Iran is at breaking point under US sanctions – and its leaders feel the heat

Despite talk of a defiant 'resistance economy', the consequences may be dire if a nuclear deal with the west does not come soon 

Simon Tisdall in Tehran 

theguardian.com, Sunday 18 May 2014

A woman buys fruit from a street vendor in central Tehran. Signs of improvement in Iran's economy after Rouhani came to office have given way to renewed gloom. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

At the car repair shop on Soreana Avenue in central Tehran, Homayoon is happy to talk; after all, there is not much else to do. Business is bad, he says, as he wipes his hands with an oily cloth. It's the same for everybody.

"It's not good at all. Petrol is expensive, so people drive less, so they break down less," Homayoon says. Wearing a grubby red T-shirt advertising Axol Lubes, he laughs and shrugs when asked whether American sanctions are to blame for high prices and lack of customers.

"Of course it's sanctions!" interrupts Ali, another mechanic. "The economy is sick. My friends have small businesses like this one. Electricity is up 25%, water up 30%, petrol up 75%, business tax up, VAT up. Interest rates are 25%, so they can't borrow. They can't handle it," he says.

"I don't know about those things," says Homayoon, still smiling. "That's for the government to decide. I like the Americans. They're great. I don't care what they say at Friday prayers."

What they say at Friday prayers is less forgiving. A day earlier, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, one of the Islamic Republic's most venerable imams, treated the weekly televised gathering at Tehran University stadium to a stern anti-American diatribe.

With white beard, flowing robe, turban and walking stick, Jannati is every inch the mullah – a Shia fundamentalist cleric of the old school. He preaches under the slogan "Any diversion from the true path will be the path of accursed Satan".

Today, Jannati is treading the path of self-sufficiency and what the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calls the resistance economy –Iran's supposed answer to the crushing American-led oil, banking and trade embargoes.

Iran must make what it cannot buy abroad and learn the skills it needs, he says. "Workers and teachers are the backbone of our society. We should be self-sufficient in all areas of the economy and in all fields."

In Egypt and now in Ukraine, the US has toppled elected presidents and installed its "favourites", Jannati says. Fortunately, Russia has foiled America's Kiev plot. But his dire implication is plain: Iran may be next.

Inflation in Iran has come down, but is still running at around 20%. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

At his bidding, up to 10,000 prostrate male worshippers, including Revolutionary Guards, uniformed soldiers, airmen and sailors, and rows and rows of black and white-turbaned clerics rise as one with clenched fists and chant: "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Their massed voices roll like thunder across the open-sided, scaffold-roofed stadium.

Officially speaking, the government of President Hassan Rouhani, which took office last August, maintains that the punitive UN, US and EU sanctions imposed in the row over Iran's nuclear programme, which have steadily intensified since 2006, have had little or no impact.

In particular, it says, sanctions have played no role in forcing Tehran back to the nuclear negotiating table. The talks, which resumed last week without making progress, are expected to continue in June in Vienna.

But on the streets of Tehran, and in the capital's shops, garages, markets, businesses and private homes, the story is very different. Isolated and ostracised to an unusual degree, Iran is a nation under appalling stress. The strains are telling. The ties that bind are fraying. The leadership is feeling the heat.

Iran: The Psychology of Sanctions

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/iran-the-psychology-sanctions-10511?page=show

"Too rapid a shift from fear to greed in the international business community, and from despair to hope in the Iranian market, can blunt the effectiveness of sanctions."

Mark Dubowitz

May 22, 2014

Despite the current impasse in negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iranover the fate of its once-clandestine military-nuclear program, U.S. officials remain hopeful that a final accord is within reach. An agreement that is verifiable, enforceable and that prevents Iran from pursuing both a uranium and a plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon would be a tremendous achievement. But we may not get there if American negotiators continue to insist upon weakening their leverage.

Economic sanctions are Washington’s preferred instrument of coercive statecraft for confronting challenges to the international order, including from Iran’s revolutionary regime. While there is an understandable focus on the legal architecture of sanctions, their psychological impact should never be underestimated. Too rapid a shift from fear to greed in the international business community, and from despair to hope in the Iranian market, can blunt the effectiveness of sanctions. And, unfortunately, the sanctions environment for Iran has changed in the past year.

Tehran has been on a modest recovery path since its annus horribilis of 2012 and the first half of 2013, when the Islamic Republic’s economy was hit with an asymmetric shock from sanctions, including those targeting the Central Bank of Iran, Iranian oil exports, access to the SWIFT international banking system, and trade in precious metals. The poor economic management of the economy by the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government had further exacerbated these sanctions-induced shocks.

Western sanctions pressure has de-escalated since the last U.S. congressional sanctions came into effect in mid-2013, and when, last fall, President Obama threatened to veto a “sanctions-in-waiting” bill with sixty Senate cosponsors. This legislation would have imposed new sanctions only if the Islamic Republic violated the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) reached between the P5+1 and Iran in November 2013, failed to conclude a nuclear agreement that met specific parameters by January 2015, or supported terrorism against America. This decision to de-escalate the economic pressure reduced the once overwhelming Iranian and international fear of sanctions and buoyed hopes of an Iranian economic recovery.

