‘All-weather’ friends: China, Sri Lanka agree to resume controversial Colombo Port City project

PUBLISHED : Monday, 11 April, 2016,

China and Sri Lanka have vowed to develop an “all-weather” friendship, in a move analysts say is aimed at putting disagreements over infrastructure projects behind them.
But some observers believe that despite the pledge, Colombo’s new government plans to diversify the country’s diplomatic partners and dilute its reliance on Chinese investment.

Wrapping up a three-day trip to Beijing yesterday, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said Colombo planned legal reforms to encourage foreign investment. He asked China to accept equity in infrastructure projects in return for cancelling some of the US$8 billion Sri Lanka owes Beijing and offered to sell it stakes in Sri Lankan companies.
The countries also announced the resumption of a controversial US$1.4 billion project, the Colombo Port City, suspended for more than a year over irregularities in the contract arranged by Sri Lanka’s previous administration.

“The pledge to develop an all-weather friendship is a gesture to say change of government and politics will not affect the relationship,” said Du Youkang, professor of South Asia studies at Fudan University.
Sri Lanka upset Beijing last year when it ordered a review of the project, approved under the administration of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had faced criticism domestically for too heavy a reliance on Chinese investment.
Faced with falling foreign reserves, Sri Lanka’s new administration under President Maithripala Sirisena, is hoping to boost investment from abroad.
Wang Dehua, a professor of South Asian studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies, said China would consider the equity swap.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/1935065/all-weather-friends-china-sri-lanka-agree-resume

China adds Nigeria to its African Empire

14 April 2016

By Olivia Archdeacon

Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Geoffrey Onyema, announced on Tuesday that China has offered Nigeria a $6 billion loan to fund infrastructure projects. Onyema and President Muhammadu Buhari secured the deal with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, where Buhari is currently on his first official state visit to China at the invitation of the Chinese president.

The confirmation by Onyema coincided with an agreement reached between Nigeria and China yesterday on a currency swap deal, as he looks for ways to shore up the naira, Nigeria’s currency, and fund a record budget deficit.

Onyema announced that the credit would be:

“on the table as soon as we identify the projects. It won’t need an agreement to be signed; it is just to identify the projects and we access it.”

The loan comes at a good time as Nigeria faces its worst economic crisis in decades. The country’s projected 2016 deficit is currently at N2.2 trillion ($11.1 billion). Sinking oil prices have eaten into its foreign reserves and the naira has weakened against other currencies. As a resource-rich country, Nigeria’s economic performance has unfortunately been driven by the oil and gas sector. Unfortunate because the progress recorded towards genuine economic development prior to the discovery of oil in commercial quantity has since been virtually eroded. Relying onoil and gas for around 40% of GDP (50% at peak production in 2004) has left the economy vulnerable to the global oil price crash. The sector also represents 90% of their total exports.

But the oil crash cannot be blamed entirely – Nigeria’s quest for development has spanned decades not months. It is still yet to deliver on the ultimate goal of poverty reduction, despite various plans, programmes, and projects. There is also the added pressure from Buhari who plans to triple capital spending in the 2016 fiscal year.

Much like the despair felt worldwide for economic basket-case Zimbabwe, one can’t help but feel frustrated at the mismanagement of Nigeria’s abundant natural resources. In addition to oil and gas, Nigeria also boasts sizeable reserves of: tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc and arable land. Its rainforest region is also amongst the richest and most important in the continent for research and conservation. Yet as the World Bank said in 2007, weak and unreliable infrastructure, macroeconomic instability, microeconomic risks from corruption and weakness of institutions and regulations to guide investment behaviour are the main constraints to high performance of the economy.

Ukraine’s Political Instability Continues

April 11, 2016
By Lili Bayer
The prime minister’s resignation highlights the discord among political factions in Kiev.
Summary Revolutions make for strange bedfellows, and when they are over, power struggles among the victors begin. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced his resignation on April 10, following a months-long political crisis in Kiev. The political instability and factional fighting that follow revolutions define the course of new regimes. Ukraine’s future depends in large part on the commitment of Western governments to supporting Kiev politically and financially. A weak and unstable government in Kiev presents challenges for the West and opportunities for Moscow. Although the West will remain influential in Ukraine, the U.S. and Russia will likely come to a compromise on the country’s neutrality.
Franz Kafka wrote that “every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” Many Ukrainians likely agree. Since coming to power in 2014, Ukraine’s leadership disappointed many citizens and Western governments by failing to effectively address corruption and revive the country’s economy. Yatsenyuk’s resignation is one element in an ongoing crisis plaguing the country’s fragile ruling coalition.

Ukraine’s political troubles are an example of a classic problem of revolution. Revolutions take place when an uprising of citizens leads to a change not only of a particular government, but of an entire regime. Revolutions usually require diverse social and political forces coming together. Once they defeat the regime, however, dynamics shifts. As Dr. George Friedman wrote in a 1991 essay, “Revolution is about the sublime and the sacred. Governing is about the prosaic and the profane.” Once the moment of revolution is over and the challenges of policy and everyday governing emerges, the revolutionary alliances generally fall apart. The different factions are then left fighting over the legacy of the revolution and how to move forward.
It was a little over two years ago when a group of Ukrainian public figures stood at Maidan Square encouraging the crowds to oppose then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Yatsenyuk, a seasoned economist and politician, was there representing his mentor and party leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was in prison. Also present were Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch with candy and media empires; Vitali Klitschko, a popular boxer with political aspirations; and Oleh Tyahnybok, a nationalist and openly anti-Semitic politician.

Peers Discuss ‘Hacking Inward,’ Cyber War Games at RSA Conference 2016

By Itzhak Kotler, Co-Founder and CTO, SafeBreach
During the recent RSA conference in San Francisco, I moderated a Peer2Peer session called “Hacking Inward—Implementing Effective Cyber War Games.”

Peer2Peer group discussions center around specific security topics, where participants get the chance to really dig deeply into a topic. One of the reasons this particular topic is important is because validating your security in a continuous way is good security practice. It helps you identify your weaknesses, ensure your security strategies are sound, and exposes issues in time to be remedied. Companies don’t need to understand adversaries as much as they need to understand how adversaries view them.

