Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprisings

By Jon B. Alterman

FEB 5, 2015 

The Arab uprisings of 2011 created unexpected opportunities for religious radicals. Although many inside and outside the region initially saw the uprisings as liberal triumphs, illiberal forces have benefitted disproportionately. In Tunisia, formally marginalized salafi-jihadi groups appealed for mainstream support, and in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood triumphed in elections. Even in Saudi Arabia, not known for either lively politics or for political entrepreneurship, a surprising array of forces praised the rise of “Islamic democracy” under a Muslim Brotherhood banner.

Yet, at the same time, the Arab Spring reinforced regional governments’ advantages. The chaos engulfing parts of the region has convinced some citizens that they were better off with the governments they had, and many governments successfully employed old and new tools of repression to reinforce the status quo.

In the Middle East, conflicts that many thought were coming to an end will continue, as will the dynamism and innovation that have emerged among radical and opposition groups. To face the current threats, governments will need to use many of their existing tools skillfully, but they will also need to judge what tools will no longer work, and what new tools they have at their disposal. The stakes could not be higher. 

Download PDF file of "Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprisings"

Newsflash: Jordan's ISIS War Began 3 Years Ago

Andrew J. Bowen

February 8, 2015 

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The savage murder of a Jordanian Air Force pilot, which was videotaped and released this week while King Abdullah was visiting Washington, further underscored the increasing security challenges Amman faces both to the north and west of its borders. With mounting budget pressures, as well as a large Syrian refugee community within his borders, the King has a number of friends, a few tacit acquaintances and a growing number of enemies.

In terms of long-standing friends, King Abdullah’s visit to Washington last week, the second in less than a year, highlights the growing synergies between Washington and Amman on regional security and the importance of this strategic relationship to the Kingdom. Washington has given Jordan substantial military and security assistance since 2011 to deal with both the massive flow of Syrian refugees and the militant groups operating in Syria and in Iraq. In addition to being a refuge for a number of Syrian army defectors, Amman has also served as one of main arms and military assistance points for the Free Syrian Army and a smaller staging and training ground for Washington’s largely symbolic support for the “vetted” Syrian armed opposition.

The Gulf states, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have been critical in keeping Jordan’s finances out of the red and providing humanitarian assistance to Jordan’s large Syrian refugee community. The late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia went so far as to suggest that Jordan join the GCC. The Israeli leadership also recognizes the strategic importance of the Hashemite monarchy, and, ironically, Jordan is one of the few issues on which both President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu find common ground.

In terms of tacit acquaintances, President Assad is arguably less of an enemy than one might expect. For over a year after the protests erupted in Syria, at a time when it was unclear whether Assad would be toppled or not, the King restrained his support for the Anti-Assad forces, despite the anti-regime sentiments of the growing number of Syrian refugees pouring into his country.

Don't Arm Ukraine

By JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER

FEB. 8, 2015

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The Ukraine crisis is almost a year old and Russia is winning. The separatists in eastern Ukraine are gaining ground and Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, shows no signs of backing down in the face of Western economic sanctions.

Unsurprisingly, a growing chorus of voices in the United States is calling for arming Ukraine. A recent report from three leading American think tanks endorses sending Kiev advanced weaponry, and the White House’s nominee for secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, said last week to the Senate armed services committee, “I very much incline in that direction.”

They are wrong. Going down that road would be a huge mistake for the United States, NATO and Ukraine itself. Sending weapons to Ukraine will not rescue its army and will instead lead to an escalation in the fighting. Such a step is especially dangerous because Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and is seeking to defend a vital strategic interest.

There is no question that Ukraine’s military is badly outgunned by the separatists, who have Russian troops and weapons on their side. Because the balance of power decisively favors Moscow, Washington would have to send large amounts of equipment for Ukraine’s army to have a fighting chance.

But the conflict will not end there. Russia would counter-escalate, taking away any temporary benefit Kiev might get from American arms. The authors of the think tank study concede this, noting that “even with enormous support from the West, the Ukrainian Army will not be able to defeat a determined attack by the Russian military.” In short, the United States cannot win an arms race with Russia over Ukraine and thereby ensure Russia’s defeat on the battlefield.

Proponents of arming Ukraine have a second line of argument. The key to success, they maintain, is not to defeat Russia militarily, but to raise the costs of fighting to the point where Mr. Putin will cave. The pain will supposedly compel Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine and allow it to join the European Union and NATO and become an ally of the West.

WHY DID BRITAIN JOIN EU? NEW INSIGHT FROM ECONOMIC HISTORY – ANALYSIS

By Nauro F. Campos and Fabrizio Coricelli

FEBRUARY 7, 2015

Britain eschewed EU membership in the late 1950s but changed its mind in the early 1960s, only to be rebuffed by Charles de Gaulle. Membership came only in the early 1970s. This column argues that, among others, Britain joined the EU as a way to avoid its economic decline. The UK’s per capita GDP relative to the EU founding members’ declined steadily from 1945 to 1972. However, it was relatively stable between 1973 and 2010. This suggests substantial benefits from EU membership especially considering that, by sponsoring an overpowered integration model, Britain joined too late, at a bad moment in time, and at an avoidably larger cost.