New U.S. Policies for China, Russia Must Be Backed by Action

By Nikolas Gvosdev, May 16, 2014

While most Americans have been absorbed over the past month in the usual medley of celebrity scandals, from Donald Sterling’s racist comments to Jay Z’s family troubles, the Obama administration has quietly hinted at two changes in its approach to U.S. foreign policy that, if followed to their logical conclusion, signal a major reorientation in how Washington plans to conduct international affairs.

The first, in response to the crisis in Ukraine, has been, as Peter Baker of the New York Times described it, to develop “an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment” for dealing with Russia. The last remnants of the “reset” policy have been swept away, and with them, the hope that engagement with Moscow could put the U.S.-Russia relationship on a firm foundation of mutual interest. 

The second was President Barack Obama’s statement, during his trip to Japan, that all of the Senkaku Islands—whose ownership is currently a matter of dispute between Japan and China, as well as Taiwan—are covered by the Article 5 guarantee found in the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, which commits the U.S. to respond to an attack on “territories under the administration of Japan.” While other officials have suggested this was the case, Obama’s statement was the first time an American president made such an explicit guarantee, as opposed to reaffirming long-standing U.S. policy that continues to avoid taking any definitive side in this or other territorial disputes in the region. As such it carries much more weight coming from the mouth of the chief executive.

Of course, the president has made other statements in the past that did not end up presaging an actual shift in U.S. policy, most notably about the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war being a red line for U.S. intervention. It is just as possible that the background comments on Russia and the presidential line in Japan were issued not to indicate fundamental changes in direction, but to achieve shorter-term political ends—to mollify critics who believe that the administration has not done as much as it should to confront Russia or to give Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the political cover he needs to make concessions to advance the U.S.-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. If so, there will be no real change in the U.S. posture in the world.

But these are not words to be used lightly. “Containment” does not mean the imposition of a few targeted sanctions and the deployment of several hundred military personnel or the holding of a few extra military exercises. While it may employ an asymmetric response, the policy means using all tools of national power—including economic and military—to blunt another country’s ability to project power. Bringing other former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and Georgia, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may not be feasible, but a neo-containment strategy would certainly rebuild America’s forward military posture in Europe and develop credible plans for the immediate defense of the Baltic states with the deployment of sufficient naval, land and air forces in the vicinity. It would be accompanied by an immediate push for changing U.S. legislation and rapidly developing the infrastructure for exports of unconventional American hydrocarbons to the European market, as well as a full-court diplomatic and financial effort to jumpstart long-proposed but never implemented alternate projects that bypass Russia as an energy provider. 

**** The Old Order Collapses, Finally

May 22, 2014

By Robert Kaplan

There has been something both conclusive and convulsive -- and yet sustaining -- about the crisis inUkraine that has caused people to believe we have now entered a new chapter in international relations. As other commentators have noted, the old order has collapsed. By that they mean the period erstwhile labeled the Post Cold War.

This is a stunning formulation because it means at face value that all the blood and tragedy inAfghanistan and Iraq were not enough to signal a new phase in history, while the past few months in Ukraine were. But how can that be? The answer is that historical periods evolve very gradually -- over the years, during a decade of fighting in the Middle East, say -- whereas our recognition of these changes may happen only later, in an instant, as when Russia annexed Crimea.

Let me define what others have referred to as the "old order," as well as where I think we stand now.

In Asia, the old order, or the Post Cold War, meant American naval dominance, in essence a unipolar military world where the Chinese were developing a great economy but not yet a great military and the Japanese were safely entrenched inside a semi-pacifistic mindset. That Post Cold War order actually started decaying only a half-decade after the Berlin Wall fell, in the mid-1990s, when Chinese naval development first began to be demonstrably noticed. Over the past two decades Chinese naval power has grown steadily to the point where that American unipolar military order is giving way to a multipolar one, even as Japan, as a response to the Chinese threat, has slipped out of semi-pacifism and has rediscovered nationalism as a default option. The old order, in a word, is collapsing -- though we have only recently noticed it. The recent Chinese-Vietnamese naval standoff in the South China Sea has only punctuated the matter.

In the Middle East, the Post Cold War initially meant that the Americans kept Saddam Hussein's Iraq in check by ejecting him from Kuwait and then suffocating him with a no-fly zone. Saddam's Iraq, in turn, helped keep the mullahs' Iran in check. The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and America's subsequent acceptance of stalemate in those wars, certainly undermined Washington's credibility and allowed Iran to expand its geopolitical influence. But with the American Navy and Air Force in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and elsewhere -- not to mention the deployment of drones and Special Operations Forces to a place like Yemen -- American power is still not wholly to be trifled with. Indeed, the Persian Gulf -- whose security is underwritten by U.S. sea power -- has always been safe for hydrocarbon transport, relatively unaffected by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Of course, state collapses and partial-state collapses in Syria, Libya and Yemen have weakened American influence in those countries, but they have also weakened great power influence there in general. Nevertheless, we can say that as anarchy has increased over the years in the region, the ability of America to influence things has diminished. Thus, we have the slow-motion demise of the old order.