By hacking inward and implementing effective war games, you can:
Unearth people, process and technology issues.
Answer the question of “Are we secure?” and “Can a breach happen to us?”
Practice and refine proper process/procedure for when a breach does happen.
We divided our discussion into three parts—people, process and technology.

People
End-users are typically the weakest part of an organization’s security strategy. This first set of discussion was on the potential for human error, mistakes and occasional stupidity by end users. The key focus for many organizations in the session was on education.
Reducing business risk and improving security starts with making sure employees realize that security is everyone’s problem. Similar to how you may report to authorities when you see an unattended bag at airports, the same type of vigilant employee base with a high level of imprinted situational awareness in action is required when it comes to cybersecurity.
Participants shared a variety of educational tactics. They ranged from “security” fairs to phishing campaigns that test the effectiveness of user education. Another participant shared how USB flash drives were dropped in the parking lot and common areas to see how many users would pick them up. One unusual tactic I found interesting was sharing information on attacks launched on the organization with employees. Instead of just explaining to employees the appropriate security best practices, this internal information sharing approach helps provide real examples of how attackers are specifically targeting their organization.

Processes
Most of the discussion on processes was around validation of third party processes especially payment processes, which seems appropriate in light of the recent Bangladesh bank heist, where a $20 million bank transfer was stopped because of a typo. The participants shared their specific process validation. In one example, the payment process for vendors triggers an alert if the invoice is above a certain threshold. Others shared that human intervention was necessary, and that specific employees were required to review certain transactions before they were approved.

Technology
We agreed that technologies that validate and prove that the security systems are functioning correctly are an essential part of a robust cybersecurity strategy. The typical organization in this session uses a combination of technologies and “specialized” humans to try to address this challenge.

Participants discussed using a myriad of tools from patch management/vulnerability assessment tools to application security platforms. In addition, many also hire external pen testing teams for third-party validation. Most security leaders in the room were interested in building an internal security red team because of the benefits of an internal team that understands the business and can execute relevant breach scenarios.
An internal red team can play true war games that give more complete answers across people, process and technology. But red teams tend to be limited to larger organizations with a fairly sizable security team and robust security framework. Participants who had internal red teams wanted to increase the frequency of security validation performed.

In general, participants felt that the existing security validating approaches are flawed. Dependency on specialized humans isn’t scalable, and the frequency of validation (annual/bi-annual) by external consultants do not accurately reflect true security risks. The majority of audience felt that a new way of automating and continuously validating our security controls was needed—an “automated red team” on a platform. An automated platform not only helps addresses risks in dynamic environments, but also extends security validation to both internal and external attacks. This approach called “continuous security validation” or “attack simulation” is emerging technology that is available today, but we ran out of time for more in-depth discussions.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the Peer2Peer session. As a former red team leader, I believe in cyberwar games as an effective way to identify key issues that need to be remediated. Effective cyberwar games starts with understanding your business and security objectives, and testing the framework that you’ve put in place. By hacking inward on a continuous basis, you can test people, process and technology, and stay ahead of the attacker.

Itzik Kotler is CTO and Co-Founder of SafeBreach. Kotler has more than a decade of experience researching and working in the computer security space. He is a recognized industry speaker, having spoken at DEFCON, Black Hat USA, Hack In The Box, RSA Europe, CCC and H2HC. Prior to founding SafeBreach, Itzik served as CTO at Security-Art, an information security consulting firm, and before that he was SOC Team Leader at Radware (NASDQ: RDWR). Follow him on Twitter at @itzikkotler.



- See more at: http://www.rsaconference.com/blogs/peers-discuss-hacking-inward-cyber-war-games-at-rsa-conference-2016#sthash.kKWZsckW.dpuf

The Race to Attribution Needs to Stop

http://deaddrop.threatpool.com/race-attribution-needs-stop/
March 30, 2016  AuthorEmilio Iasiello

It has become almost systemic for people to immediately question, “Who did it?” when a major breach occurs in the public and/or private sectors. Understandably, the victimized have a keen interest in identifying their faceless attackers especially when they have been publicly exposed. There is also a competitive aspect, as the first person to make attribution can add credibility to his or her name. However, while providing information for public consumption is important, it’s equally as important to provide accurate information.
In the cyber security industry, a commonly heard mantra is that attribution in cyberspace is difficult. Cyber security experts and organizations, and even some government officials, have emphasized this point. If most agree that attribution is difficult and time consuming, why is there invariably a need to immediately attribute hostile activity that may end up being incorrect and misleading?

This is perplexing especially when one considers that some state actors are considered to be sophisticated and stealthy, yet once their operations are exposed, attribution appears relatively easy to assign. This contradicts the general premise of the attribution challenges that cyberspace presents and discounts the anonymization and obfuscation techniques employed by savvy actors to avoid those very identification efforts. Furthermore, reliance on technical evidence as indicators of attribution may become less important as actors may alter timestamps, use different keyboard languages, and change compile times to point blame in a different direction.
Three highly public cyber incidents have involved a rush to judgment over the identity of the perpetrators that may ultimately prove incorrect. In one incident, a state actor is strongly suspected as being the perpetrator; in another, later evidence suggested that the original suspects may not have conducted the activity; and the last, the high confidence accusation of a state government’s involvement in destructive activity is met with considerable criticism and doubt by the larger computer security industry.
Office of Personnel Management (OPM): In June 2015, OPM announced that it had been breached and potentially exposed four million federal employee records to suspected nation state-affiliated hackers. State actors, or actors working on behalf of the state, were believed to have carried out this attack because, in addition to technical indicators and “unique” malware, the perceived stolen material was not found to be monetized on underground hacking forums. However, according to one source, 23,000 government e-mails from different agencies were found on an underground hacking forum two days later. While it can’t be concluded that these e-mails were harvested from the OPM breach, it certainly warranted further investigation that didn’t occur. Rather, it was quickly concluded that the motivation for this attack was the compilation of information to be used for future espionage campaigns, or the creation of a database for all U.S. federal employees by the state actor in question. Little consideration was given to any other possible scenario. A June 2015 report further intimated that state actors were behind the attack; although it cited two possible groups – both suspected state hackers – as the perpetrators, a fact that only additional time and investigation would have helped to determine. In the end, Beijing arrested the actors in question claiming that the activity was a criminal manner. Given the confluence of cyber crime and the fact that cyber espionage activities occurring more regularly, who’s to say that more espionage groups aren’t going to engage in similar moonlighting efforts?
France’s TV5 Monde: In April 2015, France’s TV5 Monde was breached, shutting down transmissions and inserting pro-jihadist messages on its social media accounts. At the time, officials from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack. However, after further investigation, French security investigators suspected a Russian hacking group to have been responsible (the website was hacked and replaced with a pro-“Cyber Caliphate” message). The investigation is still ongoing, indicating that even the most seemingly mundane attacks can have more complex machinations behind them. The “easy” answer may not prove easy at all.

