Monthly Archives: January 2012

Maybe

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…Value Added Taxes aren’t all they’ve been cracked up to be.  The Wall Street Journal reports

China has removed a value-added tax on vegetable distribution retroactively to Jan. 1 as part of efforts to curb rising food prices, which have contributed to inflationary pressure over the past year.

Lifting the VAT on vegetables will lower production costs for wholesale retailers, who typically pass such costs on to consumers.

and

“The lower costs benefit distribution companies, especially vegetable wholesalers,” said Gao Wang, an analyst at Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultant Ltd.

A year ago, Beijing launched a wide-ranging government drive to increase food supplies, and had taken aim at improving the nation’s agricultural production distribution as part of that effort.

Hmm….

America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part II

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I wrote earlier about American defense policy here.  We saw there, and in my series of foreign policy posts, what war looks like from foreign and defense policy perspectives.  At this point, it’s useful to ask what defense policy principles we need to guide our defense behaviors and our force structure.  Defense policy itself drives, ultimately, defense strategy, and this drives, ultimately, force structure.  (I’ll not get into tactics in this series of posts; although strategy certainly does drive tactics as well as force structure.)  In this post, then, I’d like to get into some specific defense principles that I consider critical to our safety and future as they drive our defense policies.  In a later post, I’ll suggest some defense policies that both implement these principles and that give sound, concrete guidance to our defense strategies, and after that I’ll suggest some necessary force structures.

The most important principle for our defense establishment is that our defense must be built around the concept winning across the full spectrum of conflict, and across the full spectrum of kinds of enemy combatants.  We’ve seen in the Korean and the Viet Nam Wars the failures of fighting merely to hold, or to contain—deliberately fighting solely to a draw.  This is the point of having an ability to defend ourselves.  The spectrum of conflict runs, in one dimension, from economic war, through cyber war, and a full range of physical combat: low-level conflict (as measured, in one way, by the amount of soldiery and equipment committed to the war relative to the enemy’s or our total military establishment), through terror war, to all-out war.  The spectrum runs in another dimension from nation states as the enemy combatant(s), through non-national entities engaging in terror attacks (or other forms of war) and the nation states that harbor, if not outright support these terror organizations.  There can be no area of combat, no type of combat that we do not decisively dominate, and we must be able actively to deny sanctuary in any area to our enemy.  And there can be no question that decisive victory must be our objective.  Less than that simply invites renewed conflict at a later time and place of our enemies’ choosing.

As anyone with any military experience knows, control of the high ground is central to efficient use of force in achieving victory.  It’s certainly possible win from the low ground, but that is expensive at best in lives and treasure, and it’s wasteful of those lives and treasure when better alternatives are—or should have been—available.  Accordingly, the next principle must be control of the high ground.  Assured access is highly important, but it’s insufficient: better to be there already and in control of it; this, in turn, assures that access.

Today’s high ground is in space.  However, with today’s technology, and with the technology being developed by the PRC and by Russia (and (for now more slowly) by terrorist nations like Iran and northern Korea), the high ground of space is not earth orbit.  This high ground now extends much further: it includes the moon and lunar orbit, and it includes the LaGrange Points L4 and L5, gravitationally stable regions in front of and behind the moon at the moon’s altitude above the earth.  The high ground, and the race for it, won’t end here, though: as our enemies’ technology and capability improves, the high ground will move outward, to Mars in the next 20 years, and beyond Jupiter by the end of this century.  The advantages of controlling the high ground of space are obvious.

With this control, we can protect our economic infrastructure that relies to increasing extent on space-based assets: our GPS constellation that lets our automobiles navigate in strange cities, among other things; our communications satellites, that let us make cheap, clear telephone calls intercontinentally or let us see and hear first hand the struggles of fellow human beings as they fight against oppression in tyrannical nations; that also support our information access through television and the Internet; that together with our GPS constellation also power such appliances as OnStar®; and so on.  With this control we can protect similar systems critical to our government’s and defense’s operability around the globe.  With this control, we can deny access to our enemies, including their access for attacks on our systems, at times of our choosing.  With this control, we can achieve an additional direction from which to attack their surface to surface missiles and even their aircraft.  With this control we can maintain quality surveillance of their surface forces and weapons systems development and disposition.  The list goes on.

