China, War, and the 'Sentiments of a Nation'

http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/china-war-and-the-sentiments-of-a-nation/

Clausewitz’s writings on the sentimental dimensions of war help explain China’s recent moves in the South China Sea. 

By Kerry Brown

May 28, 2014

The nature of warfare has changed radically since the time almost two centuries ago when Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, his great treatise on the subject. For him, the great exemplars of tactical genius were Napoleon and von Bulow; the horrors of absolute, mechanical war lay in the future. Even so, there is one great insight in von Clausewitz’s work which has resonance across the ages and transcends culture. “We are apt to regard the combat in theory as an abstract trial of strength, without any participation of the feelings,” he writes, “and that is one of the thousand errors which theorists commit.” Clausewitz acknowledges that “the heart and sentiments of a nation” are an enormous factor in the product of its political and military strength. Of all the noble feelings that fill in the human heart in the exciting tumult of battle, he writes, “none, we must admit, are so powerful and constant as the soul’s thirst for honor and renown.” War as a battle of feeling and moral sentiment rather than brute strength is his great message. And it helps us today when we look at different kinds of conflict across the world.

Anyone looking dispassionately at China’s pushback with Vietnam in the last month without Clausewitz’s insight might profess puzzlement. It seems illogical. Firstly, China has serious domestic security issues at the moment, with a number of very nasty attacks related to Xinjiang over the last few months. Secondly, China has a number of ongoing territorial spats, with those involving Japan and the Philippines being the most severe. Thirdly, relations even with the DPRK look bad, with rumors that the Chinese have been exerting pressure on the capricious young leader of their northeastern neighbor not to go ahead with another nuclear test. With all this negative activity happening inside and outside, why do more to alienate regional neighbours, and the international community, by encroaching symbolically onto contested territory and raising the hackles of a famously bellicose neighbor to such an extent that Chinese investments in Vietnam are attacked and people have to be repatriated? Far from promoting China’s self-interest, isn’t this damaging them?

Were foreign policy a solely rational process, where cause and effect follow smoothly along, then we might try to divine some long-term strategic intent from Beijing to make sense of its recent moves. But it is probably wiser to take heed of Clausewitz’s writing on the sentimental and moral dimensions of war. China is a country that has become wealthy and (through that wealth) powerful relatively quickly. It has done this largely under the skeptical and often ill-disposed eyes of the rest of the world, who dislike its political system. Its demise has been predicted many times in the last two decades, more often than not through wishful thinking. Despite all the challenges, China has so far prevailed. It is not surprising therefore that it now feels some right in flexing its muscles, and pushing back.

Add to this the weight of memory. Events 75 years ago sometimes seem like yesterday in the Chinese psyche. Young people might not know much of the detail of the war period from 1932 onwards, but going by the cacophony on Chinese social media they have certainly acquired anger and feeling about that time. Chinese leaders might have problems creating unity over internal social policy, but all the evidence points to the fact that when they put pictures of their troops and agents undertaking operations like the recent ones in the South China Seas, the public is on their side, and a sunny unity reigns across the country. Which leader wouldn’t want to exploit this at a time when so many other issues are contentious and tough?

Dabbling with public sentiment about your country’s historic resentments and frustrations at how little heed is paid to its international pride and status is one thing. But it takes leaders of what Clausewitz called profound moral and intellectual skills to be able to channel this in the right direction, rather than being pushed along by public opinion towards an unexpected clash that might not work in their favor. Emotion and public sentiment are powerful allies in even a phony conflict.

But should any strategist in Beijing be tempted to dabble with a real military clash along the maritime borders, then they need once more to have a look at the great German theorist. He writes of the crucial need, in a zone of human activity so prey to fortune and chance, to have a military that is “habituated” – trained in the real theatre of war, and used to its experiences, rather than theory. And here the Vietnamese link is a sobering one. The last time Chinese forces had any significant combat experience was in 1979, with the Vietnamese. It ended up being a debacle. This profound awareness of a real lack of experience means that, for all the noise and threats, only in the most exceptional circumstances would Chinese leaders really push the button for conflict. And that, for all of us, inside and outside China, is a very good thing.

Renovation and Controversy at the Roof of the World

By ANDREW JACOBS

MAY 26, 2014

Four years and $7.2 billion later, Yushu, a city high on the Tibetan Plateau that was leveled by a calamitous earthquake, has been largely made whole, as I reported from there recently. There are thousands of new homes, dozens of schools and impressive-looking museums. The reconstruction effort was made all the more challenging by the city’s isolation and thin air.

But despite the herculean effort and lavish spending, many residents are unhappy with the results. Some say the distribution of new housing favored well-connected government officials over ordinary residents. Others, especially construction workers and contractors who answered the government’s call to rebuild Yushu, are embittered over unpaid wages. At the city’s main monastery, the disappearance last year of a contractor hired to rebuild dormitories and prayer halls means that hundreds of monks and nuns are still living in tents.

The corruption and mismanagement have aggravated tensions between the city’s Tibetan majority and the Han migrants who run most of the local businesses. The result: A project that was meant to showcase the Communist Party’s magnanimity toward China’s embattled Tibetans has inadvertently sown even deeper cynicism and anger.

Indochina’s Troubled Year

http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/indochinas-troubled-year/

With a coup, a crash and a clash, it has been a rough 2014 so far for Indochina.

By Luke Hunt

May 28, 2014

Rarely has Indochina found itself in such a diplomatic mess: Vietnamese brawling with China over their maritime border, a plane crash that claimed senior government leaders in Laos, and a coup d’etat in Thailand have taken an unprecedented political and economic toll and turned trouble-prone Cambodia into an unlikely oasis of peace and stability.

The collective behavior is also winning Indochina comparisons with the Central American republics of the 1980s, while the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and civil unrest in Myanmar have cast an additional pall over the wider region.