It's Time To Rescue The Nigerian Girls

Jay HallenContributor

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Two weeks ago, Michelle Obama posed for a photograph holding a sign saying “#BringBackOurGirls,” in support of the 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria by Al Qaeda-affiliate Boko Haram. While the sentiment is sincere, there is something perverse about an American First Lady – perhaps the second most powerful person in the world – resorting to social media to counteract a crime against humanity. Can a single image better encapsulate American futility? Islamist terrorists kidnap and rape at gunpoint, and the U.S. responds with hashtags. Little wonder that Putin laughs at us, while Chinacontinues to harass its neighbors in the East China Sea.

Fortunately, there is more the U.S. can do, and Mrs. Obama should start lobbying her husband. The kidnapping debacle demands American intervention, and the President should execute a rescue mission with an elite unit such as a Ranger or SEAL team TISI -0.29%. While West African nations are currently deliberating joint military action (even local hunters have even pledged their support),Washington knows full well that only decisive U.S. action has a serious chance of success.

Severe human rights violations occur all over the world, and have from the beginning of time. The U.S. cannot possibly intervene on all of them, but in this case, several arguments strongly endorse a rescue mission:

Humanitarianism. Any argument for a rescue mission begins and ends with the human impact. School-going girls have been kidnapped, and are being held hostage by a gang of Islamic extremists bent on selling them into sex slavery, if not murdering them outright. There is no moral ambiguity: the actions of Boko Haram (whose name literally translates to “Western education is a sin”) are a crime against humanity, and a direct affront to female educational advancement, a theme that resonates deeply in all parts of the developing world. Decent people everywhere have been united in their outrage.

Boko Haram is a legitimate threat to regional security. A successful rescue mission would seriously weaken Boko Haram, which has used the kidnapping as a propaganda tool. Boko Haram is an al-Qaeda affiliate whose power has steadily grown over the past year. Islamic extremism very much remains the greatest threat, and the only existential one, to America and her allies. Boko Haram threatens to open a new front in the war on terror.

Sub-Saharan West Africa, from Senegal to Cameroon, has a large Muslim population that to date have been moderate and disengaged from global jihadi activities. In fact, West Africa has one of the world’s highest concentrations of Muslims and Christians living side-by-side, mostly peacefully as neighbors over the last decades since independence. The religious mix provides fertile ground for radicalization, and Boko Haram has repeatedly tried to spark a sectarian war. This kidnapping, which targeted a school of mostly Christian girls, is yet another attempt to provoke reprisal. Not only would a sectarian civil war ignite Muslim-Christian tensions elsewhere in the world, but in would destabilize Nigeria’s weak national government, and the country of 169 million would descend into a vacuum of lawlessness, like Libya (population 6 million) but on a far worse scale. At best, Boko Haram’s endgame resembles that of Ansar Dine, which declared a breakaway Sharia state in northern Mali in 2012. At worst, it results in ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Next-Gen UAVs: Armed, Modular and Smaller

By AARON MEHTA

FILED UNDER 

World News

Americas

ORLANDO, FLA. — Walk around the show floor at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) annual conference, and you can see unmanned systems — or drones, if you want to anger the attendees — of all shapes and sizes, for all mission sets.

There’s no paucity of options for a discerning buyer, whether one wants a small, hand-launched device a soldier can carry in a backpack or a behemoth system capable of dropping a pinpointed missile from thousands of feet above.

But that’s the current selection, leaving some to question what a next-generation unmanned system would look like.

Asked what market trends he sees for the future, Michael Blades, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan, told an audience that the ability to defend itself in contested environments is No. 1 on his list.

“I don’t know if it’s all stealth or all countermeasures, but whatever we make for future platforms is going to have to have some sort of capability to fly in contested airspace,” Blades said. “You need to be in a contested environment because the people that are bad to us are going to have more access to surface-to-air, air-to-air platforms. There are countries out there right now developing air-to-air UAS to shoot down what we have.

“So you’re going to have to have some sort of stealth, defensive capabilities — passive sensors, where you can see stuff and people can’t tell that you’re seeing stuff,” as well as secure communications links, Blades said. “Those are the kind of technologies we’re going to need for the future.”

During his presentation at the show, Blades added one other future requirement.

“Anything that can be armed, will be armed,” he said.

Col. Kenneth Callahan, the Air Force’s remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) capabilities division director, expects a next-generation system to be modular.

“We don’t have money for niche capabilities,” Callahan said. “So my guess is it would absolutely be multirole, but that’s where modularity comes in. I want to be able to put pods on and off that can [carry] different things. I want to be able to put weapons and extra fuel tanks on and off, if that is useful for whatever I’m using it for.

“We always like faster, more lethal,” he said. “Those are things that will evolve with every new platform. I have no doubt that we’ll be talking about remotely piloted aircraft that can fly for days instead of hours.”

HOW THE F.B.I. CRACKED A CHINESE SPY RING

MAY 16, 2014

POSTED BY YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

In the magazine earlier this month, I wrote about Greg Chung, a Chinese-American engineer at Boeing who worked on NASA’s space-shuttle program. In 2009, Chung became the first American to be convicted in a jury trial on charges of economic espionage, for passing unclassified technical documents to China. 