Prime Minister Cameron is determined to change the relationship between the UK and the EU. If the Conservative party wins the May 2015 general election, he promised he will renegotiate membership terms and offer an ‘in or out’ referendum by the end of 2017 (Copsey and Naughton 2014). Life after the EU is a real option for the UK and an unfamiliar one for the EU, considering that no member has ever left. Economic history can throw valuable new light on the current re-examination of the rationale for membership.

This column argues that a fundamental yet relatively unappreciated feature of the relationship between Britain and the EU is a structural break.[1] The ratio of UK’s per capita GDP to the EU founding members’ declined steadily from 1945 until 1972 but was relatively stable between 1973 and 2010. Such prominent structural break (and to the best of our knowledge one not previously detected and analysed) suggests substantial benefits from EU membership especially considering that, by sponsoring an overpowered integration model, Britain joined too late, at a bad moment in time, and at an avoidably larger cost.

Lost wars

The Navy’s Hidden Crisis It’s too small—and getting smaller.

By ROBERT C. O'BRIEN 

February 05, 2015

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Not many Americans understand how many Army divisions we have, the percentage breakdown of the Air Force’s fighter/bomber mix, or the three “Triad” legs of our strategic nuclear force. But just about everyone understands the Navy’s “ship count” and what it means for a president to send a carrier battle group into a crisis zone. And so, amid a more complicated and complex discussion this week over the sequestration’s impact, it didn’t go unnoticed Wednesday when Ashton Carter, President Obama’s defense secretary nominee, told Congress that the aircraft carrier fleet would likely continue to shrink.

It was only the latest revelation, though, about how deeply and how quickly the Navy’s ambitions are shrinking—even in an age when our adversaries are growing their own navies in oceans around the world. Ever since Theodore Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet,” the U.S. Navy has been how the country’s leaders have projected power on the world stage—but it’s now clear from years of cutbacks, sequestration, and an aging fleet that we’re going to be doing less of that power projection in the years ahead.

What’s not clear, though, is that “less” is the right answer—and that’s a topic that going’s to be front and center in the debates over the nation’s military entering the 2016 presidential race. There will be a dozen voices on the GOP side alone—each struggling to connect with their own “peace-through-strength” message, grabbing the mantle of Ronald Reagan in some capacity or another. When talk in the debates and on the campaign trail turns to defense and national security issues, candidates will need a short hand message to communicate seriousness on the subject. It is easy to lose audiences here—to dive too deep into defense minutia and acronyms as candidates struggle to communicate their clear and steady commitment to American exceptionalism and a strong defense. After having been involved in the last three presidential campaigns, I can say with certainty that the shortcut to connecting with voters on national security is via a discussion of the strength of the United States Navy. The American voter knows that we cannot protect the seas and our interests overseas unless we have ships that can fight and deliver Marines and carrier-based fighter jets to the world’s hot spots.

This chart shows all of the submarines currently in the Russian Navy

JEREMY BENDER

FEB 6, 2015

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Borei-class submarine Yuri Dolgorukiy during sea trials.

Russia's submarine fleet is one of the most capable in the world, perhaps second only to that of the United States.

The submarine fleet is mostly a holdover from the days of the Cold War. Nuclear-armed Soviet and US submarines would pursue each other across the world's oceans and act as second-strike options in the event of all-out nuclear war.

Although Russia's submarine fleet had aged and shrunk since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russian President Vladimir Putin has grand plans to modernize the fleet through the purchase of additional submarines coupled along the development and acquisition of new models.

Below is an infographic by St. Petersburg, Russia-based designer Anton Egorov depicting the submarines that Russia currently operates, along with their maximum depth:

Russia's submarine fleet is divided into three broad categories: diesel-electric powered submarines, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and nuclear-powered attack submarines. Each variation has its own unique purpose and is further sub-divided into varying models.

Russia's diesel-electric submarine fleet is the least technologically advanced segment of the fleet and also the cheapest to acquire and maintain. These submarines, which are smaller and slower and have a shorter range than their nuclear counterparts, are limited in their total operational depth and are used for attacking surface ships and merchant vessels.

Russia plans on adding an additional six Kilo-class submarines to the Black Sea Fleet, along with 14 to 18 diesel-electric submarines similar to Lada-class subs over the next fifteen years.

Nuclear-powered ballistic subs form the nuclear deterrent backbone of the Russian fleet. These subs are faster than diesel-electric submarines, larger, and can dive to significantly deeper depths. These subs carry ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’

Owen Bowcott

6 February 2015

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Regulations governing access to intercepted information obtained by NSA breached human rights laws, according to Investigatory Powers Tribunal 

 

The regime that governs the sharing between Britain and the US of electronic communications intercepted in bulk was unlawful until last year, a secretive UK tribunal has ruled.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) declared on Friday that regulations covering access by Britain’s GCHQ to emails and phone records intercepted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) breached human rights law.

