New Zealand Considers Role on ISIS

By Helen Clark

February 21, 2015

Amid opposition, the country contemplates joining the coalition in the Middle East. 

New Zealand’s defense chief, Lieutenant General Tim Keating, is currently in Saudi Arabia for talks on fighting ISIS.

New Zealand is not part of the coalition fighting the group, unlike allies Australia and the United States, and it has made no public decisions to join but, said Keating, “it makes sense that there’s New Zealand Defence Force representation at such a meeting… it will be a good opportunity to receive updates on the situation.” Prime Minister John Key has told reporters that the decision whether or not to send troops would most likely be made Monday.

There is not full support, even among conservatives such as the Nationals partners, for sending troops overseas. Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox said, “Training troops in Iraq and places like that have in the end turned sour on those countries that have done that.” She did agree to humanitarian aid and peacekeeping, however. Key previously ruled out the idea of Kiwi troops in combat roles, restricting them to training.

Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne is also against the training of Iraqi troops, saying, “All they’ve done is create an ongoing festering sore which is now rampant, if you like, right through the Middle Eastern region… I mean it didn’t work in the Crusades and yet these are the modern day versions of that.” He said the idea of New Zealand joining just to be part of the Western club was not a good one. Iraq has formally requested military aid from New Zealand, however, so it is not simply a case of Kiwis following their closest security ally Australia blindly into battle. Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has issued a statement saying essentially that given the close relationship between Australia and New Zealand it was important to share views on security and defense.

New Zealand recently took up a position on the UN Security Council this year and has been involved in issues in the Middle East. Possibly unusually, it disagreed with Australia’s veto on Palestinian statehood, saying New Zealand would either have agreed or abstained from the vote.

Barack Obama Is Not a Muslim

By Reihan Salam

He should stop trying to interpret Islam. 

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19, 2015.

On Sept. 17, 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush declared that “these acts of violence violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith, and it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.” According to Bush, “the face of terror is not the true face of Islam,” because “Islam is peace.” To Americans who feared that Muslims would face violent reprisals in the wake of the attacks, Bush’s words were welcome. Yet there was something awkward about the fact that the president, by all accounts a devout Christian, had decided not only to say that our Muslim fellow citizens ought to be treated with respect, but also that those who’d commit such a horrific crime had—and here Bush literally quoted from the Quran—“rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”

No one should doubt Bush’s good intentions in describing Islam as a religion of peace. But by invoking Islamic scripture, and by weighing in on a debate that can only be settled by those who identify as Muslims themselves, he contributed to a confusion that persists today. The real problem with people who kill innocent people in the name of Islam is not that they’re incorrectly interpreting their faith. It’s that they are killing innocent people.

Why do the leaders of ISIS have to be insincere in their beliefs in order for us to reject their brutality? 

Like Bush, President Obama has weighed in on matters that must ultimately be left up to Muslims. Take his remarks this Wednesday, when he said, quite rightly, that “we are not at war with Islam.” Not content to stop there, or to simply explain that we are at war with various apocalyptic death cults that have declared war on us, he added that “we are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

In great detail, Obama explained that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, and other extremist groups seek religious legitimacy in order to recruit young people to their cause, and that they “depend upon the misperception around the world that they speak in some fashion for people of the Muslim faith.” According to Obama, these groups base their claims to legitimacy on falsehoods and selective readings of Islamic texts. Obama’s position seems to be that the leaders of these groups aren’t sincere in their beliefs. He suggests that what ISIS is really after is power, as if its obsessive focus on acting in accordance with practices that were widespread in the days of Muhammad is merely window-dressing for thuggery and theft. But why do the leaders of ISIS have to be insincere in their beliefs in order for us to reject their brutality?

Paul Rogers' Monthly Briefing: Is Islamic State in Retreat?

This briefing looks at two unrelated incidents in the first weeks of 2015, in France and Syria, as indicative of major developments in the evolution of extreme Jihadist movements and that are likely to have long term effects. The Charlie Hebdo murders will lead to much more intensive counter-terror procedures in France and in greater security services cooperation across Europe but these also risk stimulating a further rise in the anti-Islamic mood. The execution of the young Jordanian pilot, Flight Lieutenant Moaz al-Kasasbeh by Islamic State (IS) in Syria looked initially to increase the resolve of regional states to confront IS. However, it is far from clear that recent suggestions that IS is more generally on the defensive are accurate.

Charlie Hebdo

On 7 January, two French brothers of Algerian descent, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, entered the central Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire on an editorial meeting, killing 12 people. In an apparently coordinated attack, hostages were later held at a Parisian kosher supermarket. Four customers and another police officer were killed by Amedy Coulibaly, an apparent associate of the Kouachi brothers. By the time the three attackers were killed in sieges on 9 January, France had deployed an estimated 80,000 police, army and other security personnel in response.

Although Charlie Hebdo was a low circulation magazine, it was a part of French political culture and represented that strand, more prominent in France than in most European countries, of vigorous political lampooning, sometimes close to the obscene. The attack was viewed immediately as an assault on freedom of expression and the response included the biggest public demonstrations of support on any issue in France for decades and stoked intense debates across Europe on what is and is not permissible.

