is allowed to have a missile defense system that can shoot down missiles coming from the Near East without threaten Russia. Russia gets to keep the Cold War-era arms control regime around for another generation.

It is by no means a solution to U.S.-Russian strategic relations. Instead, it is designed to tackle the one obstacle that prevents such cooperation, a lack of trust on strategic issues stemming from the Cold War. This lack of trust is an antiquated notion because the quest for national power is no longer a zero-sum game. It is both nations to realize that fact and build a relationship that will ensure both American and Russian strategic power for another generation.

Another paradox of American power

Stephen Biddle summarizes in one paragraph the point I've been trying to make on the Iraq War since late 2003:

If the surge is unacceptable, the better option is to cut our losses and withdraw altogether. In fact, the substantive case for either extreme -- surge or outright withdrawal -- is stronger than for any policy between. The surge is a long-shot gamble. But middle-ground options leave us with the worst of both worlds: continuing casualties but even less chance of stability in exchange. Moderation and centrism are normally the right instincts in American politics, and many lawmakers in both parties desperately want to find a workable middle ground on Iraq. But while the politics are right, the military logic is not.

The United States should either pony up significant amount of blood and treasure that it will take to fix the Bush administration's broken endeavor in Iraq or it should go home. Half measures, including phased withdrawals or "strategic redeployments," will only waste resources and perpetuate an issue that has led to sharp divisions on foreign policy. End of story.

The situation in Iraq highlights another Joseph Nye's paradoxical element of American power, something I like to call the impatient enormity factor. Americans are willing to make enormous sacrifices and take on a significant amount of risk on foreign policies. In return for their sacrifice, however, they expect rapid results to match the scope of that sacrifice. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was George C. Marshall who said that the U.S. public wouldn't abide more than five years of fighting against Germany and Japan. This contrasts significantly with the degree that we celebrate U.S. involvement in World War II as popular and even noble ('greatest generation' anyone?).

Contrast this with the United States' response to the Cold War. Rather than contest Soviet power directly, we picked the relatively low-cost, low-risk route of basing U.S. troops in friendly nations, funding proxy wars and backing tinpot dictators. Sure, we funded an expensive reconstruction programs in post-WWII Europe, but it only lasted four years. The only deviation from this pattern was in Vietnam, but like Iraq, we went in thinking the endeavor was going to be relatively easy and come at a low cost.

We get ensnared in the impatient enormity problem when promise of an easy, low-cost effort does not pan out. The administration of the sitting president takes it as an affront to his re-election prospects and/or legacy. I think we can guess how these scenarios end -- the word 'badly' comes to mind. But that is not the only problem with impatient enormity.

The flip-side of the costly overcommitment is the marginal mission creep. This is a scenario where a low-cost policy (frequently sanctions) is applied to a briefly fashionable cause (Burma, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, Venezuela, etc.). Once the policy is put in place and the now-sated populace and the media loose interest, control over it is ceded to one of three groups: (1) members of Congress on the far left or far right (the activists), (2) members of Congress with a vested in the policy outcome (the lobbied), or (3) fanatical mid-level political appointees (assistant secretary and below).

These groups tend to come into office bent on expanding the current set of policies, but not always. I may complain about the Bush administration's efforts to slowly dismantle the arms control institutions of the Cold War more often, but it is no worse than our mindless sanctions against Cuba and Burma.

But hey, I hear that superpowers don't do windows, so I'm probably just illustrating a useless point.

'Rollins Show' is pretty good

Based on J's interesting post on the Henry Rollins Show, I decided to check it out myself. I'll admit I had some misgivings at first. I'm a libertarian with a fair amount of Mill and Friedman in my library. Rollins's contemporary message is about as hardcore left-wing as Black Flag was in the 1980s and Rollins Band was in the 1990s. We will probably agree on some issues, but I doubt we'd ever get along -- even after spending an hour or two around the beer pong table.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed most of the show. Sure, sometimes his critiques degrade to him jumping up and down yelling 'Bush and Cheney are dicks!' Most of the time, however, he is incredibly witty and demonstrates that he is a master of satire. The interviews can be real misses. Rollins rants about consumerism, but fails to take Penelope Spheeris to task about her filmography and his interview with Ozzy Osbourne was barely intelligible. The interviews with Patton Oswalt, Eddie Izzard and Michael Chiklis were really fantastic though.

I'm not 'so underground that I haven't heard of myself,' but I did recognize most of Rollins's musical guests. Like the interviews, some are great (Jurassic 5 and the original lineup of Dinosaur Jr. stick out in my mind) and while others prove the old adage that even the greatest musician can have terrible taste in music.

