New sick man of Europe?

by Radha Kapoor Sharma 

October 22, 2014 

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The recent pronouncement by the managing director of John Lewis, that France is “finished”, that it is a “sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat” country where “nothing works and, worse, nobody cares about it”, provoked a floodtide of ripostes and aggrieved accusations of “French bashing” from across the channel. Though he later apologised, his comments had touched a raw nerve. The French are battling a severe case of collective despondency about the future. This famous French malaise has percolated through all layers of society, dissipating any lingering illusions of grandeur.

The political landscape never looked bleaker. Distant seem the days of leaders with vision and grand ambition, like Charles de Gaulle and even Francois Mitterrand. Instead, France has to make do with uncharismatic President Francois Hollande (the most unpopular president in modern French history, with a popularity rating that touched 13 per cent), who, unsurprisingly, has a reputation for perpetually having one eye on the opinion polls. Hollande’s efforts to project himself as a statesman of international stature and as the US’s principal ally in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East are somewhat undermined by his inability to control his own fractious Socialist Party and rebellious members of government. His image took a further beating because of former companion Valérie Trierweiler’s tell-all memoir, which shows him in poor light.

The main opposition party, the UMP, in severe in-fighting mode, appeared to be on the verge of a split when, like a knight in shining armour, Nicolas Sarkozy rode into the political breach. The announcement of his return to politics brought temporary respite and the party appeared to be rallying around him. But old ambitions die hard and bitter rivalries have resurfaced. In the meantime, Marine Le Pen’s radical, far-right National Front has been making inexorable inroads into both left and right vote banks, wresting two senate seats for the very first time in the latest elections. In an unprecedented development, opinion polls show that each party enjoys the support of approximately 30 per cent of the voters and suggest a repeat of the 2002 presidential election: a second-round runoff between the UMP and National Front candidates. That the far-right is forging ahead is unsurprising, given the economic doldrums France finds itself in.

Labelled by some as the new “sick man of Europe”, France’s economy is certainly ailing. The country’s rate of growth is close to zero (0.3 per cent), unemployment is over 10 per cent, public debt is around 95.1 per cent of the GDP, and the deficit is 4.3 per cent. Disposable income has shrunk and the spectre of joblessness haunts the young, while for the old, the prospect of diminished pensions seems all too real. Strikes seem the order of the day, as one after the other, various groups — air-traffic controllers, notaries, Air France pilots, pharmacists — make desperate attempts to safeguard their benefits. Hollande’s new measures to spur growth are met, for the most part, with the dismissive Gallic shrug and indifference, indicative of his lack of credibility in the eyes of the population.

This economic quagmire has engendered social tensions. In some dreary, high-rise suburbs, unemployment is as high as 40 per cent for the under-25s, who feel marginalised and discriminated against because of their immigrant origins. All it takes is a minor incident for the feeling of despair that prevails in these neighbourhoods to be ignited into violence. In recent months, the spark was provided by the Gaza conflict, exploited by radical groups to fan violence and anti-Semitism. France, home to Europe’s largest populations of both Jews and Muslims, has, of-late, witnessed the rise of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Elucidating Russia's Nascent Narrative on the Baltics

by Samuel Bendett

October 9, 2014

Russia's foreign policy establishment is undertaking a profound review of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This is not necessarily new - some level of internal debate and apportioning of blame has persisted for 24 years now - but recent Russian actions in Ukraine have emboldened those in the Kremlin who wish to "right the wrongs" of the fateful events of 1991.

Starting in January 1991, and pressured by unrest in its constituent republics, the Soviet Union began to break apart. Lithuania is considered by many to have catalyzed that process. Peaceful civilian protests at the Vilnius Radio and Television headquarters and at the city's television transmission tower on Jan. 13, 1991, prompted heavy-handed suppression by the Soviet military. This in turn triggered more resistance by ethnic Lithuanians. All told, the clashes left 14 civilians dead and almost 1,000 more injured.

Russia's post-Soviet narrative

Turning back to the present: Russia has turned up the pressure on on the Baltics, and there is widespread fear throughout the region that Moscow's threatening rhetoric matches the words that preceded its actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Among other moves, Moscow has placed Lithuania's commercial exports on its anti-EU sanctions list.

Against this backdrop, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily this week interviewed author Vladislav Shved, whose book, roughly translated into English as "Lithuania against Russia and Alpha," recounts the fateful events of early 1991.

The sentiments expressed in the interview are a good barometer of how Lithuania's anti-Soviet resistance is seen in Russian policy circles - and what that could mean as Russia contemplates future actions in the post-Soviet space.

Shved recalls the rise of anti-Russian sentiment in Lithuania in the lead-up to 1991, drawing parallels with the attitudes of the Ukrainians who gathered at Maidan Square in Kiev at the end of 2013.

"(Then Soviet premiere) Gorbachev thought that he would be accepted into the European house after he let go of the Baltics, and he turned a blind eye to what was happening there. He was a dilettante and did not know Russia's history. Tsarist Russia was hounded as much (by the West) as today Russia is!" 