Islam in Europe

by THE DATA TEAM 

Islam in Europe Jan 7th 2015

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/01/daily-chart-2

THE brutal murder of 12 people at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris today appears to have been carried out by militant Islamists. If so, many will again question the compatability of Islam with secular-minded, liberal European values. Mistrust of religion is not confined to Islam, but Europeans regard it as more threatening to their national cultures than other faiths (or indeed atheism), according to a 2013 poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Germany. The threat of Islamic terrorism is rising, to judge not just by today's slaughter but also by other attacks and a recent upward trend in arrests for religiously-inspired terrorism reported by Europol, the European Union's law-enforcement arm. Perceptions can easily run ahead of reality, however. There were still more arrests for other types of terrorism (motivated by separatism, for example) in Europe in 2013, the last year for which pan-European data are available. And European publics wildly overestimate the proportion of their populations that is Muslim: an Ipsos-Mori poll in 2014 found that on average French respondents thought 31% of their compatriots were Muslim, against an actual figure closer to 8%.

Douglas MacArthur and the Pivot to Asia

By Francis P. Sempa

February 22, 2015

The controversial general would have applauded the U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific. 

Douglas MacArthur is known as a brilliant and controversial general, but not as a geopolitical visionary. Throughout his lengthy and distinguished military career, however, MacArthur envisioned geopolitical factors that he believed would result in a U.S. pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.

In April 1904, shortly after MacArthur graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he accompanied his father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, Jr., on an official tour of Asia. General Arthur MacArthur, who won the Medal of Honor as a 19-year-old lieutenant in the Union Army during the American Civil War and who had commanded U.S. forces in putting down the Philippine insurrection, was in Japan to observe the Russo-Japanese War. Douglas recalled in his memoirs, Reminiscences, that he and his father traveled from Japan to Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Calcutta, Peshwar, Quetta, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Madras, Colombo, Java, Siam, Indochina, and Shanghai. “We were nine months in travel,” MacArthur wrote, “traversing countless miles of lands so rich in color, so fabled in legend, so vital to history that the experience was without doubt the most important factor of preparation in my entire life.” He continued:

The true historic significance and the sense of destiny that these lands of the western Pacific and Indian Ocean now assumed became part of me. They were to color and influence all the days of my life. Here lived almost half the population of the world, with probably more than half of the raw products to sustain future generations. Here was western civilization’s last earth frontier. It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined with Asia and its island outposts.

After distinguished service with the army in Mexico and having commanded the famous Rainbow Division in France during the First World War, and following a stint as superintendent at West Point, MacArthur in October 1922 arrived in Manila where he served as commander of the Military District of Manila, the Philippine Scout Brigade, and later the 23rd Infantry Brigade of the Philippine Division. In the mid-1920s, he was back in the continental United States where he participated in the court-martial of pioneering airman Billy Mitchell, served as president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and returned to the Philippines as commander of all U.S. Army forces on the islands.

Syriza’s scattergun

Greece had a chance to make the euro zone work better. It blew it Feb 21st 2015 

CLIP-CLOPPING around Europe over the past few weeks, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s dashing finance minister, has urged the euro zone to chart a new course. Endlessly forcing new loans upon indebted countries like Greece in the pretence that they will one day be repaid, he argued, was a strategy for depression and deflation. “The disease that we’re facing in Greece,” he told the BBC, “is that a problem of insolvency for five years has been treated as a problem of liquidity.”

This view would not seem outlandish in the academic world that Mr Varoufakis recently quit. Few believe that Greece’s debts, worth over 175% of GDP, will ever be repaid in full. But saying so betrayed a woeful misunderstanding of the euro zone’s rules. If the European Central Bank shared Mr Varoufakis’s view, it would have to cut off Greek banks, potentially driving Greece out of the euro. Indeed, earlier this month, when the minister visited the ECB in Frankfurt, Mario Draghi, its president, snippily told him to keep his opinion to himself. He has not repeated it since.

Mr Varoufakis’s gaffe is a mere footnote in a list of mishaps that have characterised Greece’s miserable experience in the euro. But it is depressingly typical for a government that, for all its high popularity at home, has squandered every opportunity to improve its lot, and ultimately that of the euro zone. Even as Mr Varoufakis and his colleagues in Greece’s ruling Syriza party have loftily declared that the changes they seek would benefit all Europeans, not just Greeks, their negotiating strategy has been small-minded, self-defeating and naive.

Some of this may be put down to inexperience. A few Europeans were guilty of assuming that Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, would perform what Greeks call a kolotoumba(“somersault”) the instant he took office. But Syriza has no excuse for making idle references to the Nazi occupation of Greece. Nor has it helped by playing games with its partners in the Eurogroup of finance ministers. European officials have been incensed by a Hellenic habit of leaking supposedly private discussion papers.