Tourist numbers are falling sharply amid speculation of a recession in Thailand, which will have a negative impact on its poorer neighbors, while foreign investor confidence has declined sharply, particularly among Chinese struggling to strike a balance between business as usual in Vietnam and the political realities of Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The Thai economy contracted 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2014, predominantly because of a sharp 9.4 drop percent in investment and a 12.8 percent fall in construction. Tourist arrivals in Thailand have dropped to their lowest levels in five years with the industry expecting a $2.5 billion revenue shortfall in the first half of 2014.

Vietnam, already hamstrung by years of corruption and economic incompetence, could follow suit with the prospects of further military clashes with China more than likely, at least until mid-August when the Chinese are due to end oil-drilling operations in waters near Danang.

“Military strategists and planners must now be assumed to be weighing the options and consequences of delivering a ‘short sharp shock’ to Vietnam at sea to placate domestic opinion and signal resolve,” said Gavin Greenwood, a security analyst with Hong Kong-based Allan & Associates. “There is a strong sense that factions within China’s leadership have been seeking just such an opportunity for some time.”

Greenwood noted that Vietnam’s “immoderate behavior” – which left two Chinese dead, more than 100 injured, and hundreds of Chinese and Taiwanese factories damaged – had sanctified Beijing’s response.

“A brief skirmish that left a couple of Vietnam patrol boats ablaze would obviously be broadly, if relatively mildly, condemned by the U.S. and the wider international community unwilling to jeopardize important economic ties under such ambiguous circumstances.

INFOGRAPHIC: Troubled waters

An oil rig deployed by Beijing in the South China Sea earlier this month caused outrage in Vietnam and led to protests in which at least four Chinese nationals were killed and more than 200 factories destroyed. Here we look at the sources of the maritime conflict between the two countries

Adolfo Arranz

26 May, 2014

View the full screen version of this infographic

Where Does the Syrian Civil War Stand Today?

May 28, 2014

Syria: With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Allies

strategypage.com

May 28, 2014

In the east (near the Iraq border) al Nusra and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) continue to fight each other with ISIL often getting the worst of it. This is despite the fact that ISIL has plenty of armed men just across the border in Iraq and in the city of Raqqa to the west. But in Western Iraq (Anbar province) ISIL is struggling to deal with increased pressure from government forces and pro-government tribal militias. ISIL forces are trapped in Fallujah, with the siege of the Islamic terrorists growing tighter and tighter. To the west ISIL is trying to establish a road connection between Anbar and Syria, where it controls Raqqa, the largest city in eastern Syria and the only provincial capital to be captured by the rebels. The revived (by Iranian Shia mercenaries recruited in Lebanon and Iraq) Syrian government is turning its attention to its Sunni eastern areas and the Shia dominated Iraqi government is increasingly aggressive attacking ISIL on both sides of the Syrian border. Both Iraq and Syria believe that ISIL is intent on creating a Sunni religious dictatorship out of eastern Syria and western Iraq. This is a largely desert and thinly populated region. ISIL is actually suffering more casualties in Syria, where its main foe is other rebels, especially large Islamic terrorist groups like al Nusra.

In the south (near the Jordanian border) Al Nusra and FSA units are increasingly hostile with each other. FSA is already at war with ISIL (as is al Nusra) and now there is the prospect of open fighting between FSA and al Nusra. There is also growing hostility between all Islamic terrorist rebel groups. It’s the same old story; every Islamic terrorist group believes its way is the true way. When you are on a Mission From God you tend to believe that your way is the only way. This splintering is old news among Islamic radical groups and no one has ever found an easy way around it. Thus despite there being over 100,000 armed rebels in Syria, the many divisions and growing infighting among the rebels is greatly weakening rebel combat capability. The fact that there are up to a thousand different rebel groups does not help either. As a result many rebel groups, in particular the FSA, are reporting growing desertions and more difficulty in recruiting. It’s believed that currently more rebels are dying each week at the hands of other rebels than in fighting with government forces. The government has over 300,000 troops and militiamen and their forces are much more disciplined and united. Assad and Iranian officials increasingly speak openly of eventual victory and this is no longer a fantasy.

In the northwest (Idlib province, where the Lebanese and Turkish borders meet) rebels continue to advance. This is in contrast to the setbacks the rebels are suffering elsewhere. In part this is because the government is concentrating on clearing the rebels away from Damascus and out of Aleppo. Once that is done, the Assads will march on Idlib. Currently ISIL is not very active in Idlib and al Nusra and secular rebels tend to get along there. Thus the government forces are on the defensive.

Middle East: Three nations, one conflict

May 27, 2014

By Borzou Daragahi

The crises in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are merging into a single sectarian war

Iraqi forces have stepped up their patrols along the barren 605km Syrian border recently, but they admit they have very little to show for it. The flow of guns, fighters and money moving in and out of Iraq has just grown too heavy to control.

One day this spring they caught a convoy of fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, starting a firefight, only to hear word two days later of an even larger convoy that had made its way past them. The best the border controls can do is serve as the eyes and ears of Baghdad.

“We maintain a strong presence on the border to try to cut their supply lines, but mostly to try to find out what is happening on other side,” says Brigadier General Saad Maan Ibrahim, spokesman for Iraq’s interior ministry. “It is clear that what is happening in Syria is impacting us and hurting the Iraqi people directly. If there is any problem in Syria or fresh outbreak of violence in Syria, this will be reflected in Iraq.”

Lebanese and Iraqi Shia militiamen take up arms in Syrian towns and cities. Syrian insurgents set off bombs in southern Beirut. Sunni fighters flow from Syria to Iraq, where they battle government troops on the outskirts of Baghdad, while Lebanese and Palestinian Sunnis in Lebanon fight in the Syrian city of Homs. Governments in Baghdad and Beirut, backed by their patron in Tehran, look the other way – or sometimes help – as arms and fighters make their way into Syria for battles from Aleppo to Damascus to Deraa.

This is more than just the “spillover” from the Syria conflict analysts warned about when the uprising against Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. The various conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon are increasingly merging into one war stretching from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea in what the writer Rami Khoury calls “a single operational arena in terms of the ease of movement of fighters and weapons”.