Advocacy groups said the decision raised questions about the legality of intelligence-sharing operations between the UK and the US. The ruling appears to suggest that aspects of the operations were illegal for at least seven years – between 2007, when the Prism intercept programme was introduced, and 2014.

The critical judgment marks the first time since the IPT was established in 2000 that it has upheld a complaint relating to any of the UK’s intelligence agencies. It said that the government’s regulations were illegal because the public were unaware of safeguards that were in place. Details of those safeguards were only revealed during the legal challenge at the IPT.

An “order” posted on the IPT’s website early on Friday declared: “The regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK, which have been obtained by US authorities … contravened Articles 8 or 10” of the European convention on human rights.

Article 8 relates to the right to private and family life; article 10 refers to freedom of expression.

Shadow Boxing With the Islamic State in Central Asia

BY REID STANDISH

FEBRUARY 6

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When it comes to the Islamic State’s potential threat to Central Asia, no one quite seems to be able to tell the difference between reality and speculation.

On Monday, Uzbekistan’s domestic intelligence agency announced that it had intercepted communications indicating that the militants were planning to carry out terrorist attacks in the country in the spring. The same day, Kyrgyzstan’s Interior Ministry said it had uncovered 83 cases of recruiters trying to bring fighters to Syria.

Fighters returning from Syria have not carried out any attacks in Central Asia and apart from such statements from state security organs, there is little reliable information to be had on the inroads the Islamic State has made in the region. The question of how many Central Asian citizens have joined up with the Islamic State or have professed jihadist sympathies has now become a volatile political issue. Hyping the threat could provide justification for the region’s strongmen to further consolidate power. At the same time, terror experts agree that Central Asia has become a recruitment hub for the militant group.

“The estimates and figures from Central Asian governments are all highly politicized and speculative,” says John Heathershaw, a Central Asia expert at the University of Exeter. “The simple truth is that no one has an accurate figure.”

In October 2014, Rafal Rohozinski, a terrorism expert and CEO of SecDev, a Canadian think tank, told a conference in Kazakhstan that approximately 4,000 Central Asians are fighting with the Islamic State. The figure was picked up and widely circulated in the Russian and Central Asian media. That estimate, according to Rohozinski, was based on an extensive reading of jihadist chat forums and social media.

Interpreting the National Security Strategy

Thomas Wright

February 6, 2015

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The Obama administration released its second and final National Security Strategy (NSS) today. It highlights America’s strong recovery from the financial crisis and the importance of leading in a challenged world. This document is always difficult to produce—it has to go through an inter-agency process and it’s not always possible to call the world as the president privately sees it. It’s unfair to expect George Kennan. With that caveat, there is much that can be gleaned from it.

The key to understanding the NSS is to recognize the context in which it appears. Foreign policy analysts are currently split into two camps with regards to how bad the world situation actually is. The first sees the breakdown of the international order due to the return of geopolitics and the weakening of the state in the Middle East. President Vladimir Putin’s aggression fundamentally challenges European security, which has been a core U.S. interest since World War II. The regional order in the Middle East is unraveling with catastrophic consequences. And in Asia, China’s rise poses major challenges.

The second camp believes that the United States faces difficult threats and challenges, but it rejects the notion that the return of geopolitics is a game changer or that the regional order in the Middle East is collapsing. For them, the United States must deal with each individual crisis—whether it is Russian aggression or the rise of ISIL—but it is important not to exaggerate their larger significance. As National Security Advisor Susan Rice said in her speech at Brookings to launch the document, the United States cannot "be buffeted by alarmism in nearly instantaneous news cycle.” It is vital not to lose sight of other challenges which are even more important, including climate change and non-proliferation.

In the National Security Strategy, President Obama firmly located himself in the second camp, and the document provides a coherent strategy for this worldview. How it deals with Russia is probably the most telling signal. The document condemns Russian aggression (a sharp contrast from the engagement of the 2010 strategy), but there is no special section on Russia. Russia is not listed in the top eight strategic risks to U.S. interests. Mention is made in that list of the security of allies, but this notably excludes the war in Ukraine, which has so far claimed over 5,000 lives and could get much worse.

Hacking the Hackers: NSA and UKUSA Allies Monitor Hacktivists to See Which Systems They Are Penetrating

Glenn Greenwald

February 5, 2015

The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, andaggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.

In some cases, the surveillance agencies are obtaining the content of emails by monitoring hackers as they breach email accounts, often without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches. “Hackers are stealing the emails of some of our targets… by collecting the hackers’ ‘take,’ we … get access to the emails themselves,” reads one top secret 2010 National Security Agency document.