The wrangling over whether to extend Greece’s second bail-out, which expires on February 28th, has shown Mr Tsipras’s government at its worst. Admittedly Syriza was dealt a bad hand by its predecessor, which before Christmas accepted an extension of only two months. But rather than accept an extension, Mr Tsipras and Mr Varoufakis have dug in their heels, robotically insisting on a “bridging” deal that would unlock euro-zone funding while allowing the government to slow or reverse reforms. Greece’s creditors, unsurprisingly, were unimpressed. On February 19th Greece put forward a more conciliatory proposal to extend its loan. But this was almost immediately rebuffed by Germany. Trust has seemingly been so grievously eroded that Greek promises of discipline are not worth much in Berlin.

The Daily Lives of Russians, as Seen on the Silver Screen

Posted by Samuel Bendett 

February 22, 2015

Today American audiences will be treated to the Oscars Awards. Among the nominations for a best foreign language film is the Russian motion picture "Leviathan," a hard-hitting, bleak and depressing film about one man's futile struggle against corrupt city government. Russian authorities, and many in Russian society, have condemned the film as an unfair and biased representation of the country. In fact, it has been decried as "anti-Russian propaganda" at a time when Moscow is engaged in a struggle of ideas with the West over the conflict in Ukraine. Indeed, "Leviathan" could carry the day at the Oscars as a political statement against Moscow. If that happens, it wont be the first time a Russian film has caught the world's attention.

Sincere portrayals

Russia for its honest portrayal of a corrupt mayor who is willing to steamroll a regular citizen to get his way. The protagonist in the film has very little ammunition to fight such tactics, no matter how much he wishes to stay within the limits of Russian law. This happens regularly across Russia, as the laws and principles governing private property and individual freedom have remained in flux, and are pitted against the Russian state's growing role in practically every aspect of life. In other words, the film showed Russia as it is, rather than Russia as it wishes to be seen.

North Korea’s New Anti-Ship Missile: No Cause for Alarm

By Nah Liang Tuang

February 23, 2015

The successful missile test is a development of note, but not of alarm. 

On February 8, 2015, North Korea test fired five of what it termed “cutting edge” anti-ship missiles. Strategic political analysis would indicate that the date of the test firing holds more significance, as Pyongyang has chosen to showcase its latest naval armament upgrade a few weeks before annual U.S.-ROK military exercises, which the former regards as invasion rehearsals. While the missile testing was conducted to convey Pyongyang’s displeasure to Washington and Seoul, the successful testing of anti-ship missiles at a range of 200 km, as reported by South Korea’s defense ministry, is a development of note but not of alarm.

No ‘Silver Bullet’

According to knowledgeable analysts, the DPRK’s latest weapon appears to be a Russian Kh-35 anti-ship missile, which the North Koreans christen the “KN-09” and claim as their own. Assuming that the KN-09 shares the same technical and performance specifications as the Kh-35, whether as a renamed Russian import or a reverse engineered copy, it can be argued that the DPRK’s newest anti-ship missile is an attempt at economical force modernization rather than a “silver bullet” to counteract ROK naval superiority.

Considering the missile inventory of the Korean People’s Navy (KPN), we can see that its earlier anti-ship missiles ranging from the Soviet SS-N-2 Styx to the Chinese Silkworm and CSS-N-8 Saccade were developed from the 1950s to the late 1980s, and could be considered outdated. With the introduction of the KN-09 or Kh-35, the DPRK now has a modern missile which was deployed in Russian service as recently as 2003.

When making the case for KN-09 deployment as a force modernization measure, rather than as a short cut to negating South Korean naval preponderance, it would help to compare the characteristics and capabilities of the Kh-35/KN-09 with the American made Harpoon anti-ship missile used by the ROK navy. Examining the latest versions of both missiles, we can see that they have similar ranges (260 vs 278 km), are guided by onboard inertial navigation and active radar homing, are sea skimming (to reduce detection probability) while being day/night capable, and even have similar warhead weights and speeds (0.8 vs 0.7 Mach).

Cambodia’s Garment Industry Rollercoaster

By Peter Ford

February 22, 2015

News for the vital industry has been decidedly mixed of late. 

Travel in any direction from Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, and it is not long before you reach the clothing and footwear factories. Lining the national highways, these buildings – often resembling warehouses in both size and architectural merit – house up to 600,000 workers, predominately young women. Time your trip for the beginning or end of a shift, and the sight of thousands of these women crammed into open top cattle trucks starkly highlights both the youth of the workers, and the huge numbers involved in this industry.

The importance of the garment industry to Cambodia’s economic output is clear: $5.7 billion in clothing and footwear was exported last year, and is a major factor in the country’s official zero percent unemployment rate. Yet despite this it can sometimes feel as if garment workers never catch a break. Stories featuring the Kingdom’s seamstresses in the past few years have covered mass fainting, mass strikes, and the police shooting of five workers. Indeed, positive stories are hard to find.

In the past few months, though, there have been a number of developments.