The author alludes to the actions of the Soviet elite military detachments sent to pacify Lithuanians in 1991, and he notes ongoing Lithuanian parliamentary proceedings against former Soviet leaders:

"Following instructions from Washington - and Lithuania is accustomed to working with such instructions - today's Lithuanian parliamentarians have decided that is is necessary to finish Russia off. Namely, it is necessary to prove that Russia is the successor of a criminal state. And when 79 former Soviet - and now Russian - citizens are judged and found to be war criminals (for their actions in storming the afore-mentioned TV tower), Lithuania will then be able to claim that Russia is the successor state to a criminal entity and must be held morally and financially responsible."

Shved hints that Lithuanian leaders orchestrated the actions that culminated in the storming of the tower:

THE RISING COST OF GETTING CLOSER TO BEIJING: NEW RUSSIAN-CHINESE ECONOMIC AGREEMENTS

ANALYSES

October 17, 2014 

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The Rising Cost of Getting Closer To Beijing: New Russian-Chinese Economic Agreements

Ewa Fischer, Szymon Kardaś, Witold Rodkiewicz

During the Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang’s visit to Moscow on 13 October, nearly 40 documents were signed, including over 30 economic agreements (in the areas of finance, investment and energy, among others). The economic agreements are another manifestation of Vladimir Putin’s long-term policy of building closer relations with China in order to reduce the Russian economy’s financial and technological dependence on the West, and of diversifying Russia’s energy markets (mainly gas). The introduction of Western sanctions this year has only accelerated this process, and has also worsened Moscow’s bargaining position with Beijing. Contrary to Russian propaganda, the agreements concluded do not constitute a real breakthrough in Russian-Chinese economic relations. For example, the gas agreement indicates that the parties have still not agreed on a number of issues relating to the implementation of the contract signed in Shanghai to supply Russian gas to China (mainly, the two parties cannot agree on the bases for financing the construction of a gas pipeline in Siberia). In turn, China’s preliminary consent to hold talks on gas supplies from Western Siberia to the north-western regions of China, the so-called ‘Western path’ (a project which for Russia is mainly of political significance), is likely to be offset by significant economic concessions from Moscow to Beijing (low prices for Russian gas supplies to China).

Financial and Investment Agreements: A Political Response to Western Sanctions

The financial and investment agreements signed in Moscow have greater political importance as propaganda, and do not constitute a real breakthrough in Russian-Chinese economic relations. On one hand, the agreements were made necessary by the deteriorating financial situation of Russian companies and banks, whose access to Western markets has been restricted; on the other, the agreements are a form of retaliation against strategic European suppliers in response to Western sanctions. One striking example of this is the memorandum signed by the Russian Railways (RZhD) with Chinese Railways on the construction of a high-speed railway line from Moscow to Kazan. Since the Russians are starting cooperation with a Chinese partner from scratch, one may legitimately suspect that Russia’s real intention was to strike a blow at those Western businesses interested in investing in the project who had been operating on the Russian market for years: the German company Siemens (which had invested US$800 million in Russia over the past two years, and whose annual export value reaches US$2 billion) and France’s Alstom, which had been holding talks on implementing and co-financing the project for many months.

These agreements also confirm China’s improved position on the Russian market; it is currently Russia’s largest trading partner, with an annual turnover of US$90 billion. China is interested in gaining access to Russian raw materials, and in particular to energy deposits; it has confirmed its readiness to offer financial support by investing in Russian infrastructure projects, and by selling machines and technologies, taking advantage of the weakness of Russian banks and companies whose access to Western capital markets has been restricted by sanctions.

Chinese credit lines totalling US$4 billion offered by the Export-Import Bank of China to the Russian state-owned banks (Vneshekonombank and Vneshtorgbank), and a loan of US$300 million granted to Rossielkhozbank, will be used for investment projects involving Chinese partners, mainly in the oil/gas and agriculture sectors, as well as for purchasing Chinese goods, services and technology. In addition, an agreement worth US$24.5 billion was signed between the central banks; this will enable the financing of commercial transactions in yuan and roubles instead of US dollars, on condition that they involve a Chinese supplier. Russian state-owned companies will be the main beneficiaries, while other companies will continue to have difficulty in obtaining funds from Chinese banks, which are afraid of the reaction from the West, with whom they have much larger financial interests.

The western model is broken

Pankaj Mishra

14 October 2014 

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The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear. So why does it still preach the pernicious myth that every society must evolve along western lines? 

Anti-American murals adorn the former US embassy in Tehran, Iran. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images

“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions. It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did. Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy.

The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened Niebuhr’s bland fanatics. The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history thesis, and cruder theories about the inevitable march to worldwide prosperity and stability were vended by such Panglosses of globalisation as Thomas Friedman. Arguing that people privileged enough to consume McDonald’s burgers don’t go to war with each other, the New York Times columnist was not alone in mixing old-fangled Eurocentrism with American can-doism, a doctrine that grew from America’s uninterrupted good fortune and unchallenged power in the century before September 2001.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the cold war – thinking through binary oppositions of “free” and “unfree” worlds – and redoubled an old delusion: liberal democracy, conceived by modernisation theorists as the inevitable preference of the beneficiaries of capitalism, could now be implanted by force in recalcitrant societies. Invocations of a new “long struggle” against “Islamofascism” aroused many superannuated cold warriors who missed the ideological certainties of battling communism. Intellectual narcissism survived, and was often deepened by, the realisation that economic power had begun to shift from the west. The Chinese, who had “got capitalism”, were, after all, now “downloading western apps”, according to Niall Ferguson. As late as 2008, Fareed Zakaria declared in his much-cited book, The Post-American World, that “the rise of the rest is a consequence of American ideas and actions” and that “the world is going America’s way”, with countries “becoming more open, market-friendly and democratic”.