These and other revelations about the intelligence agencies’ reliance on hackers are contained in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents—which come from the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters agency and NSA—shed new light on the various means used by intelligence agencies to exploit hackers’ successes and learn from their skills, while also raising questions about whether governments have overstated the threat posed by some hackers.

By looking out for hacking conducted “both by state-sponsored and freelance hackers” and riding on the coattails of hackers, Western intelligence agencies have gathered what they regard as valuable content:

Recently, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and Menwith Hill Station (MHS) discovered and began exploiting a target-rich data set being stolen by hackers. The hackers’ sophisticated email-stealing intrusion set is known as INTOLERANT. Of the traffic observed, nearly half contains category hits because the attackers are targeting email accounts of interest to the Intelligence Community. Although a relatively new data source, [Target Offices of Primary Interest] have already written multiple reports based on INTOLERANT collect.

U.S. SOCIAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Stephen Van Evera

February 9, 2015

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Editor’s Note: Welcome to our new series “The Schoolhouse”. The aim of this series is to explore and debate the state of advanced graduate education in international affairs. We aim to move beyond the often-repetitive and tiresome debates about the usefulness of scholarship to policy. We believe there are deeper issues at stake. Please join us and chime in in the comments section or with a submission.

In the eloquent essay that kicked off “The Schoolhouse” series, my colleague Frank Gavin pointed to a number of issues that affect and infect graduate education in international affairs, particularly at the PhD level. Many of these problems are not exclusive to international affairs, security studies, and related disciplines and fields but rather more broadly afflict the social sciences in American universities. Therefore, to solve the problems of our own turf, we need to have a serious conversation about improving the whole U.S. social science complex. It is toward that end that I propose four reforms. U.S. universities should:

Re-organize the social sciences to create multidisciplinary academic departments that are focused on problems. For example, let’s create new departments of international politics, history, and policy.

Introduce the teaching of professional ethics into social science PhD training.

Reward scholarship that addresses the concerns of the wider world (i.e., “policy relevant scholarship”) in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.

Increase the role of policy practitioners in the social sciences, especially in schools of international affairs and public policy.

These reforms will broadly benefit social science but will especially benefit international relations/security studies (IR/security). They will help to focus social science scholarship on more important questions and to improve the quality of social science research.

Why We Should Worry About Commercially-Available Drones

Robert Beckhusen

February 5, 2015

Why we should worry about domestic drones and how to bring them down

Feb 4 (Reuters) - Let’s imagine the worst-case scenarioinvolving domestic drones. No, not the tiny quadcopter whose operator mistakenly crashed it on the south lawn of the White House. Let’s try something scarier.

Take several drones, and equip each with a few pounds of explosives, shrapnel and ball bearings. Then send them on a one-way kamikaze mission. As the technology advances, network the drones so they travel in a group and explode at the same time.

The question is: How do you stop them?

It might sound farfetched. But scenarios like this are now worrying officials in the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. A drone attack by terrorists hasn’t happened - yet. But it’s possible. German police arrested several far-right extremists who allegedly planned attacks with a drone in 2013.Like the car bomb, the drone bomb could become a cheap, ubiquitous and anonymous way to deliver explosives. The machines can hop over fences, bypass checkpoints and move too fast for a security team to react to. What if the target is a congressman, general or a president?

The good news is that drones are easily jammed. Almost all rely on a radio link to a ground controller, which makes them vulnerable to electronic interference. With an accurate enough sensor, anyone can search and pinpoint drones nearby, tune their jammer to the same frequency and overwhelm the vehicle with electronic “noise.”

Most domestic drones are highly vulnerable to this attack. The average consumer drones available in a hobby shop typically communicate using a frequency of 2.4 or 5.8 gigahertz, or some combination of both if they carry wireless video cameras.

New UK Home Office Document Indicates GCHQ Can Bypass Encryption Protections

Alan Travis

February 7, 2015

Security services capable of bypassing encryption, draft code reveals

Britain’s security services have acknowledged they have the worldwide capability to bypass the growing use of encryption by internet companies by attacking the computers themselves.

The Home Office release of the innocuously sounding “draft equipment interference code of practice” on Friday put into the public domain the rules and safeguards surrounding the use of computer hacking outside the UK by the security services for the first time.

The publication of the draft code follows David Cameron’s speech last month in which he pledged to break into encryption and ensure there was no “safe space” for terrorists or serious criminals which could not be monitored online by the security services with a ministerial warrant, effectively spelling out how it might be done. 

Privacy campaigners said the powers outlined in the draft guidance detail the powers of intelligence services to sweep up content of a computer or smartphone, listen to their phonecalls, track their locations or even switch on the microphones or cameras on mobile phones. The last would allow them to record conversations near the phone or laptop and snap pictures of anyone nearby.

The code spells this out by saying the new rules give the security services the power to use hacked computers to “enable and facilitate surveillance activity”.

Eric King of Privacy International, said: “They hack their way, remove and substitute your hardware and software and enable intelligence collection by turning on your webcams and mice and shipping the data back to GCHQ at Cheltenham.”