The announcement in November 2014 that the minimum wage for garment and footwear workers would rise 28 percent to $128 a month was a rare piece of good news for workers. Facing strong resistance from employers and the government alike, the increase served as a strong reminder of the importance of the sector to the government, not to mention the power of the unions involved. The recent tightening of union registration laws might be a sign of just how strong this message was.

While this was a significant increase, it fell far short of the $160 demanded by the unions, and has done little to quell the underlying anger, as the sporadic subsequent strikes have shown.

Also in November was the widely reported broadcasting of a Norwegian reality TV show titled Sweatshop.Three young fashion-obsessed Norwegians (one admits to spending $600 a month on new clothes) travel to Cambodia to briefly experience the daily realities of the people making their clothes. Subtitled “this is what happens when you send three young Norwegians abroad,” it provided classic emotive material, with smiles and naïve comments slowly replaced with copious tears and comments on social injustice.

A Dangerous Game: Russian Debt Roulette

Andrei Movchan

February 22, 2015 

Russia's economic situation is dire. Can Moscow pull through?

Russia’s economy is dependent on oil and gas. Hydrocarbons are responsible for roughly 70 percent of Russian exports and, directly and indirectly, for almost 80 percent of the Russian federal budget. The recent downfall of oil prices, along with the isolation from Western capital markets following the Russian annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, has severely damaged Russia’s economic situation. Stagnation turned into recession, the ruble devalued and inflation became double-digit. It all made the situation inflammable, and an unexpected and unexplained decision of the Central Bank to raise the prime rate from 10.5 percent to 17 percent overnight immediately caused brief but powerful panic among consumers and in securities markets. It allowed many analysts to derive apocalyptic predictions, including the forecasting of problems with sovereign and corporate currency-denominated debt repayments.

Rating agencies have been much more cautious. While recently reassessing their forecasts for Russian ratings, they argued that “the probability of default is still very low.” In the latest move, S&P downgraded Russia’s sovereign rating to below investment-grade level (BB+); however, this rating level corresponds to circa 1.5 percent default probability. For comparison, Turkey and Indonesia also have BB+ S&P ratings; both are considered to be healthy economies with high potential.

Russian securities markets reacted more nervously, and yields of Russian short-term sovereign bonds rose twofold, while credit default swaps reached 500 bps, while CDS for Turkey is almost one third of Russian level. Still, such levels look much more like the ones in the summer of 2011 (when the price of oil was rising and Mr. Putin had neither cracked down on the opposition, nor invaded Ukraine, and when the idea of Russia defaulting would have seemed utterly implausible) than like the pre-default ones.

A quantitative exercise is a helpful, if perhaps slightly boring, way to understand the exact picture. Out of the $525 bln of Russia’s total exports in 2013, over $300 bln were oil- and gas-related. The price of oil fell from the average for 1H 2014 of $109 per barrel to $60, and, provided it remains at that level, Russian exports in 2015 will fall some $180 bln down to $340 bln, or, as the gas volumes are set to fall as well, even lower.

The Global Stakes of the Ukraine Crisis. The Failure of Western Civilization

By Prof. John McMurtry

February 20, 2015

War party bigotry and hate may be enough to drive neo-Nazis leading Kiev in the Ukraine civil war. But the reverse blame of Putin and Russia by corporate media and states has a deeper interest. It propels the geostrategic economic and military war of movement through East Europe to Russia. It is the indispensible big lie to mask their set up for foreign financial predation. A big pay-off matrix looms in Ukraine for US-led arms corporations and military services, agribusiness and GMO’s, speculator funds on debts and currency, monopoly providers of privatized social services, Big Oil frackers for newly discovered rich deposits, junk food suppliers like Poroshenko in US-frankenfood alliance, and – last but not least – the IMF money party waging a war of dispossession by financial means. 

The IMF enforces the global money-sequence cancer system by its defining policy commands on debt-impoverished countries to open them up to foreign feeding on their domestic markets and fire-sale enterprises, drastically reduced workers’ wages and benefits, stripped public pensions, healthcare and education, sell-off of historic infrastructures to pay ever more bank-created debts, and – in general- multiplying transnational money demand and profit invading their life functions at all levels. The IMF and Wall Street have been cumulatively hollowing out Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, South Europe and the US itself in these ways over 35 years. Now it is the turn of the once social democratic Europe, state by state, beginning with the most indebted and helpless. Ukraine on the outskirts of Europe next to Russia is where the military option has been required to strip it and its former Slavic economic union with Russia. This historic relationship has been the last line of life defence in the way, a conservative but sharing ethos of resource-rich societies with Putin as a superior leader facing the US-EU’s many-times more powerful economic levers and lethal arms to bully him and Russia into submission.