A world in flames

One event after another in recent months has cruelly exposed such facile narratives. China, though market-friendly, looks further from democracy than before. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia has entrenched a kleptocratic regime with a messianic belief in Russian supremacism. Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and rightwing extremism define the politics of even such ostensibly democratic countries as India, Israel, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Turkey.

The atrocities of this summer in particular have plunged political and media elites in the west into stunned bewilderment and some truly desperate cliches. The extraordinary hegemonic power of their ideas had helped them escape radical examination when the world could still be presented as going America’s way. But their preferred image of the west – the idealised one in which they sought to remake the rest of the world – has been consistently challenged by many critics, left or right, in the west as well as the east.

Herzen was already warning in the 19th century that “our classic ignorance of the western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatred and bloody collisions will develop from it.” Herzen was sceptical of those liberal “westernisers” who believed that Russia could progress only by diligently emulating western institutions and ideologies. Intimate experience and knowledge of Europe during his long exile there had convinced him that European dominance, arrived at after much fratricidal violence and underpinned by much intellectual deception and self-deception, did not amount to “progress”. Herzen, a believer in cultural pluralism, asked a question that rarely occurs to today’s westernisers: “Why should a nation that has developed in its own way, under completely different conditions from those of the west European states, with different elements in its life, live through the European past, and that, too, when it knows perfectly well what that past leads to?”

Editorial: The Future of Net Assessment

Oct. 20, 2014 

Andy Marshall plans to retire as the director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment on Jan. 2, after four decades as one of the most influential men in US national security.

The survival of the office he created and who will replace him will be critical for DoD. At a time of dramatic change and increasing strategic challenges facing the US military, the practice of net assessment — determining emerging military threats and opportunities through interdisciplinary analysis — is vital. Any organization serious about strategy needs a strong net assessment capacity.

Marshall has apolitically advised defense secretaries for more than 40 years, sifting lessons from military operations and highlighting looming challenges — like the implications of a rising China — decades before they became widely recognized as such.

Marshall’s great strength lies in his unique ability to think across domains, to ask the right questions and drive analysis of unconventional-yet-plausible scenarios. Devoid of ego, he avoided the limelight and his reputation for wisdom and selecting and mentoring top talent earned him the adoration of his military fellows who called him Yoda.

The good news is that one of the men who will determine the future of Marshall’s office is Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, among the talented pool mentored by Marshall. Work’s strategist is Tom Ehrhard, another of the Marshall alumni, as is DoD intel chief Mike Vickers.

Whomever succeeds Marshall must share his intellect and ability to think across military, technological, economic, societal and demographic disciplines. He or she must be nonpartisan, objective and discreet in advising top leaders while growing the ranks of strategic thinkers who will — from within government and without — keep America and its allies well ahead of threats, enemies and competitors.

Chinese Smartphones a Security Threat, says IAF

By Pradip R Sagar 

19th Oct 2014 

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NEW DELHI: China-based leading smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, which recently marked a successful entry into the Indian market, is allegedly a security threat. It has been accused by the Indian Air Force (IAF) of sending user data to remote servers located in China. Simply put, it is a charge that amounts to spying.

In an alert issued to air warriors and their family members, the IAF has claimed that smartphones and note books manufactured by Xiaomi have been found to send users’ private data from these devices to servers based in Beijing. The IAF alert, accessed by The Sunday Standard, has come with ‘medium’ severity rating, which is considered serious according to an IAF official.

The same company is also facing an investigation in Taiwan for alleged cyber security threat last month and the Taiwan government is in the process of taking decision to ban the company.

The IAF note, which was prepared by the intelligence unit based on the inputs from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), has also mentioned cases of Xiaomi mobile phones sending users’ data to its masters in China.

“F-secure, a leading security solution company, recently carried out a test of Xiaomi Redmi 1s, the company’s budget smartphone, and found that the phone was forwarding carrier name, phone number, IMEI (the device identifier) plus numbers from address book and text messages back to Beijing,” the IAF note says.

While mentioning another incident, the IAF note says, “A Hong Kong-based mobile phone user claims to have tested the Redmi Note smartphone and found it was automatically connected to an IP address hosted in China. The data transmitted included photo in media storage and SMSs also.”

Quoting a reader from PhoneArena website who pointed out that the Chinese Government may be involved, the IAF note added, “According to the PhoneArena report, looking up the website of the company owning the IP address in the range 42.62.48.0-42.62.48.255 reveals that the website owner is www.cnnic.cn. CNNIC is the administrative agency responsible for Internet affairs under the Ministry of Information Industry of People’s Republic of China. It is based in the Zhongguancun high tech district of Beijing.”

Therefore, the IAF in its alert to all of its Commands and Squadrons has stated that air warriors and their family members are advised to refrain from using these mobile devices.