All in all, the show is pretty entertaining, even for someone who doesn't agree with Rollins's politics.

Taepodong 2 = complete failure?

I've been mediating on the judgements made by the Japanese Ministry of Defense report in the article I translated on Tuesday. I agree with their view and here is my logic:

North Korean missile designers are resourceful, but their current string of designs lack originality. They nailed down the R-11 'Scud' design in the 1980s and have been producing it domestically for ever since. The North Koreans have even made a modest income exporting Scuds that have been modified to extend their range. The medium-range No Dong is often credited as an indigenous North Korean design, but most accounts of No-Dong development either describe it as a scaled-up Scud or a modified version of the ancient R-13 'Sark' submarine-launched ballistic missile.

Either way, North Korean engineers can only squeeze so much more additional range out by lengthening the missile and shaving down the payload.

This brings us to the Taepodong-1, North Korea's first attempt at building a multi-stage missile. The Taepodong-1's design is familiar enough -- a modified Scud-B affixed to the top of a No Dong missile. The only new component is a small, solid-fueled third stage (maybe an KN-02?) situated on top of the Scud B. When the North Koreans attempted to launch the Taepodong-1 back in August 1998, the first and second stages appear to have worked, but third stage did not.

The Taepodong-2 also represents a relatively bold step away from the previous incrementalism of the North Korean missile program. Not only that, it appears to be very different from its similarly named cousin. The Taepodong-2 launch last July appeared to be a two-stage missile -- a No Dong missile fixed to the top of what may have been first stage of a DF-3A. Whatever the first stage was, it probably need to go back to the drawing board because it flamed out after only 40 seconds of burn time last year.

Based on this track record, I feel pretty sanguine about the prospect of vertical missile proliferation in North Korea. Pyongyang's best brains were only able to crack the Scud formula after decades of incremental reverse-engineering (and probably a fair amount of trial and error). Attempts to incorporate new technology appear to be consistently (forgive the pun) blowing up in their faces. This gives me a pretty strong impression that we should be far more worried about North Korea's nuclear scientists than their missile engineers.

Dude...

So I saw the Transformers movie last night. It was 'aaaite' -- the story was pretty incoherent, but the 144 minute run time offers enough hot robot-on-robot action to make it worth paying full price for a ticket.

What I thought was far more interesting was the trailer for next film to come out under J.J. Abram's Bad Robot Studio currently dubbed Cloverfield. It was an intense experience that blends the first-person point of view cinematography of the Blair Witch Project with what appears to be some sort of Godzilla-type theme.

The whole thing is being done under a pretty heavy veil of secrecy. The film's site offers little more than an ominous picture of two frightened young women looking behind the camera. Paramount, who is going to be the distributor on this flick, won't avow its existence, except to tell the guys at slashfilm.com to take an embed link to an illegally-captured screener of the trailer off of their site. I doubt Paramount will happen upon my blog, so here is a screener I found on Youtube. There are also all of these 'Ethan Haas was right' videos on Youtube, which you can access by figuring out the puzzles on this site.

Weird stuff.

Upate: There is apparently an 'Ethan Hass was wrong' blog as well and the Cthulhu is clearly mentioned among the gibberish and Hindi script used on the site.

Worth the price of admission in most localities

My girlfriend dragged to the theater yesterday evening to see the fourth iteration of the Die Hard series, Live Free or Die Hard (the twist on New Hampshire's state motto is a bit awkward). I know what you're probably thinking, "But RE, why would an IT-savvy defense wonk like yourself go to see an action flick about some preposterous cyber-terrorism plot?" Well I have two good reasons:

First, my girlfriend loves Bruce Willis. To give you sense of the scope of her affection, she actually enjoyed Willis's "The Return of Bruno" album and the Spinal Tap-style mockumentary that accompanied it.

Second, I was dying to see how the director managed to fit a F-35C into the storyline. Given that the U.S. government has been so tight-fisted about the F-35's software code we almost came to blows with the UK back in 2005, I wanted to see how the director justified pitting one against America's everyman hero, John McClane. Hacking a JSF was going to be too big a leap for me. To my surprise, the sequence was fairly logical, if not completely ironic in the face U.S. military tactics since 2002.

Ultimately, the movie was worth the 20 bucks. My (fan)girlfriend aside, John McClane can still deliver the pain... And driving a police car into a helicopter is pretty awesome.