To take the naturally rich Ukraine for transnational bank and corporate looting, the public must be sold the story of Putin as the villain. Only then can debt screws be applied and the country opened to long-term and full-spectrum financial, foreign and oligarch control beneath the people’s notice. The IMF is already in motion to ensure that the Kiev coup state provides all of this. Few observe the underlying fact that the crushing bank debt eating societies alive across the world is all debt money created by big private banks with no legal tender to back 97% of it. Ukraine is the latest nation to fall into the deadly trap without a sound. Here public money for public need is ended, although it created the US itself. As Ben Franklin has testified, to regain public money issue was the prime reason for the American Revolution. Public banking was also what made modern Canada from 1938 to 1974 by public investment money without private debt-servicing loaned by the public Bank of Canada for construction of Canada’s material and social infrastructures from the St Lawrence Seaway to public pensions and universal healthcare.

To Manage the Pentagon, Ash Carter Turned to Bloomberg, Cantor

BY GORDON LUBOLD

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

Defense Secretary Ash Carter sets off on the job of his career with some unexpected perspective as staff takes shape. 

When Defense Secretary Ash Carter began to prepare for his confirmation hearings last month, he and aides sought the advice and counsel from some unconventional thinkers, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

Gordon Lubold is a senior military writer for Defense One. Before that, he was a senior national security writer for Foreign Policy magazine and foreignpolicy.com, where he launched and authored the widely-read Situation Report newsletter, sent to 150,000 readers in the foreign policy and national ... Full Bio

Most observers in the national security community expected Carter, who resigned in 2013 as the Pentagon’s deputy defense secretary, to walk into the job with his eyes closed. The physicist by training is long thought to be one of the smartest people in any room, largely because, most people will say, he actually is. But to Carter’s mind, the job of secretary of defense required a new level of thinking about the world, the massive bureaucracy that is the Defense Department, American governance, the economy and even human rights.

The Island Dispute No One Is Talking About

Ted Galen Carpenter

February 23, 2015 

While the South China Sea and Senkaku Island disputes are all the rage these days, South Korea and Japan's conflict could be equally consequential. 

Acrimonious territorial disputes between East Asian nations involving largely uninhabited islands are nothing new, and they have received an abundance of attention from foreign policy officials and the news media. But nearly all the attention has focused on China’s quarrels with Vietnam, the Philippines, and other neighbors regarding the South China Sea, or on the even more dangerous confrontation between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

Yet there is another nasty dispute that threatens the serenity of the region: the continuing feud between Japan and South Korea over two islets, called Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea. The quarrel may seem petty, primarily involving control of fishing waters, but given the damage that it is doing to bilateral relations between two prominent U.S. allies, it is a worrisome situation.

The territorial spat between Tokyo and Seoul has gone on for more than six decades. Just months after Japan signed a peace treaty in 1951 with the United States and other nations that it had fought in World War II, South Korea delineated a sea border that incorporated the two islands. Seoul proceeded to establish formal administrative control three years later. Japan objected, noting that it had officially claimed the area in 1905. That assertion probably intensified the irritation of South Koreans. It is impossible to understand the extent of the emotions on both sides without taking into account the troubled history between Japan and Korea. Koreans still fume about the humiliation of Tokyo’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910 and the often brutal colonial rule that followed. From the standpoint of South Koreans, the Japanese claim to Dokdo is simply another manifestation of that exploitive imperial land grab. 

The 5 Most Powerful Empires in History

Akhilesh Pillalamarri

February 22, 2015 

These powerful empires all fell. Will America fall, too?

Of all the empires that arose and thrived on the face of this earth, which were the five most powerful? And how is it even possible to select five empires from among the hundreds that have flourished over the past five thousand years? Truth be told, any formulation of the “five most powerful empires” will always be subjective, because all empires were glorious and influential in their own ways.

But there are some empires that were simply so powerful, large, and influential over the grand sweep of history that they deserve to be called the greatest, no matter the criteria. The reader may note that I left out empires from China and India. While I would be the first to acknowledge the importance and legacy of empires from these regions, the overall global legacy of empires from these regions tends to be regional.

The (First) Persian Empire

An Introduction to Autonomy in Weapon Systems

Paul Scharre, Michael Horowitz 

FEBRUARY 13, 2015 

Download the Working Paper (PDF)

In this working paper, 20YY Warfare Initiative Director Paul Scharre and Adjunct Senior Fellow Michael Horowitz discuss future military systems incorporating greater autonomy. The intent of the paper is to help clarify, as a prerequisite to examining legal, moral, ethical and policy issues, what an autonomous weapon is, how autonomy is already used, and what might be different about increased autonomy in the future.

Remote Control Project: Remote-control warfare briefing #08

Source Link

23 January 2015

A new briefing, commissioned by the Remote Control Project, finds that remote warfare tactics – the use of special forces, drones, private military and security companies (PMSCs) and cyber warfare – are coming back to haunt the states that use them, deeming these methods problematic and ineffective.

The Remote-control warfare briefing #08, by Open Briefing, finds that: 

The use of special forces in domestic terrorist attacks, such as France, Australia and Canada, risks transplanting Middle East battlefields to European cities: The use of special forces in domestic terrorist attacks heightens the sense of moving the battlefield closer to home and is at odds with the dominant ‘control paradigm’ and the preferred strategies of remote-control warfare (actioning warfare at a distance), revealing inconsistencies with the current security approach. 