While few believe that the map of the region is about to be redrawn, the emerging conflict represents a dangerous breakdown of the nation states created in the Sykes-Picot agreement sealed by French and British colonial overlords 90 years ago.

“This region, the Levant, never had national identities or entities before Sykes-Picot,” says Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute in Washington. “The identities, unlike the countries, tend to be cross-border – because you have Shi’ite here and here, Sunni here and here, and Kurd here and here.”

In its duration, geographic scope and extent of its foreign involvement, the conflict resembles the 30 years war, the series of conflicts rooted in religious differences between Protestants and Catholics that devastated 17th-century central Europe.

Putin Blinked

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/opinion/friedman-putin-blinked.html?_r=0

MAY 27, 2014 

Thomas L. Friedman

There was a moment at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 when Soviet ships approached to within just a few miles of a U.S. naval blockade and then, at the last minute, turned back — prompting then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk to utter one of the most famous lines from the Cold War: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.”

The crisis in Ukraine never threatened a Cold War-like nuclear Armageddon, but it may be the first case of post-post-Cold War brinkmanship, pitting the 21st century versus the 19th. It pits a Chinese/Russian worldview that says we can take advantage of 21st-century globalization whenever we want to enrich ourselves, and we can behave like 19th-century powers whenever we want to take a bite out of a neighbor — versus a view that says, no, sorry, the world of the 21st century is not just interconnected but interdependent and either you play by those rules or you pay a huge price.

In the end, it was Putinism versus Obamaism, and I’d like to be the first on my block to declare that the “other fellow” — Putin — “just blinked.”

In fact, I’d like to say more: Putin got pretty much everything wrong in Ukraine. He thought the world was still shaped by “spheres of influence” dictated from the top down, when Ukraine was all about the emergence of “people of influence” — The Square People, organized from the bottom up and eager to join their own sphere: the world of liberty and free markets represented by the European Union.

Putin underestimated Ukrainian patriotism; even many Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine did not like pro-Putin thugs trying to force them to join Russia. “Ukrainians have said in opinion polls that they want open borders and visa-free access to Russia,” noted the pollster Craig Charney. “But they also said in those polls — and confirmed with their majority vote for a pro-European candidate in Sunday’s election — that while they think Russia is a nice place to visit, they wouldn’t want to live there.”

And, most of all, Putin underestimated the impact of Western economic sanctions. The world turned out to be more interdependent, and Russia more exposed to that interdependence, than Putin thought.

So he blinked. The first flutter was pulling back his troops from Ukraine’s border and letting the election proceed. Interestingly, he chose to blink this out most directly at last week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s annual conference to attract global investors. “We want peace and calm in Ukraine,” Mr. Putin told the business executives. “We are interested that on our western borders we have peace and calm in Ukraine. ... We will work with the newly elected structure.”

The Russian Navy is More Rusty Than Ready

May 28, 2014 

Russia’s Navy: More rust than ready 

David Axe 

On May 8, the British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon sailed from the naval base at Portsmouth on an urgent mission — to find and follow the Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov and six accompanying vessels steaming through the English Channel. 

“A Russian task group of this size has not passed by our shores in some time,” said Rex Cox, Dragon’s captain. 

True, the Russian navy has been more active in recent months. Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula with its strategic ports and asserted itself with troop, ship and warplane deployments along the frontier between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 

That’s important to the Kremlin because, historically, Russia has struggled to maintain warm-water ports. Seizing Crimea helps ensure Moscow’s access to ice-free waters for commercial and military shipping. 

But Russia’s busy fleet schedule masks an underlying seagoing weakness. Moscow’s warships are old and unreliable. Yet the government is finding it increasingly difficult to replace them with equally large and powerful new vessels. 

Russia is a geriatric maritime giant surrounded by much more energetic rivals. 

In the final years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was determined to match the mighty U.S. Navy on the high seas. Moscow funded the construction of its first three full-size aircraft carriers in the late 1970s and 1980s — the non-nuclearKuznetsov and a sister ship, plus a nuclear-powered vessel. The United States then possessed 15 large aircraft carriers, most of them nuclear-powered. After post-Cold War force cuts, today the United States has 10 nuclear flattops plus another nine small carriers. 

The Soviet Union’s collapse dashed Moscow’s naval expansion plans. The Russians managed to finish paying the Ukrainian shipyard to complete Kuznetsov.But there was not enough money for the other two flattops. Today, a new aircraft carrier can cost billions of dollars. 

Commissioned in 1991, Kuznetsov was Russia’s last new large warship. In the past 23 years, Moscow has managed to complete a few new submarines and small frigates and destroyers at its main Sevmash shipyard, on the North Atlantic coast. But many of Russia’s current naval vessels — and all its large vessels — are Soviet leftovers. 

They’re outdated, prone to mechanical breakdowns and wickedly uncomfortable for their crews — especially compared to the latest U.S., European and Chinese ships. Washington alone builds roughly eight new warships a year, including a brand-new nuclear carrier every four or five years. 

Fixing Our Foreign Policy: 12 Ideas From a Sometimes Critic

Richard N. Haass

President, Council on Foreign Relations 

Posted: 05/27/2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-n-haass/fixing-our-foreign-policy_b_5398379.html 

President Obama has been critical of his foreign policy critics of late, suggesting that they had little to propose other than military intervention. As a sometimes critic, I take exception to that charge, as I rarely support "boots on the ground," but do question the Obama administration both for what it is doing and not doing.

Ironically, the president just put 80 pairs of boots on the ground in Chad in an effort to locate and liberate the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls. Hopefully this effort will accomplish just that, but even if it does, the criticism of the administration's foreign policy will not go away. Nor should it.

I appreciate that it does not take a whole lot of effort to find fault. In that spirit, here are a dozen proposals -- some likely to be popular, others anything but -- that if adopted would enhance this country's national security. I offer them now in the hope the president and his aides are open to new ideas as they prepare his much anticipated May 28 national security speech at West Point.