Sony Incident: In 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked by suspected North Korean hackers in protest of the release of a film. In addition to stealing confidential documents and intellectual property, the attackers may have also destroyed corporate data. The North Korean government was quickly implicated in the hack, a position that the U.S. government did not waiver from despite numerous criticism from cyber security experts and companies. While North Korea may have been behind that attack, the fact that there was little consideration over other alternatives is deeply disconcerting, particularly in a domain that traditionally favors attackers’ abilities to obfuscate their locations and implement deception techniques.

It should be noted that cyber attribution, while difficult, is not impossible. Based on the amount of time and effort it takes to gain fidelity into what transpired in a breach, particularly those conducted by sophisticated actors, attributing blame shouldn’t be a “quick” process. This is especially true where suspected government involvement is concerned. It would be unwise to base a course of action before concretely knowing who is behind an attack, as implications can extend far beyond the cyber realm into economic and diplomatic consequences.

The United States government quickly levied economic sanctions against North Korea for its perceived implication in the Sony hack, but has treaded much more judiciously in assigning the same culpability to China, even though it indicted five members of the People’s Liberation Army for hacking. Potential consequences against states should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, regardless of convincing attribution evidence.

There is little advantage to be gained by hurrying to call out particular governments or their agents as the orchestrators of hostile cyber activity, particularly since such a claim is subject to change as more information comes to light and is analyzed. One cyber security company received much criticism for a report in which it intimated that a nation state was behind a slew of attacks, a claim that it later had to back away from later.

While attribution is important in assigning responsibility for an attack, it may detract from the most important next step for a breached organization – mitigating the damage caused, patching up security “holes,” and ensuring that business operations continue promptly and securely. There will be time later to determine who was behind the attack, or at least, as good as can be expected given the tools and information on hand.

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/04/carter-may-elevate-cybercom-full-combatant-command/127243/?oref=d_brief_nl
APRIL 5, 2016 BY PATRICK TUCKER

As network warriors pound away on ISIS in the battle for Mosul, Carter says it’s time to consider full-COCOM status for cyberwarfare.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is considering turning U.S.Cyber Command into a full combatant command, an acknowledgment that cyber warriors are today not just defending military networks but joining in combined-arms attacks on the enemy.
Pentagon leaders long have said that cyber has joined land, sea, air, and space as a new warfare domain. Especially in cyberspace, Carter said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “our reliance on technology has given us great strengths and great opportunities, but also led to vulnerabilities that adversaries are eager to exploit,”

It is time, Carter said, to “consider changes to cyber’s role in DOD’sUnified Command Plan.”
The military is currently organized into nine COCOMs: six geographic commands (Pacific, Europe, Africa, Middle East, etc.) and three that field specialized capabilities: special operations, nuclear (strategic) forces, and transportation. U.S. Cyber Command, orCYBERCOM, is currently a sub-unified command under U.S.Strategic Command.
“I have given Cyber Command in the ISIL fight its first wartime assignment,” Carter said Tuesday, referring to the historic role that network experts are playing in the Mosul offensive, described primarily as disrupting the group’s communications, command, and control capabilities.
“Increasingly, I’ve brought Strategic Command and Cyber Command into these operations as well to leverage their unique capabilities in space and cyber to contribute to the defeat of ISIL. Beyond terrorism,” Carter said. “A couple of years ago, that would never have occurred to a secretary of defense.”

The calculation has changed largely as a result of ISIS’s own behavior and what the Defense Department perceives as the need to fight ISIS on the group’s own turf, inside online communications networks. He described the thinking as: “Hey, these guys are using this tool. We need to take it away.”
Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of Cyber Command, told the Senate Tuesday morning his unit was ready for the upgrade. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he discussed the future of the fledgling Cyber Mission Force and defending networks and as part of the so-called Third Offset, the Defense Department’s bid to develop technologies to secure technological advantage. “USCYBERCOM stands ready to help develop and deploy the new cyber capabilities entailed in the Third Offset, particularly hardened command and control networks and autonomous countermeasures to cyber attack,” he said.
Becoming a Combatant Command “would allow us to be faster, which would generate better mission outcomes,” he said.

The destructive threat of cyberwarfare

http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/04/12/destructive-threat-cyberwarfare/82943134/
George F. Will  April 12, 2016
There is a consensus that aggression by one nation against another is a serious matter, but there is no comparable consensus about what constitutes aggression. Waging aggressive war was one charge against Nazi leaders at the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trials, but 70 years later it is unclear that aggression, properly understood, must involve war, as commonly understood. Or that war, in today’s context of novel destructive capabilities, must involve “the use of armed force,” which the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court says is constitutive of an “act of aggression.”
Cyberskills can serve espionage -- the surreptitious acquisition of information -- which is older than nations and not an act of war. Relatively elementary cyberattacks against an enemy’s command-and-control capabilities during war was a facet of U.S. efforts in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, in the Balkans in 1999 and against insurgents -- hacking their emails -- during the “surge” in Iraq. In 2007, Israel’s cyberwarfare unit disrupted Syrian radar as Israeli jets destroyed an unfinished nuclear reactor in Syria. But how should we categorize cyberskills employed not to acquire information, and not to supplement military force, but to damage another nation’s physical infrastructure?