The security minister, James Brokenshire, said the draft code, which is subject to a six-week consultation ending on 20 March, details the safeguards applied to different surveillance techniques, including “computer network exploitation” to identify, track and disrupt the most sophisticated targets.

The UK, the Cyber Revolution, and the Need for Cyber Intelligence

February 6, 2015

Understanding digital intelligence from a British perspective

The Snowden revelations revealed much that was never intended to be public. But to understand them they must be seen in their context, of a dynamic interaction over the last few years between the demand for intelligence on the threats to society and the potential supply of relevant intelligence from digital sources. All intelligence communities, large and small, and including those hostile to our interests, have been facing this set of challenges and opportunities.

First, the challenge of meeting insistent demands for secret intelligence. For the UK this is, for example, to counter cyber security threats and provide actionable intelligence about the identities, associations, location, movements, financing and intentions of terrorists, especially after 9/11, as well as dictators, , insurgents, and cyber-, narco- and other criminal gangs. The threats such people represent are real and – in many respects – getting worse and spreading.

These demands for intelligence have coincided with a digital revolution in the way we communicate and store information. The internet is a transformative technology, but is only viable because our personal information can be harvested by the private sector, monetized and used for marketing. So the digital age is able to supply intelligence about people, for example by accessing digital communications, social media and digital databases of personal information. And for intelligence communities, new methods of supply call forth new demands from the police and security authorities that could not have been met before the digital age. And their insistent demands for intelligence to keep us safe call forth ever more ingenious ways of extracting intelligence from digital sources.

For the democracies (but not for others such as the Russians and Chinese), there is an essential third force in operation: applying the safeguards needed to ensure ethical behaviour in accordance with modern views of human rights, including respect for personal privacy. For the UK, the legal framework for GCHQ is given in: 

The Intelligence Services Act 1994 (Article 3 confers on GCHQ the functions of intelligence-gathering and information assurance with the sole purposes of national security, prevention and detection of serious crime and safeguarding the economic well-being of the UK from actions of persons overseas; Article 4 relates to obtaining and disclosing information). 

Utah Officials Think Surge in Cyber Attacks Due to Presence of NSA Utah Data Center

February 7, 2015

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah state officials have seen what they describe as a sharp uptick in attempts to hack into state computers in the last two years, and they think it related to the NSA data center south of Salt Lake City.

The increase began in early 2013 as international attention focused on the NSA’s $1.7 billion warehouse to store massive amounts of information gathered secretly from phone calls and emails.

"In the cyber world, that’s a big deal," Utah Public Safety Commissioner Keith Squires told a state legislative committee this week.

While most of the attempts are likely innocuous, cyber experts say it is possible low-level hackers, “hactivists” unhappy with the NSA’s tactics, and some foreign criminal groups might erroneously think the state systems are linked to the NSA.

"Maybe these hackers are thinking: ‘If we can attack state systems, we can get info that NSA isn’t releasing," said Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s, graduate cybersecurity program.

The state tracks the attempts with an automated system it purchased after a breach of health care information in 2012. The system detects, stops and counts the attempts to get into the computers, Squires said.

With that new equipment in place in January 2013, the state was seeing an average of 50,000 a day with spikes up to 20 million, Squires told The Associated Press. In February 2013, the number rose to an average of 75 million attacks a day, with up to 500 million on some days.

Attacks include direct attacks on websites, emails fishing for passwords, and something called “port scans,” where people probe a computer looking for weak spots.

By Saku 

http://artoffuturewarfare.org/2015/01/pacific-plunged-into-the-abyss/ 

VANDENBERG AFB – The “shot heard ’round the world,” which triggered the Pacific war, destroyed its target in total silence two mornings ago 23,000 miles above the Pacific Ocean in the vacuum of space. A single point of light reached up into the heavens from central China and rendezvoused with a celestial object – an American communication satellite, snuffing it out in a spray of metallic debris over the Pacific and signaling a new period of global darkness.

The COMSAT’s destruction, the first of almost a dozen US and allied high- and low-earth orbit satellites destroyed or disrupted in the last two days, was the culmination of a week of rapidly increasing combat as each side reacted to tit-for-tat escalations, all played out live on global TV.

The coordinated ASAT attack was the opening gambit in an audacious trans-Pacific Chinese offensive that took the United States by surprise in its scope and scale. The ASAT attacks were coordinated with missile strikes on US facilities across the Pacific, PRC Special Forces destroying sub-sea cables, and extensive strikes against the Taiwanese and Japanese mainlands

Satellite jamming and crippling cyber attacks on space, military communications, banking, electrical grids and transportation systems complimented the missile strikes and left global communication and transportation nodes from Tibet to Tacoma shattered.

As one senior administration official put it, “We were prepared to deal with [area denial] efforts in the Western Pacific, but nobody anticipated them reaching beyond the second island chain into the homeland, and as heavily into space as they did.”