1. The European allies are far too dependent on Russian oil and gas, a dependence that constrains their willingness to stand up to Mr Putin when he behaves badly, as he is wont to do. What is needed is a trans-Atlantic energy initiative, one that involves increased US exports of both oil and gas and increased European production of shale gas. The US would be better positioned to suggest France start fracking and Germany reconsider its opposition to nuclear power if the president were willing to put aside politics and support the Keystone pipeline.

2. Expanded trade would boost economic growth and provide new strategic ties to Asia, Europe, and Latin America. How about a major White House commitment to and push for Trade Promotion Authority?

3. A modest increase in defense spending is warranted on grounds of need and would send a clear signal of renewed US interest in global leadership. Coupling it with long overdue reforms of military retirement, healthcare, and veterans programs would be a two-fer.

4. Syria is a strategic and humanitarian disaster. We need to act to reduce the fighting and the absolute and relative strength of the jihadists, who are threat not just to Syria but to the entire region and the world. It is time to extend greater intelligence and military help to the non-jihadist opposition and to put forward a diplomatic plan that accepts the reality of Alawite primacy and Mr. Assad's position for the immediate future.

5. Afghanistan will soon have a new government. Let's re-establish a regional diplomatic mechanism that includes its immediate neighbors (including Iran, which has a stake in a stable Afghanistan) as well as Russia and India to increase the odds the new government does not fail. Keeping 10,000 or so American troops there, as the President is now calling for, looks both possible and desirable.

Obama just announced the most anti-war foreign policy doctrine in decades

Updated by Max Fisher on May 28, 2014

@Max_Fisher max@vox.com 

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President Obama made a commencement speech at West Point on Wednesday that the White House hadaggressively billed as a grand articulation of Obama's foreign policy vision. This was not the first time he had attempted to lay out a foreign policy doctrine, and few expected much more than the usual vague policy mish-mash — when it's year six of your presidency and you still need to explain your doctrine, it's not a great sign that you really have one.

So it was a legitimate surprise when Obama articulated a unified, tightly focused vision of America's role in the world. And while it's not a vision that will thrill many foreign policy hands, including perhaps some of those in his administration, it is the clearest Obama foreign policy doctrine he's made in years: no war, no militarism, no adventurism. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter's 1977 Notre Dame speech, it may well have been one of the most dovish foreign policy speeches by a sitting US president since Eisenhower.

EVEN TERRORISM, OBAMA'S MOST HAWKISH ISSUE, WILL BE FOUGHT MORE DOVISHLY

Obama argued, directly and repeatedly, that the US would have to reduce its use of military force as a tool of foreign policy. Obama argued that the US could not and should not use military force, including even limited actions such as off-shore strikes, except when absolutely necessary to defend "core interests" or to "protect our people, our homeland, or our way of life."

That's a very high bar for the use of military force. Obama didn't just make the point abstractly, going through several major US foreign policy changes to explain why, in each, military force was not and should not be applied. 

Obama's dove doctrine: get involved, but indirectly

Syria was his one big policy announcement: the US will dedicate more resources to "support Syria's neighbors" in hosting refugees and containing the extremist groups spilling out of the conflict. That's a pretty coldly self-interested calculation, exposing the US to minimum risk and doing the minimum to protect America against immediate terrorist threats. But it's squarely in line with his articulation of US foreign policy: no military involvement, deal with conflicts indirectly, focus on core American interests.

The case where Obama made his argument for dovishness most tellingly was, interestingly, on terrorism — the foreign policy issue where he has been consistently the most hawkish. No, Obama did not announce he was grounding the drones, but he made a telling case for continuing even this sole hawkish element of his foreign policy in a way that more aligned with dovish principles.

New Book by Retired US Army Lt. General Says U.S. Has Lost the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

May 27, 2014

A General Writes the First After-Action Report on the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Why We Lost

Mark Thompson

AFTER 35 YEARS IN UNIFORM, RETIRED THREE-STAR SAYS HE WILL EXPLAIN WHERE U.S. WAR STRATEGY FAILED

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ book sparked a firestorm upon its release in January, although you would never have predicted it by its humdrum title: Duty. But recently retired Army lieutenant general Daniel Bolger, who played key roles in Afghanistan and Iraq in his 35-year career, wasn’t coy when it came time to titling his upcoming book Why We Lost.

It’s a jaw-dropping phrase in a political-military world given to mealy-mouthed assessments of military progress in the two wars the U.S. has fought since 9/11. Its assertion calls into question the wars’ costs — 6,800 U.S. troops, untold enemy and civilian dead, and a $2 trillion, and rising, bill for U.S. taxpayers. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing the book Nov. 11. Its publication date is exactly two years after Bolger declared, during a Veterans Day ceremony in Afghanistan, that “our nations count on us, and we’ll deliver.”n Ways to Die in the West

Apparently not.

“By next Memorial Day, who’s going to say that we won these two wars?” Bolger said in an interview Thursday. “We committed ourselves to counterinsurgency without having a real discussion between the military and civilian leadership, and the American population —’Hey, are you good with this? Do you want to stay here for 30 or 40 years like the Korean peninsula, or are you going to run out of energy?’ It’s obvious: we ran out of energy.”

The military fumbled the ball by not making clear how long it would take to prevail in both nations. “Once you get past that initial knockout shot, and decide you’re going to stay awhile, you’d better define ‘a while,’ because in counter-insurgency you’re talking decades,” Bolger says. “Neither [the Bush nor the Obama] Administration was going to do that, yet I was in a military that was planning for deployments forever, basically. An all-volunteer force made it easy to commit the military to a long-term operation because they were volunteers.”

The nation and its military would have been far smarter to invade, topple the governments they didn’t like, and get out. “Both wars were won, and we didn’t know enough to go home” after about six months, Bolger argues. “It would have been messy and unpleasant, and our allies would have pissed and moaned, because limited wars by their nature have limited, unpalatable results. But what result would have been better — that, or this?”