The fallout from the Sony hack reveals broader challenges in cyber security and shows cyber attacks to be the perfect asymmetric warfare for non-state actors: The Sony hack highlights the technical challenge of cyber attack attribution as well as the ambiguous relationship between state and non-state actors. Concerns over how to respond to cyber attacks are also raised, in particular the lack of clearly defined legal standards and international norms in the area. A recent report from the Remote Control Project, by VERTIC, warns that this lack of legal clarity and the highly securitised debate around cyber issues may have destabilising effects, including increased surveillance on citizens and a ‘cyber arms race’ between states. 

7 Implementation Challenges of Big Data Analytics

Venkatesh Shivanna

Feb 18, 2015 

This article was first published on bicorner.com

Data is an asset. There is no question about that. The economics of data are based on the idea that the value of data can be extracted through analytics. However, contrarily to commodities, it is believed that the value of data doesn't grow as a proportion of its volume (1). These assumptions make data a special type of asset. Although this economical view of data is correct, it doesn't account for the fact that increasing volumes and variety of data create more opportunities to extract added value. Being able to capture structured, semi-structured and unstructured data has modified this set of assumptions. Big Data is changing the way analytics were commonly viewed, from data mining to Advanced Analytics.

Surveys conducted in the past 12 months (2) consistently show that 10 to 25% of companies surveyed have managed to successfully implement Big Data initiatives. Also, 50 to 70% have plans to implement or are implementing Big Data initiatives.What is not shown however is the percentage of these that have successfully managed to create value out of data. Primarily because attention has been placed on the technical side of Big Data.

This article doesn’t focus on Big Data from a volume and therefore purely technological point of view. The reason for this is that the Volume part of Big Data isn't what allows extracting the value of data. It allows to store and process data in more efficient ways than before, hence supporting the process of value creation but not delivering it. The key to data value creation is Big Data Analytics.

There is no magic recipe to successfully implement Big Data Analytics in an organisation. It is a combination of skills, people and processes, like it is the case for any project or strategic initiative. There is however a series of challenges that need to be clearly understood or addressed to ensure maximising the chances of success.

Confusing Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence

The Algorithm That Could Pinpoint Exactly Where Islamic State Videos Are Filmed: Scientists Say Software Could Help Identify ISIS Executioners

by Fortuna's Corner 

February 20, 2015 

http://www.fortunascorner.wordpress.com

The Algorithm That Could Pinpoint Exactly Where Islamic State Videos Are Filmed: Scientists Say Software Could Help Identify ISIS Executioners

Mark Prigg, writing the Feb. 19, 2015) DailyMailOnline, writes that “Spanish researchers have unveiled software that can scan a video; and, pinpoint exactly where it was shot;” and, help intelligence analysts and others “locate the execution sites. Researchers from the Ramon Llull University (Spain) created the system capable of geolocating videos, by comparing their audiovisual content with a worldwide, multimedia database.”

“In the future,” Mr. Prigg writes, “this [technology/software] could help find people who have gone missing, after posting images on social networks; or, even to recognize locations of terrorist executions,” they said. “The method is based on the recognition of their images, or frames; and, all of the audio.” “Their acoustic information can be as valid as the visual, and on occasions, even more so — when it comes to geolocating a video.’ said Xavier Sevillano, one of the authors of the study. “In this field, we use some physics, and mathematical vectors — taken from the field of recognition of acoustic sources; because, they have already demonstrated positive results.’ “Many of the videos available online, are accompanied by text, which provides information on the place where it was filmed — but, there are others that do not present this information. This complicates the application of the ever more frequent geolocation tools of mutimedia content.”

“All of the data obtained, is merged together and grouped in clusters so that, using computer algorithms developed by the researchers, they can be compared with those of a large collection of recorded videos already geolocated around the world,” Mr. Prigg wrote. “In their study, published in the journal, ‘Information Sciences,’ the team has used almost 10,000 sequences as a reference from the MediaEval Placing Task audiovisual database, a bench-marking initiative, or assessment of algorithms for multimedia content.” “The videos, which are most similar in audiovisual terms, to what we want to find searched for in the database, to detect the most probable geographical coordinates,” Dr. Sevillano said. He added that “the proposed system, ‘despite having a limited database — in terms of size, and geographical coverage — is capable of geolocating videos, with more accuracy than its competitors.”