While reporting the story, I learned a great deal about an earlier investigation involving another Chinese-American engineer, named Chi Mak, who led F.B.I. agents to Greg Chung. The Mak case, which began in 2004, was among the F.B.I.’s biggest counterintelligence investigations, involving intense surveillance that went on for more than a year. 

The stakes were high: at that time, the F.B.I. did not have a stellar record investigating Chinese espionage. Three years earlier, the government had been publicly humiliated by its failed attempt to prosecute the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of passing nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to China, in a case that came to be seen by some observers as an example of racial prejudice. The investigation of Chi Mak—followed by the successful investigation and prosecution of Greg Chung—turned out to be a milestone in the F.B.I.’s efforts against Chinese espionage, and demonstrated that Chinese spies had indeed been stealing U.S. technological secrets.

While Chung volunteered his services to China out of what seemed to be love for his motherland, the F.B.I. believed that Mak was a trained operative who had been planted in the U.S. by Chinese intelligence. Beginning in 1988, Mak had worked at Power Paragon, a defense company in Anaheim, California, that developed power systems for the U.S. Navy. The F.B.I. suspected that Mak, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the late nineteen-seventies, had been passing sensitive military technology to China for years.

Adversaries Outpace US In Cyber War; Acquisition Still Too Slow

By COLIN CLARK on May 19, 2014

COLORADO SPRINGS: The United States invented the Internet, but we may not rule it any more.

“We are certainly behind right now. We are chasing our adversary, for sure,” one of the Air Force’s top cyber warriors, Col. Dean Hullings, told an audience of about 350 here at theNational Space Symposium‘s one-day cyber event.

Hullings, chief of Air Force Space Command’s cyber superiority division, said the US is behind countries he declined to name when I asked him later (OK, we all know it’s China and Russia and Israel and…) both in defense and in offense. This may be part of the reason recently retired Gen. Keith Alexander, former head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, poured so much money and passion into offensive cyber capabilities.

Hullings was not alone in his assessment of the state of the US government’s cyber capabilities. The US government lags far behind the private sector, Tina Harrington, head of the NRO’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, said later at the conference.

“This is an area where we are following you guys. We have been behind you guys for most of the last two decades,” Harrington said. Her comments are especially striking, given the bleeding edge technology the NRO traditionally deploys and its supposed strong commitment to ground stations and its communications networks over the last decade.

Part of the NRO’s problem, Harrington told several reporters after her talk, is that its DNA is building the best satellites in the world and they hire the best satellite builders — not the best networks or cyber experts. So there’s the cultural hurdle to overcome. The NRO also tends to work with the biggest defense companies — especially Lockheed and Raytheon — who build most of its satellites and its ground stations. Harrington made clear both satellites and the ground need to be secure from cyber intrusion or supply chain infection, but she kept coming back to the ground as the more pressing vulnerability. That would be Raytheon’s ground network, bearer of the wonderful acronym MIND (Mission Integration and Development).

But one of the major obstacles to improving our cyber security is the Pentagon’s fabled acquisition system. Just getting through the budget system takes about two years. Add the requirements process and you’re talking another two years. That means you are about three years behind the latest technologies, thanks to Moore’s Law. As Harrington put it succinctly: ”Two years to get it is two years too late in the cyber industry.”

She said the Director of National Intelligence is leading efforts to speed cyber acquisition for her part of the world and suggested the issuance of IDIQ contracts might be a good way to build a flexible stable of secure providers from whom one could buy quickly and with assurance.

Hullings pointed to the so-called 933 report which was meant to help break the logjam of IT and cyber acquisition. If implemented it could really help speed the purchase of cyber products.

The best story of the day came from Harrington. Talking about the security of the supply chain — the military and intelligence communities worry that foreign suppliers might build code into chips or firmware to thwart or warp how a US weapon works — she pointed to the example of a long-time trusted supplier at the NRO. The vendor decided to change the wax it used to keep the NRO’s floors bright and shiny to a new “green” substance.

“It created electronic status discharge and fried one of my electronics,” Harrington said. Wow.

USAF Working to Certify SpaceX Rockets for Military and Intelligence Satellite Launches

May 21, 2014

U.S. Air Force says working hard to certify SpaceX rockets

Reuters

The U.S. Air Force is working as fast as it can to certify the ability of privately held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to compete for work launching military and intelligence satellites into orbit, a top general said on Tuesday.

General William Shelton, who heads the Air Force Space Command, said SpaceX was likely to achieve certification in December or January, but the process could not be accelerated given the complex issues that still needed to be addressed.

"It’s very difficult to pick up the pace on that," Shelton told reporters after a speech at a space conference hosted by the Space Foundation. In addition to certifying SpaceX’s three launches, the Air Force was also looking at the firm’s financial and auditing systems and manufacturing processes, he said.

SpaceX last month sued the Air Force for excluding it from a multibillion-dollar 36-launch contract awarded to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of the two biggest U.S. weapons makers, Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

Shelton said the Air Force remained committed to increasing competition in the rocket launch market and was also pressing forward with other efforts to lower ULA’s launch costs.

He said SpaceX could possibly compete for some launches before certification, with awards contingent on approval.