The mindset persists. “The senior guys say, ‘Well, it’s not lost yet — we may still pull it out’,” Bolger said, as Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned from a NATO session in Brussels where Afghanistan was a topic. “I don’t give military advice to the Taliban,” Dempsey told Jim Garamone of the Pentagon’s American Forces Press Service. “But if I were giving them advice, I’d tell them their negotiating position is not going to improve, it’s going to erode.”

THE INTERNET OF THINGS 2020: A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE

May 20, 2014 · by Fortuna's Corner

Internet Of Things 2020: A Glimpse Into The Future

http://www.fortunascorner.wordpress.com

Last month, April 30, 2014, a thought-provoking conference called: “Internet of Things 2020: A Glimpse Into The Future,” was hosted by the global strategic planning and knowledge company — A.T. Kearney. The conference was part of what’s known as The Silicon Valley Thought Leaders Series. A.T. Kearney Partner’s Alex Blantner and Mark Holman presented a briefing which is attached that looked out into the end of this decade and made some educated guesses as to how the Internet of Things (IoT) might play out.

“Everyone seems to be talking about it,’ the two Kearney Partners noted; but, they posed the question — “exactly what is it?,” — the Internet of Things (IoT). To their surprise, the conference attendees — that included the who’s who of the Internet/Social Media landscape — submitted 20 different/unique definitions of what they thought the IoT actually is. Mr. Blantner and Mr. Holman defined the IoT as a : seamless combination of embedded intelligence; ubiquitous connectivity; and, deep analytical analysis — put together in a very disruptive and value-generating way.

“Regardless of the sphere,” the to Kearney Partners note that “the key feature of the IoT — is the full cycle from the physical world of things through the digital one — and back to the physical.” This is the “first time ever,” they contend, “that such a closed loop can be implemented, on such a vast scale, across so many areas, and with such enormous potential.”

“By 2020,” A.T. Kearney says, there will be a staggering “30B mobile devices connected to the Internet (20X higher than today), by some 7.7B people; and, an average of 3.5 mobile devices per person by the end of this decade.” “How about Silicon Valley?” they ask. Kearney projects an average of 250 mobile devices — per family in Silicon Valley by 2020, and more than 200M mobile devices in an area less than 30 miles in diameter.” By 2020 they contend, the IoT “will impact close to six percent of all global commerce (total world GDP of $100T) — some $3.5T in revenue; an increase of $177B in value per customer and, an increase in productivity equaling $1.9T or more.

Mr. Blantner and Mr. Holman contend that “close to two-thirds of all incremental revenues will accrue in the business-to-business (BTB) sector, with the remainder split between the business-to-consumer and the public sector at a 3:1 ratio.” At present, they note that there is some $1.1B of venture capital investment going into the IoT; and, investment in this domain is growing at a 46 percent yearly increase versus a 7 percent yearly increase in all venture capital investment.”

“All this is very exciting,” they say, “but, how long will it actually take for the IoT to actually live up to its expectations?” “We believe, and most experts in the industry agree, that we are in the early stages of the IoT lifecycle. At the moment, there is more buzz than there is real value…yet. That said, significant money and attention is being put into/devoted to this space and inevitably, they will start producing results.” They expect the IoT ” uptake to accelerate in a couple of years and take six to eight additional years to truly deliver the value we expect from it.” But, Mr. Blantner and Mr. Holman said some internet technologists think the IoT could get here within the next two to three years.

** New Details About NSA’s Biggest Cable Tapping Operation: DANCINGOASIS

May 27, 2014

NSA’s largest cable tapping program: DANCINGOASIS

Peter Koop

electrospaces.blogspot.com

On May 13, Glenn Greenwald published his book ‘No Place To Hide' about the Snowden-disclosures. It doesn't contain substantial new revelations, but from one of the original documents in it we can determine that NSA's largest cable tapping program is codenamed DANCINGOASIS, something which was not reported on earlier.

Here we will combine information from a number of other documents and sources to create a somewhat more complete picture of the DANCINGOASIS program.

Special Source Operations

In Greenwald’s book and on his website, the following chart from NSA’s BOUNDLESSINFORMANT tool was published. Although these charts are not always easy to interpret, we can rather safely assume that this one gives the overview for NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) division, which is responsible for collecting data from major telephony and internet cables and switches.

During the one month period between December 10, 2012 and January 8, 2013, a total of more than 160 billion metadata records were counted, divided into 93 billion DNI (internet) data and 67 billion DNR (telephony) data:

In the “Most Volume” section we see that the program which collects most data is identified by the SIGINT Activity Designator (SIGAD) US-3171, a facility that is also known under the codename DANCINGOASIS, which is sometimes abbreviated as DGO.

During the one month period covered by the chart, this program collected 57.7 billion data records, which is more than twice as much as the program that is second: US-3180, which is codenamed SPINNERET. Third is US-3145 or MOONLIGHTPATH and fourth DS-300 or INCENSER. This chart will be analysed in general in a separate article.

“WE’RE AT GREATER RISK:” Q. AND A. WITH FORMER NSA DIRECTOR GEN. (RET.) KEITH ALEXANDER

May 19, 2014 · by Fortuna's Corner 

We’re At Greater Risk”: Q. & A. with General Keith Alexander

New Yorker Online, May 15 | Mattathias Schwartz

Since Edward Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance, we know more about how the National Security Agency has been interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We’ve learned some new words —“bulk metadata,” “selector,” “reasonable articulable suspicion,” “emphatic-access restriction”—but we don’t really know how much of this works in practice.

The intelligence community isn’t used to explaining itself in public, but over the past few months, with much prodding by Congress and the press, it has taken some small, tentative steps. Last week, I spent an hour with General Keith B. Alexander, who retired in March after eight years as the director of the N.S.A. The forces pushing for omnivorous data collection are larger than any one person, but General Alexander’s role has been significant. We met on Wednesday morning, in the conference room of a public-relations firm in the Flatiron District. He is a tall man with a firm handshake and steady eyes who speaks rapidly and directly.

Here are excerpts from the interview.

In January, President Obama claimed that the N.S.A. bulk-metadata program has disrupted fifty-four terrorist plots. Senator Patrick Leahy said the real number is zero. There’s a big difference between fifty-four and zero.