Our defense policies also need to be built around a principle of flexibility.  Flexibility here involves mobility, agility, and adaptability of both the weapons and support systems and of the soldiers themselves.  Mobility is especially critical.  One of the reasons the Crusader self-propelled howitzer was cancelled, for instance, was because it was so huge and amobile [sic] that a single Crusader required two large transport aircraft to deliver it with its initial ammunition load and its supporting equipment.  And it couldn’t go anywhere under its own power in rough terrain, like, oh say, the mountains of Afghanistan. In the end, a weapon that can hit a target 40 miles away but that is unable to move quickly with the tide of battle has no more value than the Maginot Line.

Each of the weapons systems our soldiers are expected to use must be able to operate across a range of terrains, whether physical or electronic or in space, and the systems must be mobile—able to move under its own power quickly or be rapidly loadable onto mobile, cheap transport systems—across the full range of terrain.  Each of these systems must also be easily and quickly loadable onto air transports, air droppable into the combat zone, and then able to go immediately into battle.  Physically, this terrain includes space, urban, desert, hilly and mountainous, muddy and rocky; sea, river, swamp; and so on.  Critical terrain also includes the virtual terrain of cyberspace.  Clearly, no individual system can be expected to operate over every type of terrain, but the totality of our systems must be operable over every type of terrain.  There can be no sanctuary space for our enemies.

Our systems require agility on the battle field.  Our spaced-oriented systems must be highly maneuverable and responsive in space, and our earth-based systems must be similarly very maneuverable on any land or water terrain, across the full spectrum terrain described above.

Our soldiers must be agile.  This includes hard physical conditioning, but it also includes their personal equipment—their weapons, batteries, ammunition, supplies, and so on: everything they carry by hand or in their packs.  This equipment must be both highly lethal and easily packed and transported in their packs as they travel on foot, as their transportation systems fail through battle damage, cyber attack, even “ordinary” wear and tear-related breakdowns.

Our weapons and logistics systems must be adaptable.  This goes beyond an ability to adapt systems to differing fuels availability, or being able to air transport via slings and helicopters, or on trucks, or inside cargo planes, and the like.  It also includes things like computer-aided or -controlled systems being able to be controlled manually as the computer systems become degraded or completely destroyed through battle damage or cyber attacks.

Our soldiers especially must be adaptable.  This isn’t limited to the need to adapt to the changing combat environment of a fight in progress.  It includes adaptability necessary to move from one kind of fight (counterterrorism, for instance) to another kind of fight (stability operations, for instance) to yet another kind of fight (total war, for instance) rapidly and with minimal need for personal equipment change out and similarly minimal need for retraining for the new fight.  But the needed adaptability goes beyond this, too.  It must also include the ability to adapt their own fighting to the use of their degraded weapons systems as battle damage accumulates, and even (especially) an ability to adapt to using what used to be (at least largely) automated systems manually, as battle damage accumulates yet farther—whether from physical damage to their systems or from cyberwar components of the fight in progress attacking their automating and computational control systems.

Successful implementation of these principles of demanding outright victory, controlling the high ground, and of being highly flexible while maintaining extreme lethality will maximize our ability to win any war that is thrust upon us.

Of course, these principles will need the implementation of defense policies governing more than the physical nature of defense; they’ll need technology and development policies as well.  I’ll go into some of those policies in my next post on this subject.

(Un)employment

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The initial employment numbers from December were quite favorable: roughly 200,000 new jobs were added, almost all in the private sector (government employment shrank a small amount), and the unemployment rate ticked down to 8.5%.  These are numbers worth watching, as a recovery may be in progress, despite President Obama’s economic policies.  But  these numbers don’t tell the whole story.

First, Seeking Alpha describes some of “the rest of the story.”  When the current malaise, loss of our edge, and descent into laziness began in December 2007, the civilian non-institutional population* of the United States was 190 million, and the labor force was a tad over 125 million.  As of December 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the “civilian non-institutional population” had increased to roughly 194 million, or 3.7 million higher (the difference includes rounding error from my own rounding) than it was those four years ago, and the labor force was 124 million.  BLS also says  that the employment population ratio was 58.5% as of last month.   Multiplying the increase in the U.S. population over the four years by the employment population ratio, says Seeking Alpha, implies that our labor force should have increased by 2 million to more than 127 million, not decreased to the 124 million actually reported: more than three million people are missing in the BLS figures.  (Note that, given the way the unemployment rate is calculated, a smaller labor force produces a better (headline) unemployment rate: dividing the number of employed in December 2011 by the size of the labor force that should exist based on the BLS’ population numbers gives us an unemployment rate of 9.6%, not 8.5%.)