In World War II, the United States and its allies sent fleets of bombers over Germany to destroy important elements of its physical infrastructure -- steel mills, ball bearing plants, etc. Bombers were, however, unnecessary when the United States and Israel wanted to destroy some centrifuges crucial to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. They used the Stuxnet computer “worm” to accelerate or slow processes at Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility, damaging or even fragmenting centrifuges necessary for producing weapons-grade material. According to Slate magazine columnist Fred Kaplan, by early 2010, approximately 2,000 of 8,700 “were damaged beyond repair,” and even after the Iranians later learned what was happening, another 1,000 of the then-remaining 5,000 “were taken out of commission.”
For fascinating details on the episodes mentioned above, and to understand how deeply we have drifted into legally and politically uncharted waters, read Kaplan’s new book, “Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.” Three of its lessons are that cyberwar resembles war, much of it is very secret and everything essential to the functioning of modern society is vulnerable.

The things controlled by or through computers include not just military assets (command-and-control systems, the guidance mechanisms of smart munitions, etc.) but also hospitals, electric power grids, water works, the valves of dams and the financial transactions of banks. And, Kaplan notes, unlike nuclear weapons or the ballistic missiles to deliver them, cyberweapons do not require large-scale industrial projects or concentrations of scientists with scarce skills. All that is needed to paralyze a complex society and panic its population is “a roomful of computers and a small corps of people trained to use them.”
Clearly the United States needs a cyberdeterrent capacity -- the ability to do unto adversaries anything they might try to do unto us. One problem, however, is that it can be difficult to prove the source of a cyberattack, such as that which Vladimir Putin did not acknowledge launching, but almost certainly did launch, in 2007 to punish Estonia for annoying Russia.

Army Soldiers Will Fight: Buy Them The Tools To Win

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/04/army-soldiers-will-fight-buy-them-the-tools-to-win/?utm_campaign=Breaking+Defense+Daily+Digest&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=28434929&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8-BdKvxE7KMsDXKXGrR07-V1-16LiSZAHxwZGjPTd5mK0Q2hastkyzDiuzAxXkm9DDGSrZfc98QBOO6tQFbZOOz7LngA&_hsmi=28434929
By GORDON SULLIVAN on April 14, 2016 
Budget battles between the Army and what would become the Air Force date back to the court-martial of Billy Mitchell in 1925. In the late 1990s the two services hurled imprecations, arguments and doctrine at each other as they fought over a shrinking pool of money, a situation not unlike what we face today. Those stresses are resurfacing, albeit with much less rancor and far greater understanding of how important fighting alongside the other services is. But that money pot is still shrinking and budget battles truly are zero-sum games.


Court-martial of Army Air Service Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell.

That’s an important part of the context for both this essay, by Association of the US Army president Gordon Sullivan — a retired Army Chief of Staff — and an earlier op-edby retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula and Doug Birkey of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an offshoot of the Air Force Association. Both articles respond to the bold statement by the Army’s chief futurist, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, that “we are outranged and outgunned by many potential adversaries,” McMaster said, “[and] our army in the future risks being too small to secure the nation.” The Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, largely concurred with McMaster’s dire assessment. But Deptula and Birkeywarned against “parochial budget posturing” and pledged the Air Force and other services would always help the Army out (provided they were properly funded, of course). Now Gen. Sullivan steps in to say that the Army’s soldiers are willing to fight and able to win — but it may take more time and casualties in the future if we shortchange Army budgets now. read on. The Editor.

Lead By Example The Three Most Important Words for Leaders

https://medium.com/the-smoking-gun/lead-by-example-ca506b94d434#.k48d7ssyu
Joshua Chamberlain’s original Medal of Honor, found inside a book at a church fundraising sale in 2013

He stood alone, visibly shaken, chain smoking from a pack of borrowed cigarettes. We’d just taken our first hostile fire of the war, some inaccurate mortar rounds that peppered the rocky soil just outside the hastily-strewn concertina wire that formed our defensive perimeter. But that fire, combined with early reports of division casualties, was enough to push him to the edge. I approached him and stood by his side, facing the opposite direction as I watched the soldiers maneuver carefully to keep their distance from their commander.
“You doin’ alright?” I asked quietly.
“I’m fine,” he answered, his hands shaking noticeably as he took a hard pull on the cigarette.

“I’ve never seen you smoke,” I replied.
“I’m out of Copenhagen.”
“You know,” I said, easing into the meat of the conversation, “this isn’t a good look for you.” I nodded toward the nearby troops, “They’re watching you. They see you’re upset, and it’s upsetting them.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” He spat. “I’m not like you. I can’t just turn it off.”

“Sir,” I began, “they need you now more than ever. This is ‘go time.’ They need to know that you’re in control. They need to see that command presence.”

He took another long pull from the cigarette in his hand, threw it to the ground, and crushed it under the toe of his boot. He stuck his forefinger into the pack and fished out a fresh cigarette and lit it. He looked down at his feet for a moment, then took a breath and turned his head in my direction. “Are you through?” He asked.

I was. I left him there, standing alone, cigarette in trembling hand.

*** China Expanding Its Nuclear Capabilities

China Moves to Expand Its Nuclear Capabilities

Omar Lamrani, Stratfor, April 11, 2016

Forecast

-China will significantly adjust its nuclear force structure, even as it officially maintains its no-first-use and minimal deterrence policies.

-Adjustments will include enlarging the Chinese nuclear arsenal while enhancing its mobility and capabilities.

-As China’s nuclear force grows, the United States and Russia will make a greater effort to include Beijing in future arms control agreements.

Analysis

Since conducting its first successful nuclear test in 1964, China has maintained one of the least belligerent nuclear policies in the world. But certain changes in technology over the past two decades have forced Beijing to re-evaluate its approach. In the coming years, China will look to revamp its nuclear force to keep its deterrent credible against the increasingly lethal arsenals of the United States and Russia.

Of all the nuclear powers, China was the first to declare a no-first-use nuclear policy, pledging to use its nuclear weapons only against states that launch a nuclear attack against it first. Beijing has also promised never to deploy its nuclear weapons on foreign soil, and it has long opposed the idea of establishing an extended nuclear deterrence. Furthermore, though China has built up an arsenal that is both large and diffuse enough to survive an initial strike, it has avoided engaging in an arms race with the United States and Russia to match their nuclear strength. It also stores its nuclear warheads in a separate location from its delivery systems, mating the two only in times of great tension. In short, Beijing has confined its nuclear program to providing a credible but minimal deterrence. 