Those [fifty-four events] were plots, funding, and giving money—like the Basaaly Moalin case, where the guy is giving money to someone to go and do an attack. [Note: Moalin’s case is awaiting appeal.] It’s fifty-four different events like that, where two programs—the metadata program and the 702 program—had some play.

I was trying to think of the best way to illustrate what the intelligence people are trying to do. You know “Wheel of Fortune”? Here’s the deal: I’m going to give you a set of big, long words to put on there. Then I’m going to give you some tools to guess the words. You get to pick a vowel or a consonant—one letter. There’s a hundred letters up there. You’ll say, I don’t have a clue. O.K., so you’ve used your first tool in analysis. What the intelligence analysts are doing is using those tools to build the letters, to help understand what the plot is. This is one of those tools. It’s not the only tool. And, at times, it may not be the best tool. It evolved from 9/11, when we didn’t have a tool that helped us connect the dots between foreign and domestic.

Around 9/11, we intercepted some of [the hijackers’] calls, but we couldn’t see where they came from. So guys like [Khalid al-]Mihdhar, [one of the 9/11 hijackers who was living] in California—we knew he was calling people connected to Al Qaeda in Yemen. But we thought he was in the Middle East. We had no way to connect the dots. If you rewound 9/11, what you would have done is tipped the F.B.I. that a guy who is planning a terrorist attack is in San Diego. You may have found the other three groups that were with him.

The C.I.A. could have simply told the F.B.I. that al-Mindhar was in the country. Which they didn’t do, for whatever reason.

But, you see, not everybody is looking at the same picture. So you’re thinking, We’re solving this puzzle. C.I.A. is over here, solving this puzzle. There are a lot of these puzzles that many of us are trying to work. Thousands at any given time. You might ask: What’s the best way for you to figure out who bad guys are? I’m going to tell you there’s a bad guy. What would you start with? You’d say, Well, I need to know who his network for friends are, because chances are many of them are bad, too.

4 DARPA PROJECTS THAT COULD BE BIGGER THAN THE INTERNET

May 21, 2014 · by Fortuna's Corner

Four DARPA Projects That Could Be Bigger Than The Internet

http://www.fortunascorner.wordpress.com

Patrick Tucker’s DefenseOne.com, had an online article yesterday, May 20, 2014 with the title above. Mr. Tucker began by noting that “forty years ago, a group researchers with military money, set out to test the wacky idea of making computers talk to one another in a new way — using digital information packets that could be traded among multiple machines; rather than telephonic, point-to-point circuit relays. The project called ARPANET, went on to fundamentally change life on Earth, under its more common name — the Internet.”

“Today,” he writes, “the agency that bankrolled the Internet (no it wasn’t Al Gore) is called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which boasts a rising budget of $3B — split across 250 [known] programs. They all have national security implications but, like the Internet, much of what DARPA funds can be commercialized, spread, and potentially change civilian life in big ways that its originators didn’t conceive of,” at the time.

“What is DARPA [currently] working on that could be as big as the Internet?,” asks Mr. Tucker. “Last week,” he writes, “at The Atlantic Council, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar declined to name names, but in her recent Congressional testimony (Senate Appropriations Committee), she highlighted some of her favorites:”

— Atomic GPS: The Global Positioning System, or GPS, which DARPA had an important but limited role in developing, is a great tool — but, maintaining it as a satellite system is increasingly costly. A modern GPS satellite can run into the range of $223M, which is one reason why the USAF recently scaled back its procurement.” “DARPA doesn’t have an explicit program to replace GPS,” notes Mr. Tucker, “but the DARPA-funded-chip-scale combinatorial atomic navigation, or C-Scan, and Quantum Assisted Sensing, or QuASAR, initiatives explore a field of research with big relevance here; the use of atomic physics for much better sensing. If you can measure or understand how the Earth’s magnetic field acceleration and position is effecting individual atoms (reduced in temperature), you can navigate without a satellite. In fact, you can achieve geo-location awareness that could be 1000X more accurate than any system in existence, say researchers.”

“The British military is investing millions of pounds in a similar technology,” writes Mr. Tucker. “Researchers associated with the project forecast they will have a prototype ready within five years. The upshot from quantum navigation for any military is obvious. It arms them with better and more reliable situational awareness for soldiers and equipment and better flying for missiles. Perhaps, more importantly,” Mr. Tucker adds, “a drone with a quantum compass wouldn’t require satellite navigation, which would make it easier to fly and less [susceptible] to hacking.”

“The big benefit for everybody else? asks Mr. Tucker. “Future devices that understand where they are in relation to one another, and their physical world won’t need to rely on an expensive satellite infrastructure to work. That means having more capable and cheaper devices, with geo-location capability, have the potential to improve everything from real-time, location-based searches to self-driving cars, and those anticipated pizza delivery drones.”

TIPPING THE SCALES: HOW TO COMBAT CYBER THREATS TO THE U.S. DEFENSE INDUSTRIAL BASE

May 10, 2014 · by Fortuna's Corner

Excerpt:

Source Link

In order to meet this challenge, the Department of Defense (DoD) must work with the nation’s largest and most critical corporations to facilitate an active cyber defense framework designed to proactively engage non-physical threats within the virtual domain and change the cost-benefit calculation of the potential cyber intruder.

U.S. government entities must work with the private sector to create deterrent mechanisms. There are four key factors in the cybercriminal’s decision making apparatus: level of expected effort, value of cybercrime, risk of cybercrime, and net reward. The level of expected effort includes the initial capital investment for computing tools and intrusion applications and the continuous level of operational investment. The overall value of committing a cybercrime is most easily understood in terms of composite financial gain. A cybercriminal’s risk calculus, on the other hand, is a function of three factors: effectiveness of preventative measures, quality of detection capabilities, and the harshness of judicial policies for prosecuting cybercrime.[5] The level of net reward equals the level of expected value minus the levels of risk and expected effort. Over the last decade, the expected returns from intellectual property theft, direct financial theft, online banking vulnerabilities, and network-based market manipulations have increased substantially because of the world’s increased reliance on the Internet.[6]

DoD systems absorb approximately 360,000,000 probes, scans, and intrusion attempts per day;[12] this equates to millions of opportunities to identify and publicly expose malicious cyber actors and put pressure on host-governments to prosecute them. A brighter spotlight would force force cybercriminals exert more effort concealing their attacks and assume higher levels of risk, pushing the threshold for committing a cybercrime to the right and reducing the expected reward (see Figure 4).