When this paper sought the company’s response, a representative from Xiaomi replied that they will respond as soon as relevant information is available. “Your mail has been forwarded to the relevant colleagues for their appropriate handling. We will respond as soon as relevant information is available,” Xiaomi India customer care replied.

A few months back, the office of the Doctorate General of Military Operations of the Indian Army had issued a similar alert of security threat from a Chinese mobile application. The Army went on to say that “every Internet company and telecom operator in China, both foreign and domestic, is held legally liable for all content shared through their platforms.”

The Army has also claimed that the location-sharing feature of applications may be fraudulently used to track and target people, especially those working in defence, scientific, industrial research or other government sector.

The development is a reminder of the scrutiny Chinese technology firms are subject to abroad, as governments become increasingly wary of potential cyber security threats from the world’s second-biggest economy.

New Weapons Spell Death For Drones; The Countermeasure Dance

By COLIN CLARK

October 13, 2014 

AUSA: For years, Predator drones have been able to fly unopposed through most of their missions. If we can do that, you can be sure other countries are working hard to deploy drones to do to us as we have done to them.

Taking the classic dance of measure and countermeasure, strike and counterstrike, the Army and other services have been quietly working on weapons to shoot drones down or disable them.

One of the more interesting efforts is led by SRC, a not-for-profit company formerly affiliated with Syracuse University. SRC has written software tying together their AN/TPQ-50 counter-fire radar, the CREW Duke counter-IED system (an electronic warfare system, really) — both carried on Humvees — and a very small armed drone called Switchblade, built by Aerovironment. I spotted a poster they had at their AUSA booth depicting the Counter-UAS effort and was intrigued.

The system, begun three years ago, underwent testing this August at Black Dart, the military’s little known exercises for counter-drone systems held at the Navy’s Mugu Point, near China Lake. The premise behind SRC’s system is pretty simple. Growlers, F-35s and other aircraft provide the first ring of defense against drones. But if any penetrate through that first ring or if an enemy deploys smaller tactical drones as our military does, then troops need defense against that threat.

The radar picks up the threat. First, the EW suite targets it to break its control or data links and perhaps force it down that way. David Bessey, who leads the program at SRC, says the EW strikes are “most effective.” If that doesn’t work, then a Switchblade is launched to shoot it down. There’s a video demonstrating this at Black Dart, but it hasn’t been approved for public release yet.

“We were able to detect UAVs at a significant distance and basically take them off course, jam ‘em, or take control,” the Army’s deputy program manager for electronic warfare, Michael Ryan, told my colleague Sydney Freedberg at last week’s Association of Old CrowsEW conference. “We’re actually taking ‘em out.”

Boko Haram

Mohammed Aly Sergie, and Toni Johnson

October 7, 2014 

Introduction 

Boko Haram, a diffuse Islamist sect, has attacked Nigeria's police and military, politicians, schools, religious buildings, public institutions, and civilians with increasing regularity since 2009. More than five thousand people have been killed in Boko Haram-related violence, and three hundred thousand have been displaced. Some experts view the group as an armed revolt against government corruption, abusive security forces, and widening regional economic disparity. They argue that Abuja should do more to address the strife between the disaffected Muslim north and the Christian south.

The U.S. Department of State designated Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization in 2013. Boko Haram's brutal campaign includes a suicide attack on a United Nations building in Abuja in 2011, repeated attacks that have killed dozens of students, the burning of villages, ties to regional terror groups, and the abduction of more than two hundred girls in April 2014. The Nigerian government hasn't been able to quell the insurgency, and in May 2014 the United States deployed a small group of military advisers to help find the kidnapped girls. 

The Road to Radicalization 

Boko Haram was created in 2002 in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno, by Islamist cleric Mohammed Yusuf. The group aims to establish a fully Islamic state in Nigeria, including the implementation of criminal sharia courts across the country. Paul Lubeck, a University of California, Santa Cruz professor who researches Muslim societies in Africa, says Yusuf was a trained Salafist (an adherent of a school of thought often associated with jihad), and was strongly influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah, a fourteenth-century legal scholar who preached Islamic fundamentalism and is an important figure for radical groups in the Middle East.

Boko Haram is so diffuse that fighters associated with it don't necessarily follow Salafi doctrine.

The sect calls itself Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati Wal-Jihad, or "people committed to the propagation of the Prophet's teachings and jihad." It is widely known as Boko Haram, which is colloquially translated as "Western education is sin" for the group's rejection of Western concepts such as evolution and the Big Bang theory.

Before 2009, the group did not aim to violently overthrow the government. Yusuf criticized northern Muslims for participating in what he saw as an illegitimate, non-Islamic state and preached a doctrine of withdrawal. But violent clashes between Christians and Muslims and harsh government treatment, including pervasive police brutality, encouraged the group to radicalize. Boko Haram's hundreds of followers, also called Yusuffiya, consist largely of impoverished northern Islamic students and clerics, as well as professionals, many of whom are unemployed.