Tallinn Is Burning

By Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr. 

http://artoffuturewarfare.org/2015/01/tallinn-is-burning/

PENTAGON: Online, on TV, and on the phone, the capital of Estonia is a black hole. From space, though, you can see Tallinn burning.

Silence fell in the packed Pentagon press room this afternoon as Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy clicked through photo after photo, all taken by satellites because surveillance drones have been shot down: the medieval Toompea Castle where the Estonian parliament meets on fire; the 14th-century town hall in smoking ruins; the Tallinn TV tower snapped in two. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral – named for a Russian military hero – is intact but surrounded by armed men, with Russian Hind helicopters hovering overhead. Running people are visible in some shots, but in most, the streets are eerily empty except for crumpled bodies and armored vehicles. A lone cheer broke the silence in the press room only once, when a picture showed a Russian tank on fire: Someone down there is fighting back.

Did the Estonians kill that tank, one reporter asked, or was it the US Army’s 1stCavalry Division, whose 3rd Brigade Combat Team deployed to the Baltics just days ago in a belated effort to deter Russian aggression?

“I can’t speak to that specific vehicle,” said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, “[but] as of our last contact with 1st Cav, they were decisively engaged with heavy armored forces.”

When was that last contact? “I can’t give you a precise time, for reasons of operational security,” the admiral said.

Does “last contact” mean we have no contact with them now? “That’s correct.”

News Enhancement In An Info Overloaded Age

By hipbonegamer

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The following story was written by hipbonegamer. This piece is a featured entry from the Art of Future Warfare project’s “Great War” war-art challenge that called for a fictional front-page style dispatch from the outbreak of the next major global conflict.

Flashing across my sub-eyes and a few dozen others today, those tiny edge of vision thunderclouds that when my saccade leaps to them indicate increasing war chance – lit by a single bolt of miniscule lightning. As my transport turns itself into its parkplace, too far from the Ed’s for me to throat her a quick morning buzz, I flipvision up and “Temple” appears in yellow and red across the sub-world, and an accompanying jolt from the adrenals gets me out of the comfort of my now stationary pod, through visual check-in and up to my console where I can dig into deets

I was the key-chooser of “Temple” for an accelerated, amplified and psychenhanced notification, having back in the day read Gorenberg on Temple Mount as the “most hotly contested piece of real estate on earth” – a phrase which haunts me still, since the clashing “end times” beliefs of the three relevant belief systems – all three messianic, one mahdist into the bargain – are undercurrents I track “out of the corner of my subs” on the principle that we shouldn’t overlook what seems vaguely irrational to us, when it’s passionately real to others. That way lies blindsiding, never a pleasant outcome.

In out-reality, which my in-reality strives to keep accurately mapped and understood — though that’s a clear impossibility in practice… in out-reality, then, attempts to wipe one holy place off another’s sacred site are standard fare in crisis sparks, have been since the Ayodhya riots, hey, maybe since Hagia Sophia became a mosque or the Mezquita in Cordoba sprouted a cathedral. I could go back into antiquity, if any of my throatees are interested.

An open letter to the British Prime Minister: 20th-century solutions won’t help 21st-century surveillance

6 February 2015

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Dear Prime Minister Cameron,

You recently proposed that all internet apps – and their users' communications – be compelled to make themselves accessible to state authorities. I want to explain why this is a very bad idea even though it might seem like a no-brainer.

You said:

“I have a very simple principle which will be the heart of the new legislation that will be necessary. In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which even in extremis, with a signed warrant from the home secretary personally, that we cannot read? Up until now, governments have said: ‘No, we must not’. That is why in extremis it has been possible to read someone’s letter, to listen to someone’s telephone, to mobile communications. … But the question is: are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read. My answer to that question is: ‘No we must not’."

President Obama appears to agree with you.

Acknowledging the problem

Heads of government bear the burden of keeping their citizens safe. That’s a crushing responsibility. Police solve violent crimes – and intelligence agencies predict and avert them – in significant part by intercepting the conversations of people conspiring to get away with them.

For at least fifty years democracies have kept eavesdropping within bounds by requiring a warrant or some other form of meaningful review before doing it. As telephone companies upgraded to digital (but still not internet-based) networks in the 1990s, governments around the world began to require that the new networks still allow for authorities to listen in to calls.

The rationale was simple and generally uncontroversial: as long as the government respected the rule of law, its demands for information shouldn’t be trumped by new technological facts on the ground.

Why, then, you reasonably ask, should that long-established balance between security and privacy be disturbed simply because the internet has replaced telephony?

The answer, it turns out, is that baking government access into all internet apps will, in fact, not extend the long-established balance between security and privacy to all mediums of communication. It will upend it.

Why the internet is different

ARMY MAGAZINE VOLUME 65, NO. 2

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VOL. 65, NO. 2 February 2015

Infantrywomen: What the Evaluations

Are Not Considering 

By Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen, USA Ret.