Spies Can Track You Just By Watching Your Cell Phone’s Power Use — Without You Knowing They Are Doing So

by Fortuna's Corner

February 20, 2015 · 

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Spies Can Track You Just By Watching Your Cell Phone’s Power Use — Without You Knowing They Are Doing So — Even When Your Phone Is Turned Off

So says Andy Greenberg on today’s (Feb. 20, 2015) Wired.com website. Mr. Greenberg writes that “researchers at Stanford University and Israel’s defense research group, Rafael, have found that Android phones reveal information about your location..to every app on your device, through a different — unlikely data leak: the phone’s power consumption. The researchers created a technique they call PowerSpy, which they say can gather information about the Android phone’s geolocation, by merely tracking its power use over time. That data, unlike GPS or WiFi location tracking, is freely available to any installed app…without a requirement to ask the user’s permission. That means, it could represent a new method of stealthily determining a user’s movements with as much as 90 percent accuracy — though for now, the method only really works when trying to differentiate between a certain number of pre-measured routes,” Mr. Greenberg wrote 

“Spies might trick a surveillance target into downloading a specific app that uses the PowerSpy technique, or less malicious app makers could use its location tracking for advertising purposes,” said Yan Michalevski, one of the Stanford researchers. “You could install an application like Angry Birds, that communicates over the network; but, doesn’t ask for any location permissions,” says Michalevski. “It gathers information, and sends it back to me to track you in real-time, to understand what route’s you’ve taken when you drove your car, or to know exactly where you were are on the route. And, it does it all just by reading power consumption.”

NSA and GCHQ Stole Codes of World’s Largest Manufacturer of Cell Phone Encryption Devices

By Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley

February 20, 2015

AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data.

The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania.

In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”

With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.

As part of the covert operations against Gemalto, spies from GCHQ — with support from the NSA — mined the private communications of unwitting engineers and other company employees in multiple countries.

JPMorgan Goes to War

JPMorgan Takes Military Tact to Fighting Cybercrime 

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The bank is building a new facility near the NSA’s headquarters to attract new talent 

In the days following the massive breach of JPMorgan Chase’s computers last summer, the bank’s security chief, James Cummings, rarely left his operations center in its Manhattan headquarters. He directed a select group of colleagues to search for links to the Russian government. There was little evidence of a government tie, especially so early in the investigation, but Cummings, a former head of the U.S. Air Force’s cybercombat unit, was confident they’d find more.

Convinced that it faces threats from governments in China, Iran, and Russia, and that the U.S. government isn’t doing enough to help, JPMorgan has built a vast security operation and staffed it increasingly with ex-military officers. Soon after joining the bank in early 2014, Cummings helped hire Gregory Rattray—like Cummings, a former Air Force colonel—as chief information security officer. Together the men oversee a digital security staff of 1,000, more than twice the size of Google’s security group. To make it easier to woo military talent, the bank built a security services facility in Maryland near Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency.

The military overtones are no accident. JPMorgan is responding to attacks that the federal government is unable or unwilling to stop, says Nate Freier, research professor at the U.S. Army War College, yet it isn’t clear whether the bank’s weapons-grade operation is doing a better job than law enforcement agencies. “It’s a brave new world that’s not very well understood by the people playing the game,” Freier says. “It really is every man for himself.”

The bank hasn’t said publicly who it believes is responsible for the June attack, in which hackers stole the names, addresses, and e-mail addresses—but not credit card numbers or passwords—of 83 million individuals and small businesses. Several people connected to the probe say Cummings and Rattray strongly suspected very early that it was engineered by the Kremlin. That message was delivered through back channels to the White House, according to a senior U.S. official.

The Lunch Question

By Ian Morris

FEBRUARY 11, 2015

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At an event in Beijing last November, I had the good fortune to meet the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has sold 1.5 million copies of his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,since it was first published in 2013. Pacing up and down in front of a packed auditorium, Piketty explained that because the rate of return on capital is now higher than the growth rate of the global economy, the proportion of the world's wealth that is owned by a small elite will likely keep increasing; in other words, we should expect to see a divergence of wealth as the rich get much richer. As his book says, "capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."

No strategic forecaster can afford to ignore this alarming prediction — or the enthusiastic response it got from the audience in Beijing. In the 20th century, the two world wars were the only force powerful enough to reverse the concentration of wealth in the elite and the mounting class conflict; in the 21st century, we seem to be falling back into a comparable world of revolution, political extremism and mass violence.

It was hard to be sure whether the members of the audience were enthusiastic because they thought Piketty was forecasting the collapse of Western democratic economies or because they thought his words applied equally well to their own society. After all, China could almost be the poster child for the process Piketty described. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, post-tax and -transfer income inequality stood at 0.31 on the Gini index. (The Gini coefficient runs from 0, meaning everyone in a country has the same income, to 1, meaning one person earns all the country's income and everyone else earns nothing.) By 2009, China's income inequality score had soared to 0.47, where it stubbornly remains after peaking at 0.51 in 2003. Though Chinese tax returns are too opaque to make reliable calculations regarding wealth inequality, or the uneven distribution of assets as opposed to income, he is almost certainly correct that this figure has risen even faster than the country's income inequality.

Three EU dreams that have turned into nightmares

By Christopher Booker

21 Feb 2015

Europe's greatest acts of make-believe in recent years are coming back to haunt it, says Christopher Booker

Russian-backed separatists firing a mortar towards Ukrainian troops outside the village of Sanzharivka Photo: Maximilian Clarke/AP

Three stories that were making daily headlines last week all had one very important thing in common. One was the shambles unfolding over Ukraine. The second was the ongoing shambles over Greece and the euro. The third was the ever-growing flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East desperately trying to escape to safety in Europe.