In July 2009, Boko Haram members refused to follow a motorbike helmet law, leading to heavy-handed police tactics that set off an armed uprising in the northern state of Bauchi and spread into the states of Borno, Yobe, and Kano. The incident was suppressed by the army and left more than eight hundred dead. It also led to the televised execution of Yusuf, as well as the deaths of his father-in-law and other sect members, which human rights advocates consider to be extrajudicial killings. In the aftermath of the 2009 unrest, "an Islamist insurrection under a splintered leadership" emerged, says Lubeck. Boko Haram carried out a number of suicide bombings and assassinations from Maiduguri to Abuja and staged a prison break in Bauchi, freeing more than seven hundred inmates in 2010.

Attacks continued to escalate, and by 2013 some analysts began to see greater influence by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Boko Haram operations. Terrorist acts against civilians, like the murder of sixty-five students while they slept at the agricultural college in Yobe state in September 2013, chainsaw beheadings of truck drivers, and the killing of hundreds on the roads of northern Nigeria raised doubts about the central government's ability to control territory and amplified fears of protracted violence in the country. Violence returned to Abuja in April 2014 with the bombing of a bus station that killed nearly one hundred people, followed by the abduction of more than two hundred schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria.

When America Realizes It Needs the Army, It'll Need It Really Bad

By Daniel Goure

October 17, 2014

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A small Army is smart until it's not

Twice in just the past 15 years, the U.S. government has made the decision to shrink the size of the Army. Under the Bush administration, the argument was that the real threat was from rising near-peer powers and regional adversaries empowered by advanced weapons technologies. Combatting these threats required investment in transformational capabilities that would allow the military to exert control over the air, seas and space. According to this paradigm, there was less need for land forces.

The Obama administration came to office committed to ending the long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it went much farther, predicting in its defense strategy that in the future the nation would not need to conduct a large-scale, protracted stability operation.

Based on these visions of the future, both administrations felt safe deciding to cut the size of the Army.

In both instances, reality trumped theory. Within a year of President Bush taking office, the nation was under attack by an enemy it had failed to correctly anticipate and found itself fighting in a place almost no American could spell correctly. Having successfully ended the U.S. involvement in the Iraqi conflict, less than three years later the Obama Administration has deployed thousands of “advisors” back in that country, and U.S. Apache helicopters are conducting strikes just outside Baghdad attempting to stem the insurgents’ advance.

There is nothing new in this phenomenon. After every major conflict over the past 70 years, the nation’s leaders have decided that they see no future for conflicts and challenges involving a major land component. Over and over again, they have been proven wrong. As a consequence, time after time the Department of Defense has been required to undergo the costly and lengthy consuming process of rebuilding the land forces that were allowed to deteriorate. Too often, the Army has been required to throw inadequately trained and prepared ground forces in insufficient numbers into these foreign conflicts in order to stave off defeat and buy the time necessary to build and deploy a capable Joint Force.

The Army is proposing that we not make the same mistake again. In its newly-released U.S. Army Operating Concept (AOC), Win in a Complex World, the Army makes a strong case for maintaining a robust force, one capable of engaging in the full spectrum of potential operations, serving as the foundation for the Joint Force, deploying regionally in peacetime in order to shape overseas environments and deter conflicts and, finally, prepared and sized to fight and win wars on the ground. Those hostile to a strong U.S. military or fearful of oversees entanglements fail to appreciate that a relatively large, active and engaged Army can reduce the likelihood of conflicts. The AOC argues that the purpose of military power is to achieve favorable political outcomes, not merely to fight wars. An Army strong both quantitatively and qualitatively contributes to this purpose by shaping security environments, reassuring partners, and deterring aggression.

The AOC also stresses the point that the pace of international events, what it calls the “velocity of human interactions,” is increasing. This makes anticipating and responding to challenges and threats more difficult.

490K Soldiers May Not Be Enough: Odierno

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

October 13, 2014

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Army Sec. John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno.

AUSA: 490,000 Army soldiers may not be enough to cope with an increasingly unstable world. Two years ago — before the rise of the Islamic State, before Russia’s stealth invasion of Ukraine, before Ebola erupted in Africa – Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno testified that an army of 490,000 active-duty troops, 350,000 Guard soldiers, and 205,000 reservists would suffice to execute President Obama’s strategy for the post-Afghan War world.

“Back in 2012, we testified to the size of the Army we thought needed — 490,000 [active-duty soldiers],” Odierno told reporters at the Association of the US Army conference today. “Because of sequestration, we came back and said, we’ve done some more work, we can probably do it at 450, but we have some concerns about that and the risk is increasing.”

“The problem is since we made those statements, the world is changing in front of us,” Odierno said. “We’ve seen Russian aggression in eastern Europe, we’ve seen ISIS, we’ve seen some increased instability in other places, so I have some concern whether even going below 490 is the right thing to do.”

However small the force gets, Odierno is increasingly concerned it won’t be ready to fight in a major crisis. Already Army units have separate and unequal training and equipment depending on their missions. “Based on the budget, tiered readiness is a reality, it’s a reality today,” he said. The question now, he said, “it’s how much tiered readiness are you going to have.”

“Beginning in ’16 we’re not going to be able to sustain the level of readiness [we need] if the commitments continue at the level they are now,” Odierno said. ” “I swore that I would never send soldiers into a place not properly prepared, trained, or equipped — and I’ll probably get away with that because I’ll leave at the end of this year, beginning of next year. But I worry for the next chief.”