It Takes More Than Rank to Make a Mentor

By Lt. Col. Raymond A. Kimball

Tank Diet:

Weighty Task to Cut Pounds

But Not Diminish Survivability

By Otto Kreisher

The Army’s efforts to develop a tank with the Abrams’ lethality and crew survivability have failed thus far. The quest for a lighter tank continues, however, in other forms.

No Avoiding Moral Responsibility in War

By Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik, USA Ret.

Moral judgments must be weighed and made even in the heat of battle. However, senior leaders may find making such decisions difficult because they might be seen as a challenge to civil authority.

K-9 Heroes: Dogs Fetch Hearts, Honors, Respect

By Toni Eugene

Military working dogs serve vital functions in today’s counterinsurgencies. Many are adopted and return home alongside soldiers with whom they served, while others help heal as therapy dogs.

Air Force launches a big change in basic training

By Sig Christenson 

February 8, 2015
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SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Tribune News Service) — Years after the Air Force increased the length of basic training by two weeks during the Iraq War, commanders have scaled back the core program and added a week of character development to raise awareness about sexual misconduct.

Recruits just starting out at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland will be the first in memory to not finish training with a formal graduation ceremony on the parade grounds after 7.5 weeks.

Instead, they'll receive five extra days of instruction designed to help them cope with the stresses of life as fledgling airmen.

"Capstone," as it's called, will emphasize core values and skills the Air Force believes airmen will need in their personal lives and careers. It is part of a makeover in basic training prompted by a scandal at Lackland that sparked an Air Force investigation and congressional hearings.

"I think it is truly revolutionary, what we're doing," said Col. Michele Edmondson, commander of the 737th Training Group at Lackland, the home of Air Force basic training. "It's a totally different form of learning for these airmen, it is an investment in their future as airmen."

The recruit class began training in earnest last week. After physical and other training ends the members' first stage, they'll begin studies in mid-March in 16 focus areas, starting with core values, morals and ethical decision making. The week will end with a low-key graduation ceremony on March 20.

Capstone program manager Kevin Adelsen said the final week would be different from the rest of basic military training, or BMT, which he described as "relatively constricted."

The trainees will be taught by a select group of military instructors and civilian contractors. They will focus on subjects ranging from warrior ethos, the Air Force's honor code, and respect and concern for others. Recruits will learn how to manage finances, balance their personal and professional lives and how to protect themselves against sexual harassment and rape.

Lead Us!

Lieutenant Michael Mabrey, U.S. Navy

http://www.usni.org/print/53453 

Instead of emphasizing the differences between today’s junior officers and their predecessors, senior leaders should focus on unlocking this generation’s potential.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert’s 2011 vision for the future Fleet emphasized the need to develop “a motivated, relevant and diverse 21st-century workforce.” 1 The article reminded us that the Navy exists to provide combat sea power, and that sailors are the ultimate source of our warfighting capability. Meanwhile, the debate over the qualifications of this young force has simmered in wardrooms across the Fleet. The frustration of some senior officers found a voice in an insinuating article about junior personnel, and subsequent junior-officer responses took a similar slant, failing to elevate the conversation. 2 The emotionally charged debate has merit on both sides.

My generation, labeled Millennials (b. 1981–2000), is less formal, less concerned with customs and traditions, and honest about our view that excessive work demands might not be worth the cost of advancement. 3 However, we volunteered during a time of war, and many of our peers have been severely injured or died in the line of duty. To meet the CNO’s vision, this conversation needs to move away from finger pointing toward an honest assessment of how to train, mentor, and prepare junior officers to lead in a volatile world.

Generational Personality

The Navy has patrolled the seas for 239 years spanning countless generations, each shaped by their social, political, and economic context. Today’s youngest generation of sailors came of age during the digital revolution, the tragic events of 9/11, and the near-collapse of the global financial markets in 2008. These events, alongside changing social norms, created distinct personality traits among individuals from my generation. Not everyone born during this time exhibits all of these traits, but we do share many similarities.

In general, we have an affinity for digital technology and social media. We look for meaningful work in a collaborative environment and value a results-based promotion system over the traditional tenure track. Many of us desire a more sustainable work/life balance than previous generations, and we are willing to work for less money to achieve it. We like to ask “why?” and desire to innovate and change our workplace rather than operate under the status quo. Employment is viewed in a more transient context, making employee retention a pressing challenge. According to the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Millennials plan on switching jobs throughout their career and 6 out of 10 already have. 4

Keeping Humans in the Loop

By Captain George Galdorisi, U.S. Navy (Retired)

http://www.usni.org/print/53455

You say you want a revolution? Autonomous unmanned vehicles could bring on the biggest one yet.

In his best-selling book, War Made New , military historian Max Boot notes: “My view is that technology sets the parameters of the possible; it creates the potential for a military revolution.” 1 He supports his thesis with historical examples to show how technology-driven “Revolutions in Military Affairs” have transformed warfare and altered the course of history. The U.S. military has embraced a wave of technological change that has constituted a true revolution in the way war is waged.