Conclusion:

By increasing the required effort and risk of committing a cybercrime, the U.S. government can reduce the number of cyber-espionage attempts against its defense technology projects. Collaborative efforts between DoD and the defense industrial base may help mitigate the compromise of critical defense-related intellectual property and preserve the U.S. strategic military advantage over its adversaries.

The Professional Bridge Discourse and the Bondage of Needing the Right Answer

This post was provided by Robert Mihara, a US Army strategist. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the US Army, Department of Defense, or any other organization of the US Government.

Over the past several years under US Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, much has been made of the need for revitalizing the profession of arms in the US military generally, and in the US Army specifically. The attention has taken place against the backdrop of scandals in the general officer corps and worries the post-war army will suffer from a malaise inflicted by converging influences of declining budgets, inane garrison demands for leaders accustomed to the dynamism and gravity of war, and the accumulated traumas of twelve years of constant conflict that have been deferred for many by the cycle of separation and reunion. However, the discussion has focused more on normative standards, structures, and processes for the profession and less on the ethos of the professional discourse to vibrant and socially responsible professions. It is fine to discuss the normative aspects of the ideal military profession and what must be done to establish or maintain that ideal, but those fine arguments often fail to fully recognize the hindrances that exist to an active and open discourse that is so necessary to realizing that ideal.

Discourse is more than a professional activity that one simply does. It is an interaction based on a perspective of collective, shared, discovery. This characterization of discourse might seem academic in a military setting, but, as much of the criticism leveled against military proclivities suggests, the necessary cultural precursors for productive discourse are neither entrenched nor broadly accepted. As with leader initiative, the rhetoric of open and dynamic discussion of professional matters within the military runs aground on the reality of institutional risk aversion and an fear of being fired, made ironic when so few officers are actually dismissed from places of significant responsibility.

6 Leadership Lessons From A 3-Star General

Retired Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney.

"Leadership is deliberate: You don't accidentally have successful teams," retired Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney recently told a group of small-business owners.

He was speaking to more than 130 dealers from a Fortune 50 automobile company at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. They had gathered for the Thayer Leader Development Group's leadership program.

The three-day executive-development program is designed to immerse business leaders in the habits and beliefs of the U.S. military. The day begins with a 7 a.m. boot camp of situps, pushups, and relays or a three-mile run on the West Point campus. Next comes a series of leadership exercises, workshops, and lectures like this one. 

Kearney, who was formerly the deputy commander for the U.S. Special Operations Command, a 62,000-person global enterprise with a $10 billion budget, says businesspeople tend to underestimate the similarities of leading an infantry unit and leading a company. The Army may not seek profits, but it certainly aims for results, he says, all while recruiting, training, and organizing thousands of people. "Disciplined processes create agile organizations," he likes to say.

Here are lessons business leaders could learn from the U.S. military, according to the three-star general. 

You're Only As Strong As Your Least Experienced Team Member It's important that businesses establish trust in their organizations to gain credibility, says Kearney. "When we went to Afghanistan, it was important to work with people in the community. We talked to tribal leaders and showed them pictures of the twin towers falling and tried to explain why we were in their country or valley." 

But that trust is easily eroded. It needs to be maintained from the lowest-level employee all the way to the top. Often, the receptionist communicates more about a business than its CEO, Kearney says, because they are the first line of contact for customers. And in the Army, it's typically the young soldiers on the battlefield who represent the relationship. "Everyone in the organization is responsible for building and sustaining your brand." 

Intelligence: Soliciting Human Geography

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140527.aspx

May 27, 2014: U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) recently advertised for individuals or organizations able to supply social, cultural, economic and military information on places like Burkina Faso, Burma, China (mainly the southeast), Djibouti, Honduras, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, North Korea, South Sudan and Trinidad & Tobago. Technically, the information provided is to be obtained legally. That is, outside the countries in question by consulting travelers from those countries. In practice the suppliers can obtain information inside the countries listed at their own risk and without any official support from SOCOM or the United States. 

All this information is what SOCOM calls human geography (or cultural geography). This sort of data collection and analysis was employed extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. Data collected from open sources (like this recent open solicitation) is merged inside SOCOM with classified data to produce a database that SOCOM can use to plan operations and which the operators carrying out those missions can consult while they are on the job. 

This is not the first time SOCOM or the CIA, has used “open sources” like this. During and after the Cold War (1947-1991) intelligence was often collected from people who were not spies but were usually residents in foreign countries. This was often innocuous stuff like clippings from local newspapers or simply gossip heard on the street. Depending on where the source was, collecting such information and passing it on (often to a legal visitor from a neighboring country) was considered espionage and punishable by severe punishments if you were caught at it. The U.S. would instruct these open source information providers how to proceed with the least risk, and pay then according to the risk they were exposed to. Even in dictatorships, the local spy catchers tended to go after more dangerous (to the national security) spies and ignore the suppliers of newspaper clippings and gossip. 

The U.S. often relied on contractors (local or American) to supervise these open source informants, to further insulate the United States government from these sources, and vice versa.

Rethinking Douglas MacArthur Fifty years after his death, it’s time America’s most misunderstood military genius got his due.

