Tag Archives: defense policy

Dealing with Terrorists

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In the ongoing “negotiations” with the Iranian government over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear weapons program, our politicians are beginning to have rubbed in their faces the utter duplicity of the men and women reigning over Iran.

Though Iranian negotiators have sought to move forward on talks, the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s powerful paramilitary force, has undermined talks with repeated attacks, according to multiple US officials.

The civilians in Tehran profess to be…negotiating…the status of the Strait while, at the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is attacking shipping in the Strait and claiming that the Strait is closed.

The fact of the matter is that the IRGC—paramilitary or formal military—is an arm of the Iranian government. Either the Tehran civilians are using the IRGC to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity, or—as increasingly seems likely—the IRGC runs the government and is using the civilian arm to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity.

Either way, the words of the Iranian government men and women are completely worthless. It’s time to leave off from the current Trumpian love taps in reaction to Iran’s attacks on shipping through the Strait and the terrorists’ disingenuousity regarding “negotiations” over their nuclear weapons program. It’s time to impose a full scope—kinetic, cyber, economic—attack on Iran, and keep it up until the terrorists are physically incapable of any further kinetic or cyber activity.

President Donald Trump (R) has said that Iran has asked for talks as these love taps have resumed. In order for those talks to occur, Trump should require the Iranian government to publicly and in writing ask for those talks. Only when that happens, should we agree to them. Even then, those talks should be allowed only if Iran sends decision-makers to a negotiation site and “makes a deal.” Any professed need for Iran’s negotiators to consult with Tehran before agreeing should be taken as further proof that Iran remains unserious, and our full scope attacks should continue apace until that deal is made.

Trump’s terms of the deal [and my addenda] are simple and straightforward.

  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm—in writing] must confirm that the Strait of Hormuz[, along with the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,] are international waters over which Iran has no influence whatsoever.
  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm in writing] must forswear that it has no designs on obtaining nuclear weapons.
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international inspection force to enter and inspect [any site] in Iran the force wishes, and do so [on a no-notice basis].
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international team to recover the processed uranium and remove it from Iran altogether or confirm that any processed uranium remaining is unrecoverable.

The terrorists will never agree, though. The only way to get the safety of these waters restored and Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons eliminated is to destroy the terrorists’ ability to act and to destroy the terrorists themselves.

The Next Carrington Event

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“Authorities on space weather” are worried about a Carrington Event, a solar storm of civilization-destroying magnitude, happening in the relatively near future. Three scientists, including Brian Walsh, Boston University Associate Professor of Engineering; Daniel Welling, University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Climate & Space Research; and Allison Jaynes, University of Iowa Physics Professor—have dreamed up a program called StormWall that entails launching a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites into geosynchronous orbit, holding in their aggregate 838,000 pounds of barium, lithium or sodium. On warning of an inbound Carrington solar storm, the satellites would release that material, sunlight would “quickly” ionize it, and the resulting plasma would mitigate the surface effects of the storm as well as shield, mostly, satellites in orbits below geosynchronous, for a few hours.

It would be a single-use system that, like the automobile airbags to which the designers liken it, then would need replacement. They sell their system’s tens of billions of dollars cost as trivial compared to the losses an unprotected modern population would suffer, and in this much they’re correct. Further, in the best-case scenario, just the research would require at least five more years just to develop the rockets capable of launching such mass so high.

As often is the case in academia, they’re overthinking and over-engineering a solution to the real, once a century threat of a Carrington event. The Carrington Event of 165+ years ago burned a few telegraph stations. The threat today is the wave guide that is our electrical power grid. It would be much cheaper to harden our grid by installing surge-protecting circuit breakers in a multiplicity of places throughout the grid to break up the wave guide. This also is a well-established technology, easily emplaced, and far cheaper to do so. All that’s necessary is the political will (tacitly assumed to be extant for those satellites and their launches) to install them.

A not very distant secondary threat is the fragility of all of our computing requirements, primarily financial, control nodes of our distribution networks, defense establishments. Faraday cages would protect them—even older, more established and cheaper technology—as would surge protectors.

Of course, the surge protectors are one-use affairs, too, but they’re much more cheaply and easily replaced than those half-dozen school-bus-size satellites with their heavy payloads. The Faraday cages themselves would be undamaged by the electrical surges the Carrington event would generate.

In orbit, our satellites still would need protection, but hardening them is equally straightforward, and it could be done as we replace them–which we ought to be doing anyway to protect them from EMP that our enemies would create in any kinetic war.

Deterrence and Responses

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Russian President Vladimir Putin can destroy NATO with a simple move, goes the intro. The simple move would be a minor incursion into Poland, perhaps, or seize some Baltic Sea islands, or (my own speculation) enter Lithuania from the Suwalki Corridor in a claimed need to widen it and then watch the NATO nations dither and not respond, which would demonstrate to the world, to Putin, and to those NATO member nations just how worthless and timid and uninterested in defending each other, much less themselves individually, the alliance is. Which is what President Donald Trump (R) has been complaining about and why he’s been prodding, even provoking, those nations to do more for their own defense.

On the other hand, those member nations could promptly and in useful coordination act to defeat the incursion, taking prisoners, inflicting casualties, and driving the remainder back out of the invaded (because that’s what it would be, never minding the timid euphemism that is “incursion”) nation. That would provide a measure of deterrence, but only in a tit-for-tat sort of way. We and our NATO fellows should have learned as long ago as our Vietnam War that tit-for-tat only leaves the door open for another try later on, with greater friendly casualties—and as the present barbarian case in Ukraine is demonstrating, increased civilian casualties.