What about those 3 million people, then?  The BLS says these folks left the labor force and that this justifies purging them from the statistics.  It’s certainly true that if 3 million Americans left the labor force—gave up and stopped looking for work—it’s valid for them to be scrubbed from the employment numbers.  (As an aside, note that this departure from the labor pool is a continuing trend: 2011’s labor pool is smaller than 2010’s, despite an increasing total national population.) Thus, it’s not inaccurate—as far as it goes—to say that of the population looking for work, their unemployment rate is the reported 8.6%.  But now think about what it means for 3 million folks to have just given up on finding jobs.  It’s clear that the current recession is continuing (yes, yes, I’m aware that by the consecutive quarters official measure, this recession ended ‘way back in 2009—see how your unemployed neighbor, or your spouse, or yourself feels about that), and no economic recovery has taken place or is in progress.

The Wall Street Journal describes another aspect of the story concerning long-term problems that exist and that will persist as a result of this prolonged recession.

Long-term unemployment remains above 15%, down only trivially from 15.3% to 15.2% last month.  Additionally, our labor market has, over the last 20 years, lost much of the edge it enjoyed over other developed countries.  Some of this is due to the deterioration of our education system, so that our relative gains from the last century due to our education are disappearing.  There are demographic causes, too: we relocate less frequently and change jobs less often, which makes the job market less flexible, as employers are less able to find the workers they want.  If the desired worker isn’t local, the employer has to do without, pay more for more training, or pay more for relocation costs.  And as seen above, a smaller share of us are working.

Additionally, there are 5.6 million Americans that have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and of these, 3.9 million have gone unemployed for a year or more.  Indeed, these 5.6 million out of work for half a year or more represent fully 42.5% of our unemployed.  This, of course, is in addition to those millions that have given up on finding a job.  This long-term unemployment rate forms a vicious circle, also.  The longer people go unemployed, the less (re)hirable they become.  Reasons for this vary, but they include deterioration of skills and the stigma of having already been long-term unemployed.  This can lead, domestically, to the same situation that has occurred in Europe: an underclass of semi-permanently unemployed labor develops, with all of the negative implications for any hope of overall productivity, and regardless of what we might think of social welfare programs, for those programs as well.

There’s another dimension to this negative feedback loop: a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, “Recessions and the Cost of Job Loss,” by Steven Davis and Till von Wachter found that workers who lose their job when unemployment is low—below 6%—lose on average 1.4 years’ worth of earnings.  This is bad enough, but it turns out that those who lose their jobs when unemployment is above 8%—the current jobless population—lose 2.8 years’ worth of their pre-job-loss wages, or twice as much.  Von Wachter, et al., also found that unemployed workers’ earnings fall 1% for each additional month they’re out of work (recall the long-term unemployed numbers above), and that those losses can last for years even after they find another job.  There’s further fallout from this: those lower earnings result in less revenue for government regardless of tax rates and regardless of what we might think of how much money government actually needs.

The longer the government stays in the way of the economy and our recovery, the worse our economy will be and the more difficult and slow any recovery will be because the more entrenched these feedback loops will get.

*BLS-speak for “persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.”

National Defense Cuts vs National Defense Purpose

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Yochi J. Dreazen  of the National Journal describes the announced US military reduction as follows.  He characterizes the reduction as “a decisive shift away from manpower-heavy counterinsurgencies like Afghanistan,”  and this isn’t inaccurate.  Our military leadership, in fact, insists

that ground wars like Afghanistan are a thing of the past while air and naval conflicts with nations like Iran or China represent the most important threats of the future. The document explicitly said the Pentagon will shift military and financial resources away from Europe and toward the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

and consequently,

potentially significant cuts to the size of the Army and Marine Corps[.]

However,

Both men [Panetta and Obama] have previously indicated that the purchases of costly armaments like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive warplane ever built, and several next-generation types of warships may be slowed or reduced to save money, though they offered no new details on Thursday.

There are some problems with this thinking, though.  In the first place, if the primary upcoming threats are Iran and the PRC, then what do they call the terrorist organizations like the ones actively at war with us now?  These are just competitors, then?