And for the past few decades, the approach has suited China’s particular needs. Beijing has long understood that it lacks the technological capability, industrial capacity and financial resources needed to keep up with its U.S. and Russian rivals. Joining the massive nuclear arms race of the Cold War would have been a losing proposition, especially since China’s minimal deterrence was effective on its own. (Even though the U.S. and Russian arsenals were vastly superior, China was able to use its expansive geography and numerous underground facilities to maintain its second-strike capability.) 

Beijing also feared the prospect of keeping its nuclear arsenal on high alert, ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Doing so would have made its missiles more vulnerable to seizure and use by rogue forces, a particularly troubling possibility for Beijing during periods of political turbulence, such as the Cultural Revolution. Because of its minimal deterrence policy, China has been better able to ensure that it retains control of its nuclear arsenal.

Beijing’s nuclear doctrine has given it more room to maneuver in its interactions with other nuclear states as well. For example, its own refusal to extend its nuclear deterrence outside its borders has given China the ability to similarly denounce the inclusion of neighboring Japan under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. In addition, China’s stance has likely done less to drive countries in its region, including South Korea and Japan, to pursue their own nuclear arsenals than an aggressive approach would have.

Is Beijing Falling Behind?

However, since the end of the Cold War, technological progress has gradually undermined China’s certainty that its nuclear arsenal and policies are enough to protect it. Though the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals have gotten smaller, they have also become far more accurate — and as a result, more deadly. At the same time, new technologies have dramatically improved countries’ intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, while emerging weaponry, such as hypersonic missiles, is undermining traditional missile defense systems. Each of these developments has weakened Beijing’s ability to rely on its vast territory and underground facilities to protect its nuclear arsenal from attack. The United States, for instance, is in theory much more able to find and destroy China’s nuclear missiles now — no matter where they are located in the country’s expansive terrain — than it was during the Cold War.

Beijing has similar concerns about its nuclear weapons’ offensive effectiveness. Advances in ballistic missile defenses have raised the question among Chinese leaders as to whether their nuclear weapons, should they survive a first strike, would even be able to penetrate an enemy’s defenses.

As China’s assessment of its nuclear posture changes, so will its patterns of investment and technological development. Beijing has already begun pouring more money into the sea leg of its nuclear triad, launching its first nuclear ballistic missile submarine patrol last year. Nuclear submarines are difficult to detect, and their exposure to danger can be reduced when they are used as part of a bastion strategy, which involves protecting nearby seas without venturing too far from Chinese ports. China’s ability to pursue nuclear ballistic missile submarines, which require nuclear warheads to be mated with their delivery systems, can be credited at least in part to Beijing’s growing assurance that it can keep its arsenal secure. The same confidence will encourage the Chinese to start wedding the two sets of components in land-based systems as well, enabling Beijing to order a more immediate nuclear response to any incoming attack.

Meanwhile, China will also continue to grow its nuclear arsenal in a way that improves its chances of surviving an enemy assault. The Chinese are not only moving their missiles from fixed silos to mobile platforms, which are more difficult to target, but they are also building nuclear missiles that have a much longer reach and can be launched from deep in the heart of China. These missiles include the DF-41, the world’s longest-ranged nuclear missile. Moreover, China will begin to rely more on missiles equipped with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs, rather than single warheads. Such missiles have a better chance of making it past an enemy’s ballistic missile defenses with at least some of their warheads intact.

China’s nuclear force alterations will not mean the abandonment of its long-standing no-first-use and minimal deterrence policies. In fact, from its perspective, arsenal upgrades are a necessary measure for maintaining the credible threat underpinning those policies. However, other states are unlikely to assume such benign motives and will remain wary of China’s actions. Rapidly advancing nuclear powers with roughly equivalent arsenals, such as India, may interpret Beijing’s moves as the initial signs of an impending arms race. Even China’s non-nuclear rivals, including Japan, could respond by reviewing their own nuclear positions. Meanwhile, the United States and Russia, ever cognizant of China's increasingly powerful nuclear arsenal, will try to tamp down Beijing’s efforts by integrating it into future arms control agreements.

*** Europe, Islam and Radical Secularism

Reality Check

A daily explanation of what matters and what doesn't in the world of geopolitics.

April 14, 2016

By George Friedman

Post-Enlightenment Europe has replaced its Christian values with secular ones.

In traveling to Europe this week, I am going to a place that is experiencing both an influx of Muslim refugees at the same time that it is experiencing terrorist acts by Muslims. In one sense, this is a very old story. Muslims invaded Europe in the 8th century, seizing Spain and penetrating France. Muslims also invaded Europe from the southeast, penetrating as far as Vienna in the 17th century. Europe invaded Muslim lands during the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Europeans again mounted major penetrations in the 19th and 20th centuries. These were accompanied by lesser attacks as well as population movements. 

So in this sense, this conflict has been waged for well over a thousand years, with endless friction and occasional major movements. This has been a conflict between two religions, which both see their foundations in the book of the Jews, the Old Testament, but expanded on that with new and in some ways contradictory revelations. Both have many followers, and fairly defined, vast territories. In the struggle between Christians and Muslims, both have lost at some times and won at others, but neither has been able to decisively defeat the other.

This seems to be a rather minor phase of conflict in an ongoing war. But this chapter is different in a fundamental way. All prior conflicts have been between Christians and Muslims. This one is not. Since World War II, Europe has redefined itself. It was once Christian. It is now officially secular, and this is therefore a conflict between Muslim religiosity and European secularism. And that makes the dynamics of the conflict different.

Europe has embraced the principles of the French Enlightenment, which holds that religion is an entirely private matter that ought not become part of public life and that cannot be blamed for what others do in public life. The critique of the idea that Islam, migrants and terrorism are the same thing is rooted in a complex understanding of public and private, and collective and individual responsibility based on the complexities of the European enlightenment. 

Europe has become profoundly secular, more so than the United States. That should not surprise anyone since Europe was the center of the Enlightenment. Europe therefore was once a Christian continent, until Christianity became a private matter, seen as one system of belief among many, with the public sphere neutral on all such matters. 

Of course, such neutrality is impossible. Public life is impossible without some shared moral principles. European public life is filled with such principles, usually derived from the themes of the French Revolution, such as liberty, equality and fraternity – the right of citizens to live as they chose, to be treated equally under the law and with brotherhood, in which no one is excluded. These are of course complex values and more interesting in the things they exclude than what they include. They exclude any mention of God in general and Christ in particular. In other words, in neutralizing the public sphere, all religions have been rendered equal and made to respect the values of the public sphere. 