Added Army Secretary John McHugh, “I don’t think there’s any question the vast, vast majority of members on both sides of the aisle, in both houses [of Congress], understand the challenges…. The challenge for members, as it always is, to try to take that baseline agreement that something needs to be done and develop a pathway by which you can pass it through the House and Senate and get it through a conference committee…. in these very politically complicated times.”

It’s not easy, said McHugh, “I get it. I was a 17-year member of the House Armed Services Committee.” But Congress has to act.

Army’s Message At AUSA: Don’t Cut ‘Foundational Force’

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

October 13, 2014 

AUSA HEADQUARTERS: It is time for the tribes to gather. Monday is the opening of the Association of the US Army’s modestly named Annual Meeting. With roughly 30,000 people likely to attend over three days, it is the largest defense conference of the year despite a post-Iraq decline. This mega-event is also a microcosm of the Army in all its diversity, divisions, and dysfunction.

During the three-day conference in DC, as in the Army all year round, there is so much going on, and so much effort spent just communicating between factions within the Army, that it’s hard for the outsiders — the media, say, or Congress, which writes the checks — to discern any unifying message. But this year, both the Army association and the service’s priesthood, theTraining and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), believe they’ve found a gospel that’s got legs: “foundational force.”

I’ll get to what that means in just a moment.

The bad news about news

In 1998, Ralph Terkowitz, a vice president of The Washington Post Co., got to know Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were looking for backers. Terkowitz remembers paying a visit to the garage where they were working and keeping his car and driver waiting outside while he had a meeting with them about the idea that eventually became Google. An early investment in Google might have transformed the Post's financial condition, which became dire a dozen years later, by which time Google was a multi-billion dollar company. But nothing happened. “We kicked it around,” Terkowitz recalled, but the then-fat Post Co. had other irons in other fires.

Such missteps are not surprising. People living through a time of revolutionary change usually fail to grasp what is going on around them. The American news business would get a C minus or worse from any fair-minded professor evaluating its performance in the first phase of the Digital Age. Big, slow-moving organizations steeped in their traditional ways of doing business could not accurately foresee the next stages of a technological whirlwind.

Obviously, new technologies are radically altering the ways in which we learn, teach, communicate, and are entertained. It is impossible to know today where these upheavals may lead, but where they take us matters profoundly. How the digital revolution plays out over time will be particularly important for journalism, and therefore to the United States, because journalism is the craft that provides the lifeblood of a free, democratic society.

The Founding Fathers knew this. They believed that their experiment in self-governance would require active participation by an informed public, which could only be possible if people had unfettered access to information. James Madison, author of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and of the press, summarized the proposition succinctly: “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” Thomas Jefferson explained to his French friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.” American journalists cherish another of Jefferson's remarks: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

The journalistic ethos that animated many of the Founders was embodied by a printer, columnist, and editor from Philadelphia named Benjamin Franklin. The printing press, which afforded Franklin his livelihood, remained the engine of American democracy for more than two centuries. But then, in the second half of the 20th century, new technologies began to undermine long-established means of sharing information. First television and then the computer and the Internet transformed the way people got their news. Nonetheless, even at the end of the century, the business of providing news and analysis was still a profitable enough undertaking that it could support large organizations of professional reporters and editors in print and broadcast media.

Now, however, in the first years of the 21st century, accelerating technological transformation has undermined the business models that kept American news media afloat, raising the possibility that the great institutions on which we have depended for news of the world around us may not survive.

Pulse news aggregator app.

source: alphonsolabs.com

These are painful words to write for someone who spent 50 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. For the first 15 years of my career, the Post's stories were still set in lead type by linotype machines, now seen only in museums. We first began writing on computers in the late 1970s, which seemed like an unequivocally good thing until the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. Then, gradually, the ground began to shift beneath us. By the time I retired earlier this year, the Graham family had sold thePost to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, for $250 million, a small fraction of its worth just a few years before. Donald Graham, the chief executive at the time, admitted that he did not know how to save the newspaper.

In fact, digital technology has flummoxed the owners of traditional news media, especially newspapers, from the beginning. For example, in 1983, in the early years of computerized production of newspapers when almost no one knew what was coming, The New York Times almost committed digital suicide. The Times decided it only needed to retain the rights to the electronic versions of its stories for 24 hours after publication. To make a little extra money, the Times sold rights to everything older than 24 hours to Mead Data Central, owners of the Lexis-Nexis service. Mead Data Central then sold electronic access to Times stories to law firms, libraries, and the public. By the early 1990s, as the Internet was becoming functional and popular, this arrangement was a big and growing problem: newspapers, including the Times, were planning “online,” computerized editions, but the Times had sold control of its own product to Mead Data.

'Knife Fights': 9 lessons John Nagl has learned from waging modern war

BY THOMAS E. RICKS

OCTOBER 16, 2014 

By John Nagl

Best Defense guest columnist

1. Invading Iraq in 2003 was a mistake. Leaving Iraq in 2011 was a mistake. Not arming the Syrian rebels in 2012 was a mistake. The combination of the three mistakes has gotten us to the mess we're in today.