Secondly, if we’re to rely on our Navy in the Asia-Pacific region, and PRC is building up its navy, its long-range counter-ship capability, and its air force, how will we deter and defeat that threat without modernized—and more—ships?

Thirdly, do we no longer care about the safety of our only reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel?  Are there no important threats there to our interests or to our ally?  Or, for how long do the Pentagon and the White House expect that Israel can hold out while we’re “spoiling” an attack there, perhaps one by a nuclear Iran, while we are fully engaged elsewhere?

Additionally, air and naval forces can’t seize and hold territory—which is what terrorist organizations and their supporting nations, as well as directly threatening nations occupy.  To defeat these enemies, we need to take their territory away from them and hold it ourselves until a more peaceable government can be installed.  That requires ground forces not merely equipped and trained to the task, but numerous enough for it, as well.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says

The U.S. joint force will be smaller and it will be leaner.   The Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support the kind of large-scale, long-term stability operations that dominated military priorities…over the past decade.

He’s partly correct.  The Marines are an expeditionary force, best used for power projection and for breaking down the barriers to entry into enemy territory, and it’s the Army’s job to complete that entry and then to effect the subsequent destruction of the enemy’s ability to prosecute his war against us.  Reversion of the Marines to its primary role—if that’s what’s actually intended, and not simply a “cost-saving” across the board slashing of manpower for its own sake—is a useful move.  However, also stripping the Army of the numbers it needs to do its job—and there is a threshold number required, regardless of skill and equipage—simply strips us of our ability to protect ourselves.

Dreazen adds

Canceling or curtailing planned weapons buys is always difficult politically because lawmakers typically work to shield armaments built in their states as a way of saving jobs. It is likely to be even harder now because of election-year partisanship and legitimate concerns about the Pentagon taking steps that would almost certainly mean job losses at a time of deep economic weakness throughout the U.S.

To a large extent, though, as with the “smaller and leaner” bit above, this is only partially true.  Where weapons systems cuts are legitimate—the F-22 is a prime example of a boon-doggle, and the F-35, within the new defense concept, is of questionable value, unless it can deliver the goods in the secondary “spoiling” engagements elsewhere in the world that is a part of this new “fight one and hope for the best everywhere elsedenying and deterring aggression elsewhere” strategy—the systems should be eliminated and the funds put to better use in the DoD.

On the other hand, systems that are necessary for this new strategy (vis., modernized and enlarged naval forces, longer-ranged air forces with larger payloads and better protection systems, and additional forward basing systems in places like, oh say, the Republic of China, the Republic of the Philippines, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of India) will need to be increased, not cut.  Congressmen of all parties and independencies will have to decide whether they’re going to be partisan hacks for favored private companies or Representatives of their constituents come together with their fellows at the Federal level, and look to doing what’s best for the nation as a whole: making the requisite cuts here and increases there, regardless of personal political profit.

Finally, I have to ask:  Is Panetta now suggesting we have no more need of dealing with terrorists?  The GWOT is over?  As I mentioned above, neither insurgency and its associated terrorism, nor terrorism directed against us or our friends and allies, are destroyed unless someone is prepared, in the aftermath of the fighting, to occupy the territory and engage in “stability operations.”  In the end, assuming we’ve won the proximate fight, who else will conduct the stability operations?  The just defeated nation?  With what resources, and to what motivated end?  Europe?  With what resources?  They ran out of bombs five minutes into the Libyan No Fly campaign and had to drop American ordnance for the duration.  Given that failure, from where will Europe get the manpower and equipment—including civil engineering manpower and equipment—to conduct stability operations?  Or is Panetta’s plan to simply to shoot up the area, crush the enemy forces in the field, for today, and then just walk away?  This seems somehow…incomplete.

In the end, the Pentagon and the White House seem to have lost sight of a fundamental tenet: quantity has a quality of its own.  What’s the value of the best trained, best equipped, most courageous and dedicated force in the world if it can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers from an attacker that cares not a whit about his own casualty rate, so long as he kills and wins the battle?  The terrorists in the World Trade Center attacks achieved ~110:1 kill ratio, and at Mumbai the terrorists achieved a kill ratio of nearly 20:1.  Across both attacks, one attacker survived.  The enemy simply didn’t care; he achieved his goals.