One of the most rapidly growing areas of innovative technology adoption involves unmanned systems. In the past decade the military’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased from only a handful to more than 5,000, while the use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) has exploded from zero to more than 12,000. The use of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is also growing, as USVs and UUVs are proving to be increasingly useful for a variety of military applications. The skyrocketing use of unmanned systems (UxS) is already creating strategic, operational, and tactical possibilities that did not exist a decade ago.

Defining Warfare

Armed unmanned systems are not only changing the face of modern warfare, but they are also altering the process of decision-making in combat operations. Indeed, it has been argued that the rise in drone warfare is changing the way we conceive of and define “warfare” itself. These systems have been used extensively in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and will continue to be equally relevant—if not more so—as the U.S. strategic focus shifts toward the Asia-Pacific region and the high-end warfare that strategy requires.

However, while these unmanned systems are of enormous value today and are evolving to deliver better capabilities to the warfighter, it is their promise for the future that causes the most excitement. These systems have created a substantial buzz in policy, military, industry, and academic circles. But an increasing amount of it involves concerns—some legitimate—regarding the extent of autonomy these systems ought to have. Unless or until those concerns are addressed, the enormous potential of these technological marvels may never be realized.

RUSSIAN THREAT PERCEPTIONS: SHADOWS OF THE IMPERIAL PAST

Hanna Smith

February 4, 2015

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Russia’s new military doctrine is making waves and has already generated a great amount of analysis. However, in general it does not give an answer to certain questions: why does Russia see NATO as a threat to its security? In what way is NATO enlargement a military risk? And how is NATO a rival for Russia?

In the new doctrine, published last month, Russia named NATO as its greatest enemy. This was not the first time an official Russian document has portrayed NATO as an enemy. The 2014 military doctrine was Russia’s fourth since the fall of the Soviet Union: military doctrines were issued previously in 1993, 2000, and 2010. But the tone of the latest doctrine is significantly different. NATO is more clearly identified as the “fundamental external threat” to Russia. Global rivalry is identified as the key driver of international politics in this document, rather than international cooperation as it was portrayed in the 1990s. Since the task of a military doctrine is to define threats and inform the defense policy of a nation, it is a document well worth getting acquainted with when considering current security policy among the Russian ruling elite. It also tells us something about the future pathways of Russian security thinking.

These types of doctrines always have an element of continuity that is important to understand, and then there is an embedded message regarding what has changed. What remains unchanged is the overall picture – Russia will deter aggression with its nuclear arsenal. Since 1993, Russia has felt that the possibility of a large-scale war is small, but doctrine by doctrine, the security environment has become more dangerous, according to Moscow. When it comes to NATO, the Russian way of talking about the threat informs us of the Russian leadership’s deepest worries.

THE ROLE OF MILITARY HISTORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ACADEMY – ANALYSIS

By Tami Davis Biddle and Robert M. Citino

FEBRUARY 7, 2015

The resort to war signals the failure of far more satisfactory means of settling human conflicts. It forces us to face and wrestle with the darkest corners of the human psyche. It signals the coming of trauma and suffering—often intense and prolonged—for individuals, families and societies. War-fighting concentrates power in non-democratic ways, infringes upon civil liberties, and convulses political, economic, and social systems. From the wreckage—the broken bodies, the re-drawn boundaries, the imperfect treaties, the fresh resentments and the intensified old ones—altered political and social patterns and institutions emerge that may help to prevent future conflicts, or sow the seeds of new ones. All of this creates a difficult, complicated, and fraught historical landscape to traverse.

Though the study of war is demanding, both intellectually and emotionally, we cannot afford to eschew or ignore it. Examining the origins of wars informs us about human behavior: the way that we create notions of identity, nationality, and territoriality; the way that we process and filter information; and the way that we elevate fear and aggression over reason. Analyzing the nature of war informs us about the psychology of humans under stress: the patterns of communication and miscommunication within and across groups; the causes of escalation; and the dynamics of political and social behavior within nations and across populations. And studying the consequences of wars helps us to understand human resilience, resignation, and resentment; we learn to identify unresolved issues that may lead to further strife, and we develop a heightened ability for comprehending the elements of political behavior that can lead to sustainable resolution and the re-building of broken—indeed sometimes shattered—social, political, and economic structures and relationships.

Research in military history not only informs and enriches the discipline of history, but also informs work in a host of other fields including political science, sociology, and public policy. Students need this knowledge in order to become informed, thoughtful citizens. If the role of a liberal education is to hone analytical thinking skills and prepare young people to accept their full responsibilities in a democratic society, then it is more than ever imperative that we prepare our students to think critically and wisely about issues of war and peace. Among its many roles, scholarship has a civic function: it facilitates our understanding of the institutions we have created, and opens a debate on their purpose and function.[1]