2. Because of mistakes made by the last two administrations and the trends identified below, the Middle East will remain at war for at least a generation.

3. Containing ISIS will require thousands of American boots on the ground for at least a generation.

4. Air strikes can halt ISIS's forward progress but not root them out of territory they already possess.

5. American conventional military superiority will drive our opponents to irregular warfare: insurgency and terrorism.

6. In conventional war, identifying your enemy is comparatively easy, but killing him is hard. In irregular warfare, the converse is true: finding is hard, but killing or capturing is easy.

7. In conventional war, politics stops until the war is over. In irregular warfare, politics and economics continue throughout the war, and are in fact key weapons of war. This combined political/economic/military challenge is what makes irregular warfare "the graduate level of war."

8. In conventional war, the civilian population is essentially an obstacle to progress. In irregular war, winning the support or at least the acquiescence of the civilian population is key to winning the war; their safety and long-term support are essential to the success of whichever side wins.

9. For a number of reasons including American conventional military superiority and the existence of nuclear weapons, conventional war has been on the decline since the 20th century. That's the good news. The bad news is that irregular warfare has been a growing challenge over the past two centuries, and the information revolution, demographics, and resource scarcity make it likely to be the kind of war the United States is most likely to face for the rest of this century. It's hard, and it's not going to go away, so we'd better get better at it if we want to win.

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/10/16/knife_fights_9_lessons_john_nagl_has_learned_from_waging_modern_war

Climate Change and National Security, Properly Defined

Paul R. Pillar

October 17, 2014

The Department of Defense recently released a "Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap" that relates the department's business to global warming and the accompanying climatic changes. The document is welcome in a couple of respects beyond assuring us that the department is properly tending to the various respects in which climate change is affecting its own operations and missions. First, it is a straightforward, unquestioning recognition of the reality and problem of climate change, by the largest executive branch department in the U.S. government. Second, by linking the problem to national security it may help to get the attention of at least some people who have no respect for tree huggers but get a rise out of any use of the U.S. military.

The document relates climate change to national security in two basic ways, as stated in the covering statement by Secretary of Defense Hagel. One is that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that can exacerbate problems that are already well known and which can lead to situations in which overseas involvement of the U.S. military may become an issue. Droughts and other climate-related resource scarcity, for example, may intensify conflicts over resources. The other way, which is what most of the document is about, is that climate change has numerous impacts on the U.S. military's operations, training, and facilities. The heavy concentration of military installations in Virginia's Hampton Roads region, for example, will mean a high impact on the military of the danger that low-lying region faces as one of the U.S. coastal areas most affected by rising sea levels.

These all are important matters, and it is appropriate for the Department of Defense to focus upon them. A document such as this carries the hazard, however, of suggesting that climate change is a national security issue only insofar as as it impinges on matters most traditionally considered to involve national security, especially matters involving the military. That is an artificially narrow conception of national security, consistent perhaps with some ideas of the past but not reflecting the fundamental meaning of national security.

Central to that meaning is the physical well-being of the nation's citizens. That well-being can be endangered by human action either directly, as with an invasion force or a terrorist group bombing people in the United States, or indirectly, as with the multiple physical effects of global warming. Increasing flooding endangers the security of the citizens of Hampton Roads whether there were any military bases in their neighborhood or not.

The security implications of climate change for Americans entail several causal paths, some more direct than others. They include the risk of being killed by extreme weather events, the impairment of food supplies, the loss of forest resources through northward migration of pests, and much else. But the implications do not even have to depend on these sorts of secondary events. The sheer heating up of the homeland matters, too. The health and attractiveness of the United States, and ultimately its strength, depend greatly on the country's fortunate geographic and climatological circumstances. Any impairment of those circumstances is in a real sense a loss of security, too.

As long as we remember those things then it is good to see a document such as the DoD roadmap, which might help to engage some people who have a narrower concept of national security. We need all the help on this we can get, given the continued prominence of American political figures whose views on climate change sound more in tune with the days when Earth was thought to be flat.

PUZZLES IN THE CLOSET

 How did Modi manage to do so much in the US on a fast?

DIPLOMACY: K.P. Nayar

Three weeks after Narendra Modi left stateside, an enduring puzzle for the Americans continues to be his Navratri fast. It is now known in very limited, but privileged, circles that agencies of the government of the United States of America went to extraordinary lengths to ascertain if the prime minister, in the privacy of his hotel suite, was consuming anything other than warm water during his stay in Manhattan.

In Washington, it was easier for these agencies to go through this exercise than in New York. In the national capital, the prime minister was a guest of their president and he stayed in the premises controlled by them: Blair House, where the American president’s very special guests are put up, is an extension of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the opposite side of the main presidential mansion, and literally in the shadow of the executive offices of the United States of America’s head of state.

US government agencies have considerable experience in this kind of investigative work, and they have done it as often as needed for several decades, sparing only leaders whom they consider to be of little consequence. Ten years ago, I was alerted to an advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association while idly watching a programme on NBC News at my home in Washington. The advertisement was overtly put in by the US Central Intelligence Agency, which has been otherwise periodically advertising in publications as prestigious as The Economist, seeking analysts with proficiency in Arabic, and separately, candidates familiar with South Asia — to be read in the current geostrategic context primarily as Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The JAMA advertisement, however, was curiously different. It sought “medical analysts (who will) assess the physical health of foreign leaders”. When Manmohan Singh went to Washington only a few months after the CIA accelerated its process of recruiting medical analysts, he stayed at Blair House on White House property.