By MARK PERRY

May 25, 2014

Great lives, fully lived, cast long shadows. Fifty years after his death, it’s not unusual to hear people rank Douglas MacArthur among America’s worst generals—alongside Benedict Arnold and William Westmoreland. His critics say he was insubordinate and arrogant, callous in dealing with dissent, his Korean War command studded with mistakes. “MacArthur could never see another sun, or even a moon for that matter, in the heavens, as long as he was the sun,” once said President Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur in the Pacific. Some of what the critics say is undoubtedly true, but much of what they say is wrong. And all this noise seems to have drowned out the general’s tremendous accomplishments. What about his near flawless command during World War II, his trailblazing understanding of modern warfare, his grooming of some of the best commanders this country has ever seen? What about the fact that he is—as much as any other general in the war—responsible for the allied victory? It’s time to give “Dugout Doug” credit for these merits and not just cut him down for his mistakes—real and imagined. It’s time to reconsider Douglas MacArthur.

In a sense, MacArthur is the victim of his own success. If he had been content to receive the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, and retire instead of continuing his career, he would be considered the greatest commander of World War II—and perhaps the greatest military commander in American history.

Instead, after serving as America’s “shogun” in Japan, where he laid the groundwork for Japan’s emergence as a democracy, he led U.S. forces in the Korean War. While MacArthur did author the assault that staved off an early defeat of U.S. forces on the peninsula, he consistently mishandled the Korea fight, underestimating China’s commitment to its North Korean ally and then purposely flouting Washington’s directives to limit the conflict. He fought bitterly over Korea policy with President Harry Truman and was relieved of his command.

MacArthur, who died 50 years ago last month, returned to the United States to great acclaim—he was, after all, one of the nation’s most decorated officers—but his fight with Truman overshadowed what he had accomplished in both of the world wars. He defended his actions in Korea in a series of public congressional hearings, but his testimony was self-referencing, uncertain and ultimately unconvincing. He dabbled in politics (without success) and, after failing to win the 1952 Republican nomination for president, moved with his second wife Jean and their son Arthur—Arthur MacArthur—to New York City, where the family lived in a set of suites at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Jean and her husband would be seen, from time to time, at the opera or taking in a baseball game. But for the most part, they spent their days out of the limelight. MacArthur, once so popular that mothers named their children for him, just faded away.

History has not treated him well. A recent, if informal, Internet poll listed him as America’s worst commander; Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British and whose name is practically synonymous with the word “traitor,” was second. A popular nonfiction television series on the war has Marines on Peleliu, a small coral island where the Allies and the Japanese fought for more than two months over a single airstrip, cursing MacArthur for expending their lives needlessly. In fact, he had nothing to do with the battle.

Many Americans are convinced that MacArthur rehearsed his landing at Leyte, in the Philippines, where he dramatically waded onto the invasion beach through the Pacific’s rolling surf, reboarding his landing craft until the cameras got it just right. That would be Patton—on Sicily. A Pentagon hallway is dedicated to MacArthur, but a recently retired senior army officer who spent 30 years in uniform admitted that he found MacArthur embarrassing to his profession, because of his insubordination and his fight with Truman. “What about Cartwheel?” he was asked, in reference to MacArthur’s hugely successful operation against Japan. He had never heard of it. MacArthur’s detractors relay the story that his son Arthur renounced him and changed his name out of embarrassment. There’s not a shred of evidence to prove it.

History has forgotten all those things. But Douglas MacArthur is remembered, still, for his actions during the Bonus March, where he commanded troops that gassed and trampled World War I veterans peacefully protesting in Washington, D.C, during the Great Depression, and for his evacuation from Corregidor Island, in Manila Bay, which he had fled during the darkest days of the Pacific War. He was a man of enormous courage—yet the term “Dugout Doug,” referring to his time spent bottled up on Corregidor before the evacuation, has followed him through six decades.

***

But MacArthur’s legacy is so much richer than that.

Although he was vain, arrogant, ambitious and overly confident, these traits have been shared by so many of our nation’s military commanders that they seem almost a requirement for effective leadership. More crucially, a close study of World War II shows MacArthur to be the most innovative and brilliant commander of that conflict. His was the first approach to modern warfare that emphasized the need for rapid, light and highly mobile amphibious and air forces operating over vast distances.

Best Practice or Best Strategy: Can New Counterinsurgency Doctrine Win Future Wars?

27 May 2014

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?lng=en&id=180195

If counterinsurgency theory supposedly succeeded in Iraq, why did it fail in Afghanistan? For David Ucko, the answer is clear – theory is no substitute for practical strategies that appreciate the ‘nature and grammar’ of real conflicts. 

By David Ucko for ISN 

Two weeks ago, the United States Army and the Marine Corps updated their counterinsurgency doctrine, last published in November 2006 before the ‘surge’ in Iraq. The publication of the new doctrine has raised fresh questions about the role of counterinsurgency in campaign planning and strategy. Was the 2006 field manual in some way responsible for the subsequent stabilization of Iraq? If counterinsurgency succeeded there, why did it not meet expectations (some might say ‘fail’) in Afghanistan? And will the doctrine published last week allow for better results in campaigns to come? 

Counterinsurgency and strategy 

These questions suggest two fundamental points. First, as the most recent counterinsurgency manual states, ‘counterinsurgency is not a substitute for strategy’. Counterinsurgency theory offers a collection of insights collected from past operations, which, if adapted to local context, can help in the design and execution of a campaign plan. To the degree that counterinsurgency theory worked in Iraq, it was because it was tied to a campaign plan informed by the specific contextual enablers relevant to that operation: the Sons of Iraq, the Anbar Awakening, and splits within the main Shia political structures. Counterinsurgency was then implemented in Afghanistan, but without an appreciation of these contextual enablers, which explains why the same approach produced such different results. Best practice is not best strategy. 

An important reason for the success of counterinsurgency in Iraq was the cooperation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who during the surge recast himself as a national rather than sectarian leader. Of course, the Iraqi leadership was far from perfect. For example, US support for Sunni tribes and former insurgents was not accompanied by the support of the central government, and this has complicated the reintegration process for the Sunni forces that fought against al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Nevertheless, in broad terms, the Iraqi leadership compared favorably to that in Afghanistan, which has proved either unable or unwilling to move against the warlords who have established themselves (often with coalition assistance) in recent years.