He said the lawsuit surprised the Air Force, given that the military was dedicating $60 million and 100 people to the effort to certify SpaceX as a new competitor.

"Generally," he said, "the person you’re going to do business with, you don’t sue them.”

Undersecretary of the Air Force Eric Fanning told a dinner audience at the conference that the Air Force was determined to increase competition and drive down the cost of the existing ULA rockets.

He said the Air Force was also reassessing its reliance on Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines used in ULA’s Atlas rockets, given the fragility of relations withRussia amid tensions over its annexation of Crimea.

Fanning said the Air Force was looking at longer-term options, including building an alternative engine, the promise of new entrants or increasing use of ULA’s Delta rockets.

Shelton said the Air Force was aware of threats by some Russian officials that they could cut off the supply of engines for use in launching U.S. military satellites. But he said no official change in position had been conveyed.

A new Air Force report on the RD-180 engine said a halt in Russian engine shipments would have a significant impact on the U.S. military launch program, according to sources briefed on the report. It said options to mitigate the loss of the Russian engines were limited through 2017, but recommended the Air Force boost funding to develop a new U.S. engine.

Shelton declined comment on the report, but said he favored starting work on a U.S. rocket engine to help shore up the industrial base and reduce reliance on foreign-supplied parts.

He said the effort would likely cost more than $1 billion and could take five years to complete and it remained unclear from where the funding would come.

At the same time, he cautioned against reading too much into Russian comments on the rocket engines, noting that for now, ties between the Russian company that builds the rockets and ULA were proceeding as “business as usual.”

Russian Government Wants Control Over the Russian Blogosphere

May 20, 2014 

Information Warfare: The Revolution Is Just Getting Started 

strategypage.com

Russia is beginning to enforce a law that will give the state control over blogs. Any blog with more than 3,000 visitors a day must register with the government, providing the true identity of the owner and operator of the blog. Russia already has a bunch of laws allowing the government to punish misbehaving journalists (who say anything the government does not like.) While there are many ways Russian bloggers can get around this new censorship that may not be necessary. Blogging is being replaced by other forms of social media. That, and the availability of so many Internet tools to get around censorship attempts make the latest government ploy more of an annoyance than a step towards effective censorship of the web. 

As China, which has far more resources devoted to Internet censorship, has discovered that once you have the Internet you cannot shut down the flow of information. You can’t stop the signal. China also has far stricter press censorship than Russia and still the government has been unable to stop harmful (to the government) news from getting to the Chinese people, often coming from other Chinese via the Internet. Moreover only 43 percent of Chinese have Internet access compared to 54 percent in Russia. By way of comparison in the U.S. its 81 percent, while Japan is 79 percent and Hong Kong (a semi-autonomous part of China) is 73 percent. 

Until rather recently senior Russian officials saw blogging as useful. For example, in 2011 Russian police and intelligence services were quite upset after an anonymous attacker shut down country’s largest blog hosting site on April 6th for about an hour. Among the millions of bloggers who were shut out was the president of Russia and many other prominent politicians. This was being done with the same kind of hacker attacks (DDOS) used against Estonian, Georgian and Central Asian sites during the previous four years. These earlier attacks were seen as Russian government efforts to cripple political parties and groups that do not agree with Russian policies. 

Meanwhile Russians had become the most energetic social networking users on the planet, spending twice as many hours (as the world average) on blogging and other social networking activities. The 2011 DDOS attack may have come from Russian hackers angered at apparent government efforts to censor what appears on Russian websites. The government won’t admit to actual censorship, but there were growing incidents of anti-government items not showing up after posting, because of mysterious (and seemingly bogus) “technical issues.” Since the government depends on the Internet a lot to maintain control of the public opinion, the DDOS attack is believed to be a warning that there are many Russians capable of shutting down government Internet operations. 

Since 2011 those Russian Internet users suspicious of their own government’s motives have proved correct and even before the current blogging restrictions came along Russian Internet users were expecting the worst. For Russian Internet users, the revolution is just getting started. 

U.S. DRONES ARE FROM MARS, EURO DRONES ARE FROM VENUS

http://warontherocks.com/2014/05/u-s-drones-are-from-mars-euro-drones-are-from-venus/

Ulrike Franke

May 19, 2014

Two years ago, on the way to a conference, I found myself sitting next to a gender studies professor on the plane. When I told him about my research, he asked: “What gender do you think drones have?” I did not know how to respond at the time, never having asked myself that question and never having been overly convinced of the need to ‘gender study’ everything.

Since then however, I have realized that my airplane seatmate might have had a point. Looking at drones from a gender perspective can tell us something about American versus European views on drones – and additionally makes for a highly entertaining story.

What’s in a name?

A drone – or ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ – does not have a gender, of course. But people tend to attribute gender to objects. One important factor influencing this process is said object’s name. Another is its capabilities and types of use.