There is another response, though, that would act to strengthen both deterrence and the durability of deterrence. That move would be simultaneously to defeat the invasion and to attack some key fuel and energy targets, complementary to Ukraine’s extant targeting, inside Russia. And, while that’s in progress, for the governments of the UK, France, and the United States jointly and publicly to point out to Putin that NATO has nuclear weapons, also.

Gerald Baker, in his article at the link, at first considered that with Russia’s military-in-being and economy so badly diminished by the barbarian’s war on Ukraine, a Putin incursion would be unlikely. Baker reported hearing rumors, though, that Putin actually is contemplating such a move.

I don’t think that’s so outlandish, and haven’t thought so from the jump (yeah, yeah, yay me). Putin’s armies don’t have to be up to snuff, neither does his economy. Especially his armies, but also his economy, only have to be better than what NATO has to offer in counter, and NATO’s relative weakness is the current situation. And: Putin has an additional critical advantage here: he has the political will to act; nor NATO nor national leadership has any such will.

That puts a premium on that third response option. And the lack of it would demonstrate the toothless nature of the NATO kitten, even were it to make the second response.

Revolution vs Evolution

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The opening two paragraphs lay out the question regarding the nature of warfare:

The way wars are fought is changing fast, as new technologies upend military doctrines on everything from procurement to executing operations.
But just how radical will this transformation be in years to come? And are the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested by the US, its allies and rivals in new tanks, planes and warships going to become the equivalent of buying horses and arrows on the eve of machine guns and howitzers?

Germany’s Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Carsten Breuer, added to the question:

The character of warfare is changing fundamentally. Armed forces must be able to adapt faster, integrate new technologies, and learn at speed. If we fail to adapt, we will not be able to prevail.

And Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington:

Revolutions in warfare are often declared but rarely arrive. Most military developments, like the current trends in the use of drones and precision strikes, are evolutionary. Nobody doubts the impact of gunpowder, but it was on the battlefield for hundreds of years, alongside knights and pikemen.

And this:

Military leaders, governments, and defense companies disagree on whether to call the current developments a revolution that warrants a complete overhaul of existing doctrines.

It’s a silly, time- and resource-wasting question. The situation neither demands nor holds unnecessary the idea of completely overhauling existing doctrines. It does, though, demonstrate—demand—the need to completely review, from the ground up de novo all existing doctrines and to do so periodically.

What matters, rather, is this constant: the need to manage and keep up with, even to drive, the pace of change, and that pace today is far faster than that prior rate of moving from pikes and trebuchets to rifles and cannons, far faster than the pace of weapons, logistics, tactics, and strategies during the world’s last major set-piece war, in the last century. The pace, rapidly accelerating, also is expanding into the constitution of warfare and the nature of war itself.

The question of whether we can make necessary changes across all dimensions of conflict, from political to information to economic to cyber to kinetic—and across the logistics and maintenance aspects of each of them—faster than our enemies can then becomes the Critical Item of national survival, as demonstrated from as far back as Alexander the Great and his weapons development and use and his tactics; the Roman way of war compared with that of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; and the tactics change demonstrated by the Spanish tercio.

Each of these areas of pacing also has a Do Loop that must be capable of moving apace, from recognition of a situation; through decision regarding how to respond, or better, preempt; to acting on that decision. Our Do Loops—all of them—need to be capable of operating inside of—faster than—our enemies’. If they evolve and adapt faster than we do, then we lose, and they win.

Revolution vs evolution is an irrelevancy.

An Insight into Agility

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NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte isn’t stupid. He’s worried about how to absorb the increased military spending that some NATO members finally are doing and turning that money into modern hardware and men and women trained to employ them in combat.

He’s adept at a particular style of politics—that of sycophancy toward President Donald Trump (R), referring as he does to NATO’s increased spending as the “Trump Trillion.” That’s nothing but a recognition that it took Trump’s hard words and mean tweets to prod the nations into actually increasing their defense spending instead of perennially yapping about it.

Importantly, he stated out loud a critical insight into modern military preparedness. Regarding lessons available to be learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine, he had this, using drones as his example:

It’s not about producing drones, but having the production capacity to produce drones because the technology itself is constantly adapting and is changing every two or three weeks.

That production agility doesn’t only apply to drones or to weapons and weapons systems, though. It also applies to tactics, to campaign strategies, and to soldier, sailor, and airman training.

It requires, too, the political stones to support those agilities. And that requires NATO’s member nations to understand that parochiality inhibits, possibly fatally, any chance for success in any war against an experienced NATO enemy.

Countries seeking to protect domestic companies are…duplicating efforts, such as building too many different types of armored vehicles. That kind of fragmentation is inefficient. It also means less cash for things such as air defense and deep-strike missiles.
Large systems that need to integrate armed forces across the continent, like intelligence, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities, could also be at risk of losing out.

It also leads to the outright failure of nominally agreed joint weapons programs. In the latest case, France, Germany, and Spain spent the last eight years arguing over their defense companies’ priorities for producing a joint fighter, the core pillar of Europe’s largest ⁠defence project. That parochialism led, finally, to complete failure to produce anything.

The leaders of Germany and France have agreed to scrap a landmark project to ​develop and build a new-generation fighter jet, officials said on Monday, bowing to industrial rivalries over Europe’s most ambitious defence programme.

It’s on the military and its political masters alone, though, to develop and deliver the means of protecting the logistic lines of communication. It doesn’t matter how well trained and dedicated are the personnel or how combat capable the equipment if they and the consumables they need—food and fuel—cannot be delivered to the front. Private enterprise can’t build any of that without the military’s clear specifications and the politicians to override nationalist parochialism and to provide the funds for the development and production—and the fortitude to monitor and call out, with stern sanctions, failures to perform, whether politicians or favored companies.

NATO still is less of an alliance than it is a committee of rivals. Correcting that would be Rutte’s next project, if he can last long enough.