Religions are also political movements, because in reshaping private things like conscience and obligation, they must reshape how the religious behave in public life. Christian private beliefs – or those of any other religion – ultimately demand public action and empower the leadership of the faith to make political demands. Therefore, today the demand to halt abortion derives from a private Christian belief that cannot be contained simply as a private value. Believing in that requires political action. 

That action encounters not merely the moral imperative of public neutrality, but the entire structure of values derived from the Enlightenment. In a sense, Enlightenment values are more extreme than religious ones. They not only object to the religious political agenda, but demand that the religious not express their political will. So on the one hand, all religions are equal, but all must be apolitical, including Christianity, which used to be integral to Europe’s public life.

Glacial mistrust - Whose Siachen is it anyway?

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160415/jsp/opinion/story_80128.jsp#.VxDvIRfhntQ
J.J. Singh
South of the Pamirs, there is a knot of mountains formed by the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Kuen Lun ranges. Emanating from the mighty Karakoram range, which forms the northern crown of India is the Siachen: the second-longest glacier (76 kms) in the world. The Siachen glacier is joined by many smaller glaciers and is the source of the Nubra river, which flows into the Shyok and then after entering Pakistan Occupied Kashmir joins the Indus river. This frozen landscape has craggy and rocky pinnacles and a sea of ice and snow with moraines on both sides. The people of the region have a saying, "The land is so barren and the passes so high that only the best of friends and the fiercest of enemies come by."
As debate on the demilitarization of this frozen battlefield rages in our society and media consequent to the unfortunate natural calamity that struck there recently, the question, "Whose Siachen is it?", begs asking. Did the brave martyrs who made the highest sacrifice on those icy heights die in vain or could the loss of lives be avoided? ask our countrymen. The fact is that de jure the whole of Jammu and Kashmir and de facto the Siachen glacier, an important part of it, are unquestionably Indian. Consequent to the signing of the instrument of accession by the Maharaja of J&K in 1947, the state became a part of the Union of India.

At the end of hostilities in the Indo-Pak war of 1947-48, a ceasefire line in J&K was agreed to by both countries and was authenticated on the maps. This delineation was specific up to a point: NJ 9842. Beyond that, the agreement went on to say, "and thence north to the glaciers". This broad definition was resorted to as neither side had any troops in that area nor believed that the glaciers would one day spawn a conflict. In case the CFL was to run beyond NJ 9842 in a straight-line northeast-ward to the Karakoram Pass as Pakistan's maps depict, the Karachi Agreement would have stated so. After the decisive victory in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, India had every reason to insist on a precise definition of the line of control beyond NJ 9842 in a northward direction along the Saltoro Range towards Indira Col on the Karakoram Range, thereby respecting in letter and spirit the Karachi Agreement of 1949. Historically, too, the Saltoro has been the traditional boundary dividing the Balti people and the Ladakhis. It was a huge political error when we let that opportunity pass. In an engrossing account of the deliberations during the Simla Conference of 1972, Harish Kapadia, a renowned adventurer, has stated, "A desperate Bhutto had pleaded with our Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that he be trusted to do so [to agree to delineate the borders along the Saltoro Range, but later], as he did not want to antagonize his generals at that point in time. Aap mujhpe bharosa kijiye [Trust me], he is reported to have said." We know what happened thereafter.

Defending the frontiers of India, however daunting the challenges posed by an adversary and inhospitable the terrain, is a sacred and primary responsibility of the armed forces. For the defence of the motherland, loss of life or limb and other sacrifices in the line of duty is a part of soldiering. That notwithstanding, one of the most important functions of military leaders is to ensure minimum casualties without compromising operational imperatives. Every soldier's life is precious and a national asset, and that is why the martyrs earn the privilege of being draped in the tricolour and eternal respect of our countrymen. In our case, we must not lose sight of the fact that we have unresolved boundary issues with both Pakistan and China, and hence face a situation of "no war - no peace". Occupation of our territory in Aksai Chin in north Ladakh by China in the early 1950s and Pakistan's intrusions in Kargil in 1999 resulted in costly armed conflicts. Ironically, Rudyard Kipling's words have become a truism: "In times of war and not before, God and the soldier we adore. But in times of peace and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

Why fighting for Balochistan is key to Modi's Pakistan policy Much of the story of the country is uncontested, provided we do not pay undue attention to the neighbour's claims.

Kanchan Gupta 

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/pakistan-balochistan-raw-spy-isi-iran-goldsmith-line-chabahar-gwadar-china-narendra-modi/story/1/10051.html
Activists fighting for a cause, especially one that has a lot of popular emotion attached to it, are usually loud and shrill when holding forth at public fora. They tend to be belligerent and turn excessively aggressive if their views are contradicted.
In a sense, loud speech, belligerence and aggression are necessary for effective activism. After all, if an activist is an easy pushover, then his or her cause cannot be worth fighting for. At the same time, needlessly pushy activism can put off people and make them indifferent to causes that could be perfectly legitimate and deserving of support.

History
Hence listening to professor Naela Quadri Baloch at a recent discussion on Balochistan organised by the Observer Research Foundation came as a pleasant surprise. She was soft-spoken yet firm, persuasive yet polite. She presented her case, or rather the case for free Balochistan, without taking recourse to either maudlin sentiments or theatrical hyperbole.


Balochistan continues to witness horrors. (Reuters)
Much of the story of Balochistan is uncluttered and uncontested, provided we do not pay undue attention and attach unwarranted credibility to Pakistan's claims. In 1947, when British colonial rule came to an end in the Indian subcontinent, 535 princely states were given the option of either acceding to India or Pakistan through merger of territory, or remain free and independent.
The Khan of Kalat, which comprised nearly all of Balochistan barring three minor principalities, was not too eager to accede to Pakistan. The Baloch were, and remain, a fiercely independent people with their own cultural and social identity, along with a land endowed with natural resources. That early impulse for freedom became the root cause of Balochistan's subsequent misery.
Since its violent Caesarian birth, assisted by a scalpel-wielding Britain, on August 14, 1947, Pakistan has been as deceitful as its Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was during his brief and bitter life as the ruler of a moth-eaten country, one half of which fell off the map in 1971.