The military, and in particularly the U.S. military, loves naming things and then giving them acronyms. A piece of equipment usually has at least two names or designations. There is a serious name – which is too long and gets immediately shortened – such as ‘C4ISTAR system’, the handy abbreviation for ‘Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Information/Intelligence, Surveillance, Targeting Acquisition and Reconnaissance System’ (click here for more fun military abbreviations). And there is also a catchy name, often a reference to flora and fauna, which can at times be brutal or belittling: the F-18 ‘Hornet’, A-10 ‘Thunderbolt’ or Hiroshima’s not-so-‘Little Boy’.

What to call drones has been the object of an ongoing controversy. In particular, their popular designation – ‘drone’ – is in dispute. It is not clear where the term comes from. It may be a reference to a 1930s pilotless version of the British Fairey Queen fighter aircraft, the ‘Queen Bee’. Or it may have originated with bee-like, black-striped target drones. Ultimately, the name could simply be derived from the buzzing sound UAVs (used to) make.

What is certain is that the military and industry are working hard to dissuade people from calling unmanned aircrafts ‘drones’, mainly because they worry that it sounds too menacing and removes the pilot from the equation. At the 2013 AUVSI convention (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International), much to the amusement of the press, the Wi-Fi password was “DontSayDrones”.

From a gender studies point of view, the term ‘drone’ is intriguing. Biologically, a ‘drone’ (the bee) is a peculiar thing. The term refers to a male bee, which does not have a father as it develops from an unfertilised egg and does not have a sting as its only raison d’être is to fertilise the queen’s eggs.

Even more interesting are drones’ (the aircraft, not the bees) sub-categories. Smaller UAVs are generally classified into ‘nano-/micro-’, ‘mini-’, and ‘tactical’ UAVs. The largest UAV types are ‘HALE’ UAVs (High Altitude Long Endurance). The best-known UAV type, however, which includes the notorious Reaper and Predator models, is the so-called ‘MALE’ UAV (Medium Altitude Long Endurance). Incidentally, MALE drones are the most powerful UAVs currently in use; the large majority of armed UAVs are MALE drones. The world’s largest fleet of ‘male’ drones is, of course, under U.S. command.

The Limits of Armchair Warfare

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/opinion/the-limits-of-armchair-warfare.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

By JACOB WOOD and KEN HARBAUGH

MAY 20, 2014

BOTH of us have a deep appreciation for the work of drone pilots. Whether patrolling the Helmand Valley with a sniper team or relying on drone-driven intelligence to plan manned aerial missions, we often prayed that the drone operators supporting us were cool, calm and collected.

But neither of us ever imagined that drones would do anything more than augment the manned systems that provide aerial reconnaissance and close air support for troops on the ground. We took for granted that humans on the front lines would always play the lead role.

That is why a series of proposed measures over the last year and a half by the Pentagon have us concerned. It is increasingly clear that our military leadership has become so enamored of the technological mystique of drones that they have lost touch with the realities of the modern battlefield.

Perhaps the most glaring example, especially for former snipers and pilots like us, is the Pentagon’s recent decision to scrap the A-10, a heavily armed close-air support plane officially nicknamed the Warthog but known to troops as the Flying Gun. This battlefield workhorse flies slow and low, giving pilots a close-up of what troops on the ground need. Those pilots are an aerial extension of the units below them, working in a closer relationship than a drone and its operator ever could. But the A-10 is not sleek and sexy, and it doesn’t feed the brass’s appetite for battlefield footage delivered to screens thousands of miles away, the way a swarm of drones can.

True, the A-10 fleet is more expensive than a drone program, and in this era of budget consciousness, it’s reasonable to argue for cutting it as a cost-saving measure. The problem is, the decision also fits a disturbing pattern.

In February 2013, the Pentagon announced plans to create a new award — the Distinguished Warfare Medal — for drone pilots and “cyberwarriors,” which would rank above the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. In other words, a drone pilot flying a mission from an armchair in Nevada might be afforded greater recognition than a rifleman wounded in a combat zone.

When Warfare Rhymes

IMAGE OF MASSIVE TUNNEL BOMB EXPLODING AT SYRIAN ARMY BASE; COURTESY OF REUTERS (CREDIT: KHALIL ASHAWI).

BY MAJOR MATT CAVANAUGH

The other day I had a valuable email back-and-forth with a professional acquaintance on teaching strategy. We differed on several points, but there was quite a bit of general agreement as well. One point where we were in violent concurrence was on the influence of strategic culture on tactics. I feel that culture has a bit more influence on warfare than my counterpart does - but concede the broad point that different strategic cultures often gravitate toward a particular "best" tactical approach. These similar choices can also be seen beyond culture - they can be seen across time.