Three conclusions, two of them overlapping, are plausible on why Singh’s stay in Blair House was agreed to. One is that India’s external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, was unaware then that the CIA was stepping up its efforts to assess the physical health of foreign leaders. The second conclusion is that RAW knew that the CIA was woefully short of medical analysts at that time and took the view that there was no national security risk in Singh’s occupancy of Blair House. A third opinion is that Singh’s health was good enough then to withstand scrutiny by anyone and the country had little to lose by exposure, covert or otherwise.

Since I had a fair opinion of RAW then, before it was dented by turmoil, favouritism and a culture of godfathers and patronage in subsequent years, the second conclusion seemed plausible. I could reasonably append the third opinion to that if only because it is public knowledge that the United Progressive Alliance prime minister’s health deteriorated in subsequent years in a way that he could not be exposed to covert scrutiny of his condition by foreign agencies. Whatever may be the basis of this conundrum, the indisputable fact is that on subsequent visits — and there were some after July 2005 — the prime minister declined successive White House entreaties to stay in Blair House. Singh always chose a suite in the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, which was not far from Blair House, but on a floor that was regularly being used by the Indian embassy for visiting ministers, where it had greater control over its management, structure and operations.

HATE-INDIA ICON HAS A CHANGE OF HEART

Rajesh Singh

22 October 2014 

Henry Kissinger was not only the world’s most famous diplomat-politician in the 1970s but also the most strident voice against India, its leaders and its people. But his new book shows he has mellowed greatly

Few people could match Henry Kissinger in his visceral dislike, even hatred, for India, in the seventies. Fewer still would be less deserving of the Nobel Peace prize which he got in 1973, barely two years after he, along with then US President Richard Nixon, backed Pakistan to the hilt as it went about massacring several thousand citizens in East Pakistan in the course of the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Yet, for many, all that is in the distant past. On his part, the former US National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State to two Presidents, appears to have undergone a massive change of heart. He has begun to speak more kindly of India and to even acknowledge its importance in the global forum. The amusing twist has partly to do with the changed international political-economic-strategic environment. While Mr Kissinger is a much chastened man, India cannot easily forget the shabby and insulting treatment it received from him.

But, if moving forward is the mantra that drives international relations, we might as well keep aside for the moment his 1970s’ disgraceful conduct — so tellingly and completely exposed in Gary J Bass’s The Blood Telegram, in which the author calls the massacre by Pakistani troops “genocide” — and focus on Mr Kissinger’s new trajectory laid down in detail in his latest book, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History. From the Indian perspective, his chapter titled, ‘The Multiplicity of Asia’, is especially interesting, because, inter alia, it deals with the emergence of India. He admits, “India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.” This is indeed a mouthful of praise, and Mr Kissinger must have gone through turbulent moments to acknowledge a country whose people and leadership he had scoffed and scorned at.

There is more of the about-turn. He is all praise for India’s management of multi-culturalism. He notes with approval, “India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its minorities and a fostering of common Indian principles — including democracy and nationalism — transcending communal differences.” One wonders if this is the same man and the same mind which existed in the 1970s.

The hatchet-man of the discredited Nixon goes even further. In a reference to the change in Government in New Delhi, he almost grovels, “With a firm mandate and charismatic leadership, the administration of Narendra Modi may consider itself in a position to chart new directions on historic issues like the conflict with Pakistan or the relationship with China.” This is an interesting observation for the reason that the United States had during the Nixon-Kissinger era cultivated both China and Pakistan as anti-India platforms. While the latter played a more than willing role to realise the US’s nefarious motives, China had, it must be said, restrained itself from directly getting involved in the 1971 conflict — though it had made it clear its sympathies lay with Pakistan.

That Mr Kissinger had done his best to provoke China in the early seventies to make things difficult for India during the latter’s military conflict with Pakistan is only too well known. But the Nixon acolyte has never admitted as much. One of the reasons why Nixon had made his famous secret trip to China — plotted and backed by Mr Kissinger — in 1972 was to win over the Asian power to the US’s side, and pit it against India. Even during the 1971 war, both Nixon and Mr Kissinger expressed hope in private that China would do “something” along the Indian border which would rattle New Delhi and contain its belligerence towards Pakistan as the crisis began to snowball out of hand.

Incidentally, both Nixon and Mr Kissinger crowed for years over the ‘path-breaking’ China trip and the US President’s meeting with senior Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Mr Kissinger has yet to come out of that reverie (he has devoted a lot to that in his earlier book, On China). But the fact is that despite that ‘bold’ visit, China and the US are rivals today, and on most issues, at loggerheads. They are neither friends nor allies. In other words, the Nixon visit turned out to be hardly a milestone. And, by a twist of fate which Mr Kissinger is witness to, India and the US have become friends; while China, whom he has been promoting across the world, and Pakistan, for whom he has had such affection, share an uneasy and distrustful relationship with Washington, DC.