Over Ukraine, I cannot recall any issue in my lifetime when the leaders of the West have got it so hopelessly wrong. We are treated to babyish comparisons of President Putin to Hitler or Stalin; we are also told that this crisis has only been brought about by Russia’s “expansionism”. But there was only one real trigger for this crisis – the urge of the EU continually to advance its borders and to expand its own empire, right into the heartland of Russian national identity: a “Europe” stretching, as David Cameron once hubristically put it, “from the Atlantic to the Urals”.

The “expansionism” that was the trouble was not Putin’s desire to welcome the Russians of Crimea back into the country to which they had formerly belonged; or to assist the Russians of eastern Ukraine in their determination not to be dragged by the corrupt government in Kiev they despised into the EU and Nato. It was that of an organisation founded on the naive belief that it could somehow abolish nationalism, but which finally ran up against an ineradicable sense of nationalism that could not simply be streamrollered out of existence. We poked the bear and it responded accordingly.

Drone Dealer: The Case for Selling Armed UAVs

Richard Whittle

February 20, 2015 

Letting U.S. companies export military drones and allowing trusted allies use them is a policy that’s simply on target.

The new Obama policy easing restrictions on drone exports will unnecessarily alarm many people. It’s a sensible move to let U.S. manufacturers share an important new global aviation market – increasingly civilian – that they spawned. The policy will also let more U.S. allies share an important military capability whose true value lies in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, not firepower – a fact borne out by how drones are being used against the Islamic State.

When an armed military drone crashes or gets shot down, no poor pilot dies for his or her country. So it’s easy to assume that this revolutionary weapon makes it more tempting to go to war, and that the Obama administration’s decision to relax restrictions on drone exports is going to open the door to more international conflict.

That assumption ignores important facts.

First, the administration is retaining its commitment to reviewing armed drone export requests under the Missile Technology Control Regime,which includes a “strong presumption of denial” for unmanned aircraft like the Predator and Reaper. More allies may get those drones in the future, but Predators and Reapers won’t be flooding the world market.

Clausewitz and Learning Through Communities of Practice

by DR ROBERT T. FOLEY

Many organisations like to describe themselves as ‘learning organisations;’ however, very few are actually good at organisational learning. One of the key challenges facing any organisation is how to take the knowledge and experience of individuals and spread this throughout a group so that everyone learns. This problems is particularly acute in military institutions, where the overall organisation (army, navy, air force, or marines) is sub-divided into well-defined units that often impede the free flow of knowledge. Of course, there are good reasons and clear benefits to this sub-division — creation of esprit de corps, cohesion, identity, etc. — but they nonetheless restrict the free transfer of knowledge. While to a certain extent ‘lessons-learned’ systems and centralised doctrine formation can overcome these divisions, such mechanisms also produce sometimes-unwelcome filters through which new knowledge has to travel.

One additional method armed forces have employed for overcoming the challenges to organisational learning has been through ‘communities of practice.’ These bring together members of the armed forces who are looking to develop their professional knowledge and understanding, sometimes on very specific topics. A key characteristic of communities of practice is precisely this focus, not necessarily on specific topics, but on sharing experience and creating knowledge to develop how specific tasks or roles are performed. 

Military physical training: It’s a problem bigger than obesity, with no easy solutions

By Thomas E. Ricks

February 18, 2015 

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Best Defense physical training bureau chief

At first glance, the recent introduction of new physical training programs in the Army and Marine Corps appears to be in response to emergent challenges to warfighter physiology both in basic training and combat. The military widely acknowledges the growing problem of overweight recruits becoming overweight service members, and it is now coming to grips with the high rate of musculoskeletal injuries resulting from physical training. But while the USMC’s new High Intensity Tactical Training (HITT) program and the Army’s training doctrine in the revised FM 7-22 intend to address the issues of injury and body composition, they approach both issues as symptoms of a much deeper problem.

“We have 18 and 19-year-old kids coming into basic training that can’t skip or perform a forward roll,” says Frank Palkoska, Chief of the US Army’s Physical Fitness Training School. “They have not learned the motor patterns to execute these basic movements. It’s very difficult to get a person through an obstacle course when they’re starting so far behind, and ten weeks isn’t enough to get them up to speed. You acquire most of your basic movement patterns by first grade, and our youth today just aren’t getting the physical education time they need. Lack of fitness is a societal problem. The injury rate is developing into a taxpayer concern in terms of medical care and lost training expenses. And the lack of qualified recruits it is becoming a national security issue.”

Palkoska says that strength training and weight loss are the “short poles in the tent” of soldier fitness, because they will improve with training. The longer pole involves making sure that training is effective; a concept that reveals why injury prevention is also a symptom rather than a root problem. “People get injured because they’re not moving correctly while training. For a long time we’ve held the belief about training that more is better. But more is not better. Better is better.” Many of the exercises in FM 7-22 appear so rudimentary that they seem woefully inadequate for people preparing for the rigors of combat. But in fact the routines are meant to instill the basic movement patterns troops lack.