The result is that, paraphrasing the comment often attributed (but never proven) to Mark Twain, "warfare does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." Sir Michael Howard once said much the same, "[f]or after all allowances have been made for historical differences, wars still resemble each other more than they resemble any other human activity." Even across time, the basics in land warfare are often the same. Journalist Sebastian Junger, in his book War, remarks on these fundamental tactical principles - and is worth considering at length:

"In a war...soldiers gravitate toward whatever works best with the least risk. At that point combat stops being a grand chess game between generals and becomes a no-holds-barred experiment in pure killing. As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared towards maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it's not. It's about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men...There are two ways to tilt the odds in an otherwise fair fight: ambush the enemy with overwhelming force or use weapons that cannot be countered." (p. 140)

As tactical objectives are roughly the same, and human beings still control warfare (a more open question as technology progresses) - then we are bound to find recurring tactical themes in warfare. Consider the experience Captain (later Lieutenant General) "Gus" Pagonis recalled in his book Moving Mountains. He wrote about his first mission in Vietnam: "to mount 105mm howitzers...on a fleet of barges, and use our LCM-8's [flat bottomed boats] to move that firepower up and down the rivers of the Mekong Delta." He went on to describe his learning process for that task - heavily reliant on an understanding of this cyclical pattern in tactical warfare: 

"The first order of business, therefore, was to figure out how to mount these guns on the barges. I leafed through the available manuals and found no guidance there. But having dabbled in military history during several academic jaunts, I figured that in the long history of warfare, somebody must have tried to do something similar. I put in a call to the Office of the Chief of Military History, who dug around a bit and finally cam up with a Civil War manual that depicted some Union barges on which guns had been mounted. He sent us copies of the relevant pages; and in short order, my sergeants were retooling our barges, mounting our own howitzers based on plans developed a century earlier. History, once again, proved to be very helpful." (p. 36-37)

The 2014 Counterinsurgency Field Manual Requires Pre-Publication Review

by Bing West

Journal Article | May 14, 2014

The 2014 Counterinsurgency Field Manual Requires Pre-Publication Review

Bing West

A new field manual on counterinsurgency (COIN) is about to be published. The FM states, “Many important decisions are not made by generals.” COIN is conducted by captains, not generals. So why not let the captains decide about the merits of this FM? Ask a dozen company commanders from Afghanistan to respond to the following query:

Rate the 2014 COIN FM on a scale of one to three below:

1. This FM contains overly-optimistic advice and unachievable goals. It leads down the wrong path.

2. The FM is not worth the time it takes to read. It leaves me indifferent. It is a signpost pointing to a dozen different paths.

3. The FM clarifies the principles that must be followed in the next COIN. It must be read and followed by all at battalion level and above. It leads down the correct path.

As currently written, the 2014 FM endorses and enlarges upon the 2006 FM that declared, “Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation-builders as well as warriors.” If doctrine collapses in practice, do not repeat it. We tried COIN as nation-building twice, and twice it failed.

“Write this down,” President George W. Bush said in 2003. “Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world to democracy. They are going to be the catalyst to change the Middle East and the world.”

After 3,000 civilians were murdered at the Twin Towers, the question was how to destroy Al Qaeda. The answer, enthusiastically endorsed by the US military, was to build two democracies in the Islamic, authoritarian Middle East. That was a non sequitur. Thus the American military hurled itself into host nation governance, economic development and politics, where it had no expertise. Disaster followed.

In Iraq, the US military, after easily destroying the Saddam regime, uttered no protest when an inexperienced American pro-counsel abolished the Sunni-centric Iraqi Army. For the next four years, we waged war against Al Qaeda, disaffected Iraqi officers and Sunni tribes. In 2006, a breakthrough came via the Anbar Awakening. In 2007, Generals Petraeus and Odierno adroitly deployed a surge force courageously ordered by President Bush. The FM claims the Sunni tribes went over to the government side. Abu Risha, however, told me they came over to the strongest tribe – the US military. They remained disdainful and deeply suspicious of the Shiite sectarian government. Nonetheless, civil war was averted. It seemed the COIN FM was confirmed.

FM 3-24, Social Science, and Security

by Adam Elkus

Journal Article | May 20, 2014

FM 3-24, Social Science, and Security

Adam Elkus

In his review of the updated FM 3-24, Bing West has some harsh words about the manual’s academic tint: “[t]he COIN FM is harmful because it teaches war as sociology.” Charles J. Dunlap is also unimpressed, characterizing it as a mishmash of warfighting and material targeted to “northeastern graduate students.” West and Dunlap’s remarks suggest FM 3-24 belongs in a social science faculty lounge instead of a war room. Recently, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also voiced similar sentiments about those who he believes treat war like a “science.”

West, Dunlap, and Gates’ frustrations are not without merit. The history of social sciences’ entanglement with the military and intelligence community is undeniably troubled. Reading West and Dunlap’s critiques of FM 3-24 raise the question of whether a better and more productive relationship is possible.

As a social scientist-in-training, I write this essay to offer some constructive general suggestions about how social scientists and national security practitioners can best collaborate together.

The Correlates of War

The relationship between American social science and national security dates back to World War II and hit a high point during the Cold War. The social sciences cut their teeth on the toughest political-military problems, and government patronage was also a key ingredient in the growth of the modern social sciences. This relationship abruptly changed during the Vietnam era. Military practitioners came away feeling (with some justification) that academics had overpromised and underdelivered. Moreover, the culture of the American university became more hostile to national security concerns as campus protests pushed the military-industrial complex away.

The end of the Cold War dramatically reduced government patronage of the social sciences. Certainly the spigot wasn’t completely turned off, as evidenced by government-funded ventures like the Political Instability Task Force. But compared to the feast of Cold War social science, the fall of the Soviet Union led to famine.