Jinnah, the barrister helped the Khan of Kalat to prepare his brief for independence and a Standstill Agreement in the interim. Jinnah the smash-and-grab politician paved the path for Kalat's annexation by Pakistan on March 27, 1948. Thus was Balochistan forcibly converted into a province of Pakistan, against the wishes of the Baloch and their Khan.
Balochistan's struggle against Pakistani rule and Islamabad's "One Unit" policy has been relentless since the annexation of Kalat. Brutal repression by the Pakistani army has failed to break the spirit of resistance. Beginning with 1948-49, it has been horrific campaign to put down dissent and silence voice of freedom.
There are several similarities between the Pakistani army committing hideous crimes in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Balochistan. Mass killings, rape of women, laying human habitations to waste, targeted assassinations, Bangladesh saw it all during its Liberation War of 1971. Balochistan continues to witness these horrors.

Butcher
General Tikka Khan, nicknamed the "Butcher of Bangladesh", had the dubious distinction of also being called the "Butcher of Balochistan" for the bloody campaign he led from 1973-77. But for all the sorrow, grief and misery heaped on the people of Balochistan, they have risen again. The freedom movement, relaunched in 2004 continues unabated.
Divided by the Goldsmith Line of 1871, Balochistan is split between Pakistani and Iranian occupation, with some bits spilling into Afghanistan on account of the flawed Durand Line. Britain understood the strategic importance of Balochistan and played its game accordingly to keep the Russians out. Today, both Pakistan and Iran are leveraging that strategic importance to further their own economic and security interests.
India's position on Balochistan has been, at best, ambivalent. Notwithstanding the arrest of an Indian national (Pakistan claims he is a "RAW agent" and was arrested on its side of the Goldsmith Line; there are credible claims he was arrested by the Iranians and handed over to the ISI) it would be silly to imagine a grand Indian conspiracy in action. New Delhi has long been incapable of doing what Indira Gandhi did in 1970-71.

Option

Yet there is a case for an Indian policy on Balochistan. India did play a major role in propping up the Northern Alliance so as not to concede all ground to the Taliban and its mentor, Pakistan, in Afghanistan. A hands-off approach, therefore, is lacking in precedence, even if we were to discount India's proactive role in the liberation of Bangladesh from the tyranny of Pakistan.
The issue is what should be that policy. Investing in Chabahar port that lies on the Iranian side of Balochistan cannot be a policy in entirety. At best, it will partially countervail China's captive port at Gwadar on the Pakistani side of Balochistan. That's one pawn moved. Next what?

India’s Rock ’n’ Roll Approach to Guarding Its Nuclear Sites

http://www.newsweek.com/india-nuclear-sites-rock-roll-426134?piano_t=1

By Adrian Levy and R. Jeffrey Smith On 2/14/16

This article first appeared on the Center for Public Integrity site.
On October 8, 2014, Head Constable Vijay Singh awoke before dawn in Kalpakkam, India, and scurried across the ocher gravel outside the constabulary barracks at the Madras Atomic Power Station, “looking like the monsoon was about to break,” as a grounds sweeper later recalled.
Singh was one of 620 paramilitary officers in the country’s Central Industrial Security Force assigned to protect the facility’s nuclear-related buildings and materials. But he did not have his usual tasks in mind that morning.
By 4:40 a.m., the 44-year-old officer reached the armory, where he signed out a 9 mm submachine gun and 60 rounds of ammunition in two magazines. Singh loaded one clip into his weapon, pocketed the other and entered the portico of a cream and red, three-story residential complex.
He climbed up one flight to the room where a senior colleague, Mohan Singh, dozed and abruptly opened fire at him in a controlled burst, to conserve rounds, just as he had been trained.
Then he jogged downstairs, where he shot dead two more men and seriously injured another two. With 10 rounds left in his magazine, and an unused 30-round clip in his pocket, he prowled unimpeded across the gravel, with no alert called.
A bystander shouted out to him, and suddenly Singh halted and dropped to his knees, an eyewitness recalled later. He was finally surrounded and led away, glassy-eyed, “as docile as anything, a neat guy, his hair still perfectly parted,” the witness said.
The episode was a fresh example of what officials here and outside India depict as serious shortcomings in the country’s nuclear guard force, tasked with defending one of the world’s largest stockpiles of fissile material and nuclear explosives.

An estimated 90 to 110 Indian nuclear bombs are stored in six or so government-run sites patrolled by the same security force, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, an independent think tank, and Indian officials.
Within the next two decades, as many as 57 reactors could also be operating under the force’s protection, as well as four plants where spent nuclear fuel is dissolved in chemicals to separate out plutonium to make new fuel or be used in nuclear bombs.
The sites are spread out over vast distances: from the stony foothills of the Himalayas in the north down to the red earth of the tropical south. Shuttling hundreds of miles in between will be occasional convoys of lightly protected trucks laden with explosive and fissile materials—including plutonium and enriched uranium—that could be used in civilian and military reactors or to spark a nuclear blast.
As a result, the Kalpakkam shooting alarmed Indian and Western officials who question whether this country, which is surrounded by unstable neighbors and has a history of civil tumult, has taken adequate precautions to safeguard its sensitive facilities and keep the building blocks of a devastating nuclear bomb from being stolen by insiders with grievances, ill motives or, in the worst case, connections to terrorists.

Although experts say they regard the issue as urgent, Washington is not pressing India for quick reforms. The Obama administration is instead trying to avoid any dispute that might interrupt a planned expansion of U.S. military sales to New Delhi, several senior U.S. officials said in interviews.
The experts’ concerns are based in part on a series of documented nuclear security lapses in the past two decades, in addition to the shooting:
Several kilograms of what authorities described as semiprocessed uranium were stolen by a criminal gang, allegedly with Pakistani links, from a state mine in Meghalya, in northeastern India, in 1994. Four years later, a federal politician was arrested near the West Bengal border with 100 kilograms of uranium from India’s Jadugoda mining complex that he was allegedly attempting to sell to Pakistani sympathizers associated with the same gang. A police dossier seen by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) states that 10 more people connected with smuggling were arrested two years after this, in operations that recovered 57 pounds of stolen uranium.