In the Korean War, the PRC forces kept coming against the American and Republic of Korean forces, absorbing enormous casualties to achieve their victories.  Over the course of the Chosin Reservoir battle, for instance, the Chinese absorbed nearly 50% casualties in their attempt to pen up and destroy an Allied force half their size at the start of the battle.  Even though the allied force escaped, the Chinese carried the battlefield, and so they counted the outcome as worth its cost.

Our enemies don’t think like us; it’s foolish—and fatal—to base our planning, strategy, and tactics on the assumption that they do.

It appears the present “draw-down” is based more on political rationale than on the evolving threat environment.  Our new national defense concept seems based on a muddled, ill-thought out view of the purpose of our national defense, and of who the threats against us really are.

There are nation-states that remain our enemies and would like nothing more than to see our destruction.  War is not out of the question with these.  There are non-national organizations that already are at war with us, intending to destroy us.  The force structures and capability sets necessary to engage and destroy these threats are as different from each other as are the threats themselves.

Does any rational person really think the proposed rump military that will result from the present reduction will be capable of being fully engaged simultaneously against both types of threats and defeat them—rather than itself being destroyed in those battles leaving us disarmed and helpless?  Or that it’ll be able to function at all without control of the high ground—space—which went completely unmentioned?

Misunderstanding the Threat

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Former CIA Director Michael Hayden (USAF Gen, ret) is reported by FoxNews as saying,

But externally it [closing the Straits of Hormuz] just doesn’t make any sense.

Number one, they [Iran] need the straits as much, perhaps more, than anyone else, the free flow of oil, otherwise their economy is more in the tank than it is today.  Number two, does closing the straits make Iran more or less isolated? … Does closing the straits make it more or less likely that someone will think it’s a legitimate step to attack the nuclear facility at Natanz?  I think it makes it more likely.  So why would the Iranians do that?

Our government’s blinders here (yes, Hayden isn’t any longer in the government, but those who are think similarly) is the utter misunderstanding of Iran and its goals.  As Hayden also says, “This government and its decision-making processes are incredibly opaque.”

I offer some clarification, from my lofty perch on my navel.

“Number one, they need the straits as much, perhaps more, than anyone else, the free flow of oil, otherwise their economy is more in the tank than it is today.”  Number one, the sanctions going into place have the potential to seriously threaten their ability to export oil due to a lack of buyers.  In that scenario, no, they won’t “need the straits…”.

“Number two, does closing the straits make Iran more or less isolated?”  Does Iran care about its isolation?  Certainly the lack of international intercourse can hurt, but is the Iranian government’s pain tolerance the same as ours?  Plainly not.  Nor does the Iranian government care about its isolation as isolation.  Finally, do the Iranian people have any capacity to act, should they disagree with their government?  Those people watched while a previous American administration seemed to incite Iraqis to rebellion against Saddam after our first Iraq war and then stood by while Saddam butchered the Shiites and Kurds.  Lately, they did try to act against their government and experienced the present administration standing by and watching the present Iranian government butcher them.

“Does closing the straits make it more or less likely that someone will think it’s a legitimate step to attack the nuclear facility at Natanz?”  The Iranian government, after years of loud and vociferous chit-chat and firm finger-shaking by the rest of the world, and after years of active support by Russia and the PRC for the Iranian nuclear program, has no reason seriously to think anyone will do anything at all along these lines.  Oh, and not being complete fools, they have been dispersing and bunkering their nuclear weapons facilities.  They think the Israelis might have the stones to act, even though an Israeli mission is fraught with difficulties and has an uncertain outcome.  The Iranian government isn’t too worried about strikes; a greater or lesser likelihood of one is irrelevant to them.

Understanding the threat from a nation begins with understanding that government’s goals.  Let’s broaden Hayden’s question of “why would the Iranians do that?”  One overriding goal of Iran’s is the utter destruction of Israel.  To that end, a successful nuclear weapons program gives them the tools with which to achieve that.  They don’t care the cost to themselves of achieving that destruction; indeed, Iran (at least those who populate the government; the only ones whose goals matter) will simply view their own fate as honored martyrdom.

Another overriding goal of theirs is the destruction of the United States.  To that end, a successful nuclear weapons program also is useful for arming terrorist groups who then will attack the United States (and Europe, and the hands that feed their armorer, Russia and the PRC).  Again, both the terrorists and the Iranian government will simply view their own destruction as a  martyrdom to be sought after.

This threat doesn’t think like we do.  Basing our assessments on the premise that they do is fatally flawed.