Without a Cold War-style mobilization of intellectual resources academics are ultimately bound by disciplinary incentives to produce work for other academics -- hence the “gap” between policy and academia. The Global War on Terror partially reversed these trends. The government called on academics that utilized social scientific methodologies ranging from cultural analysis tocomputational number-crunching. Did all of this reduce war to academic hair-splitting?

In a rare feat of social scientific deference to a historian, I will leave that question to historians of military and intellectual matters like my friend Nick Prime. Instead, I will suggest some pointers for productive collaboration between social scientists and their government counterparts in the security sector. These are by no means an exhaustive list of suggestions, only those that do not seem to have been discussed very much in dialogues about social science, academia, and security.

Beyond the olive branch

Published on The Asian Age (http://www.asianage.com)

http://www.asianage.com/print/298537

By editor

Created 23 May 2014 - 00:00

The credo and tradition of the Indian Army was rubbished by Gen. V.K. Singh after he took over as Army Chief. He went to the Supreme Court against the government over a totally personal and selfish issue.

S.K. Sinha

The credo and tradition of the Indian Army was rubbished by Gen. V.K. Singh after he took over as Army Chief. He went to the Supreme Court against the government over a totally personal and selfish issue.

The nation faces grave external and internal security threats which were being managed by adopting a policy of appeasement and projecting India as a soft state.

These have to be managed from a position of military strength without saber-rattling and extending an olive branch of peace. Our Prime Minister-designate Narendra Modi has made a good beginning by inviting Pakistan and other Saarc neighbours to his swearing-in function.

The threats from Pakistan and China, including their acting in cohort and the strategy required to deal with them, were discussed in a previous article. The internal threat posed by Maoist terrorism was also discussed. We need to now discuss the organisation at the apex level to manage these threats.

Unlike all democracies, the higher defence organisation in India isolates the military from the process of decision-making. Bureaucrats in defence ministry have all the authority, but are not accountable. In 1962, Jawaharlal Nehru’s orders to throw the Chinese out of the Himalayas was communicated to the Army Chief by a joint secretary. This showed that he was not in the loop when such a major decision was taken to go to war. The rest is history. The Public Accounts Committee in 1958 recommended integrated functioning and so did Administrative Reforms Commission in 1967. These were put in cold storage. Meaningless sops have been doled out from time to time. On March 25, 1955, Nehru announced in Parliament that as in other democracies the three Cs-in-C will be designated Chiefs of Staff. Their designations were changed but they have continued to function as Cs-in-C, heads of attached offices subordinate to the ministry. The Kargil Review Committee recommended both a CDS and a fully integrated defence ministry. This was approved by the GoM of the National Democratic Alliance regime. It was left to the successive government to take the final call. These proposals we scuttled. A headless Integrated Defence Staff and a meaningless Integrated Service Headquarters was established, like introducing Chiefs of Staff in 1955. The Naresh Chandra Committee has recommended a permanent full-time Chairman Chiefs of Staff instead of a rotating part-time incumbent and an additional four-star rank, as also deputation of one-star rank military officers to the ministry. Such cosmetic sops serve little purpose. The crying need is for a proper CDS and a fully integrated system as in other democracies.

Seven steps to an economic rebalancing

May 23, 2014

Suresh Prabhu

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/seven-steps-to-an-economic-rebalancing/article6037673.ece

India’s economy is at the core of its global profile. The incoming government can transform global equations by rebalancing the Indian economy, making it a platform for a foreign policy outreach

The analogy of what might happen to an aircraft when it suddenly drops from 40,000 feet to 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds is one that lends itself to describing the state of the Indian economy. After smooth sailing at close to nine per cent growth rate it suddenly dropped to less than five per cent in a very short time, leaving behind unemployment, social unrest, banking woes and stuck projects in its wake.

The huge task before the Narendra Modi government now will be to quickly revive the economy. In doing so, a huge array of issues need to be addressed.

In its current stage of evolution, the Indian economy requires a fundamental rebalancing across multiple macroeconomic parameters. To begin with, it needs to rebalance savings and investments which have deflated over the recent past and are inadequate to sustain a high rate of growth. Second, the share of manufacturing in GDP must be stepped up in accordance with the employment imperative and the need to build an advanced knowledge-intensive, technology-based product profile. Third, the economic mindset has to incorporate a much faster pace of planned urbanisation, along with a humane approach, which would foster higher economic productivity given all factors of production.

Four, India’s financial sector requires modernisation and integration with the larger global system, a task which was interrupted by the global financial crisis. Five, India’s major resource — its people — must be critically upgraded in order to effectively participate in a knowledge-driven global economy. Six, our global integration in terms of the flow of goods, services, technology and funds must be greatly expanded. Finally, we must strategise to redress the massive infrastructure gap that we currently face.

The new government is keen to address these multiple dimensions to the Indian economy in order to revive growth and boost employment. I believe it would need to focus on immediate measures that would moderate inflation and bring in new growth drivers as a first step. Equally, it would need to lay strong foundations in all these rebalancing imperatives in order to ensure sustained high growth over the next two to three decades, remove poverty and improve the quality of life by improving human development indices. The central idea would be for the government to create the right conditions of governance, macroeconomic stability, and policy framework for private sector entrepreneurship to flourish.