US wants a stronger Indian military to deter, not provoke, conflict with China - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/us-wants-a-stronger-indian-military-to-deter-not-provoke-conflict-with-china-mind-the-dangerous-gap/#sthash.jdljHHBB.dpuf

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/us-wants-a-stronger-indian-military-to-deter-not-provoke-conflict-with-china-mind-the-dangerous-gap/

US wants a stronger Indian military to deter, not provoke, conflict with China

If the United States could flip a switch and make the Indian military more powerful than it is today, it would have every interest in doing so

Written by Benjamin Schwartz | Updated: April 12, 2016 

If the United States could flip a switch and make the Indian military more powerful than it is today, it would have every interest in doing so. The US has other interests as well, such as maintaining its military edge and ensuring that its “crown jewel” defence technology doesn’t find its way into the hands of adversaries like Russia. But for the foreseeable future, the US has interest in a stronger Indian military. This was not always true. Indeed, this was not the case about 20 years ago. The most significant difference between now and then is the growing capability and assertiveness of the Chinese military. Now, it is very important to be very clear about the very big difference between an interest in a stronger Indian military and an interest in an Indian military that is in conflict with China. America has no interest in the latter. In public, Americans often skirt around the topic of China in discussions of the US-Indian defence partnership. There are a number of good reasons for this, including the fact that this partnership is important for a range of reasons that have nothing to do with China. But one reason that mention of China is avoided is because of concern that public discussion will feed into a false perception that the US is trying to push India into a conflict with China. Unfortunately, ambiguity seems to have fed the Indian public’s anxiety.

So it is important to highlight the widespread consensus among thought leaders in Washington DC that no one seeks a military conflict with China. And we don’t want to see India in a conflict either. In fact, this is precisely the reason why a stronger Indian military is in America’s interest. Relative military weakness is provocative. The trajectory of China’s growing military capabilities threatens to widen the gap between China’s military capabilities and those of India. This is the kind of gap that increases the chance of conflict. And the US and India have an undeniable common interest in trying to prevent it from growing further.

Unfortunately, this common interest is often overshadowed and, instead, there is focus on the “foundational defence agreements”. As someone who worked on these issues while serving in the US government, it’s difficult to understand why this is the case because as Pratap Bhanu Mehta recently noted in this newspaper, these are “prosaic agreements” (‘The American hug’, April 2). They are basic arrangements that facilitate rather than compel military-to-military cooperation and certainly do not “prematurely foreclose” India’s options. They are a far cry from anything approaching a treaty or alliance, which suggests they are widely misunderstood or being criticised for political purposes. I hope that they are signed because they do help facilitate military cooperation, but they will not lead to some kind of military alliance.

* A billion-dollar digital opportunity for oil companies

http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/a-billion-dollar-digital-opportunity-for-oil-companies?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1604
By Richard Ward

Making better use of existing technology can deliver serious returns—by increasing production, streamlining the supply chain, or reducing engineering time.
The computers in the offices of the average big oil company can find an additional $1 billion in value, if you let them.
Modern advanced-analytics programs are able to diagnose, sort, compare, and identify cost savings, or opportunities for increased production, in a manner beyond the capabilities of the average employee. The tools that allow you to do this have been available for several years, but adoption by the oil and gas industry has been slow. This is partly the result of the recent crash in oil prices, but competing internal IT projects and organizational reluctance to put in the effort required are also factors.
In this article, three stories are told. In each story, the average big oil company (AB Oil Co.)1 could realize $1 billion in cost savings or production increases by deploying technologies that exist today.
Finding $1 billion in the supply chain

The vendors have been brought in for meetings. AB Oil Co. has demanded discounts, and the vendors have agreed. What more can be done to save money?
For the past several years, hundreds of millions of design, procurement, and operational choices have been made by the organization. Valves have been sized and ordered, casing-team contracts awarded, and orders for cement placed, pretty much with the same vendors in the same way. In the meantime, some vendors were charging less in one field than another; some crews had fewer failures than others; one supplier had lowered the cost of an entire class of suitable products. But AB Oil’s engineers never took advantage of any of these opportunities. Why? Because there is too much of this type of information: there are too many dynamic variables in too many places for any single person to know everything, or enough to make optimal decisions. It is too much even for a team of professionals dedicated to the task.
But it is not too much for your computers.
The new generation of advanced-analytics programs are able to execute a massive analysis of all these data, normalize them, and identify opportunities for cost savings that can be leveraged across future operations.

In one case, a super-major drilling horizontal shale wells in North America found that its costs, as well as those of its competitors, varied highly across plays. The company assembled a data team and collected information from finance, operations, competitor investor presentations, and industry news stories. A software program did bottom-up analysis, churning through millions of records, normalizing, correlating, and seeking high-probability maximums and minimums, guided by an experienced team of engineers and procurement staff. At the end of this multiweek process, the team could confidently propose critical changes to casing design, procurement, and casing crew selection.
The savings came to $700,000 per well. As this company had about 1,300 future wells to drill, the total potential was $910 million—not quite a billion, but awfully close.
Saving $1 billion in engineering time

AB Oil Co. employs tens of thousands of engineers and technicians working on thousands of projects. They are scattered around offices and facilities in many locations and time zones. Instinctively, we know that not all those projects can be successful, or even efficient in how they operate. The challenge for oil and gas companies long has been how to quantify, and thereby identify, the poor performers. Project reviews inevitably surface unique circumstances that justify the status quo, and reviewers are rarely given the resources to drill down to the root causes of poor performance.

But your computers can.

A new analytical method to study this exact problem was developed in the world of Formula One racing, in which global racing teams have hundreds of engineers pursuing thousands of technical projects in parallel. Researchers gathered communications data (for example, email subject lines, dates, and names), interim work products (for example, meeting presentations), time sheets, staff locations, and travel expenses. Then, using analytical tools, they were able to gain comprehensive views of the efficiency and effectiveness of the different teams. Without the bias of any top-down assumptions (for example, that bigger teams are less efficient), the tools processed millions of correlations and hypotheses. Each step in the analysis highlighted high correlations with and predictions of high performance while eliminating low-value insights. After thousands of iterations, two clear sources of inefficiency became apparent.