I think that i’m supposed to be comforted by his “surge” of federal air marshals. What is it with this guy and surges? See that problem, a surge will fix it. Hell, only a surge will fix it. I feel the same way about hammers, but i don’t act on it.

There’s also a time for duck tape and plumber’s strap. And as fun and challenging as doing a job with the wrong tools is, if money’s no object it’s stupid. Buy a router, a set of fine chisels or even one of those 1000-tool Dremel sets.

Nope, hammer it is. We don’t have time for anything but a hammer – fuck, man, we’re in a “race against time” itself. Do you know how many billions live in hovels on this planet? Every one of them is a possible suicide bomber heading into the pipeline. They’re coming to get us, those damned tired and poor huddled masses are after us…yearning to make us eat halal!

Our only hope is to covertly militarize civilian air travel.

This is the “judgment” we got. Just what are these air marshals going to do in the event that another underwear bomber strikes, or there’s an irritated man of Middle-Eastern descent complaining in row 27? Start shooting in crowded airplane? Go all Chuck Norris on some bitches? Wait, i’ve got it. They’ll be armed with box cutters. Everybody knows that a few hundred people in an airplane are no match for a couple of guys with razor blades.

Let’s take stock of Obama’s first big test in the War on Terror^®:

Hapless, depressed Nigerian attempts to blow off his own legs in the hopes that it will kill the few people around him and maybe pop a hole in the side of a plane. Media and power players have a collective freak out. President plays it cool. Media and power players throw a collective tantrum. President freaks out. We must have new regulations to prevent another “systemic failure.” We must black-list certain nationals. We need undercover gunslingers.

Christ, what would happen if al Qaeda actually scored a hit? Oh yeah, they did. They killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan. Double crossed the masters of deception, walked right up to ‘em and and boom. Maybe the President needs to send a surge of air marshals to protect American lives in Afghanistan. Frankly, the Afghan event looks far more dangerous to our prospects in the War on Terror^® than the burnt weeny terror plot.

In that we have a double agent who had built his credibility with several pieces of actionable intelligence. Drone targets. Theoretically, this guy gave up al Qaeda baddies, which probably amounts to settling Afghan scores on the CIA’s dime. I wonder if he ever sent the drones to a wedding party? From the sound of it — though it might just be institutional pit fighting — the CIA doesn’t really know what’s going on in Afghanistan; ergo the agency probably relies on local sources. Exactly how reliable are these local sources and “allies”?

I’m trying not to worry, because our man of sound judgment has a surge for that, too.

Maybe we’ll have better luck in Yemen, but until then we need to do everything we can to stop another near-tragedy. There are innocent lives at stake that can only be protected by agents of the Commander-in-Chief (who reserves the right to indefinitely detain and torture whomsoever he pleases). Thank god we’ve got a guy with good judgment keeping us safe. Yessir, a steady hand at the wheel…at least until a bunch of cowardly Republican pundits and politicians start yelling. Then he screams and runs like a little girl.

Why doesn’t the Big Mac drop a surge on the Republicans?

Let’s be honest, the TSA personnel who deal with passengers are pretty much the same just-enough-above-minimum-wage-to-justify-wearing-the-uniform rent-a-cops that the airlines used to hire before “the day that everything changed.” The only difference is that now they have the full weight of federal law enforcement behind their badges and some sort of conviction that they’re keeping the world safe from evil. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some of them can barely read; no protocol is going to be effective when implemented by the incompetent.

But that’s just my disgruntled, i now hate airports, self bitching. The fact of the matter is that there is nothing anyone…not even super-genius, secret government agents with perfect teeth and a lovely December tan…can do to make us perfectly secure. So it really doesn’t matter who’s manning the TSA checkpoints; at least those folks have a semi-decent, if rotten, job. Hopefully they can pay the bills.

What i don’t understand is the idea that Americans are entitled to perfect security. Here we are (and for the record, all the troops stationed everywhere in the world are you and i) crashing around the globe and blowing shit up, yet those of us in God’s country should face no threat. And for the most part, we don’t face any threat. Nobody’s bombed any of the weddings i’ve been to over the last few years. I’ve never thought, “I don’t think i should go downtown, because somebody might suicide bomb where i shop.” I’m convinced that the Canadians will launch their plan for world domination any day, by invading the social and evolutionary cul-de-sac of America where i live. But as of yet i have not had to contend with RCAF close air support in the neighborhood.

Still here we are, gripped by fear and willing to submit to whatever the organs say is necessary to protect us. Hunter Thompson used to say that we’re a nation of pigs. I disagree. (Unless he was being Orwellian.) The comparison is unfair to that noble and intelligent, barnyard beast. We’re a nation of five year-olds whose parents don’t say, “No, no, there’s no bogeyman in the closet because there’s no such thing as the bogeyman.” Our parents keep telling us that the bogeyman is real and he’s out to get us. He could be in any, or every, closet. In fact, he probably is in every closet!

True, it is a good way to keep us out of the porn collection and drug paraphernalia.

I’m not being glib nor am i underplaying all those “very real dangers” that we face in the post-9/11 world. I’m saying that if we don’t want to live with the dangers then we might want to stop provoking them. I’m saying that there is no such thing as perfect safety and security; you are going to die someday and you probably won’t go to heaven. And i’m saying that our government consistently overplays any actual threats (and their probability) in order to control us through fear.

I know i’m right because any terrorist organization worth its holy book would have stopped trying to blow up airplanes in flight. They would have started walking into the ticketing areas of American airports and blowing themselves up right there. There’s no fancy security to get to check-in. There are plenty of people to kill, dramatically so. And such an act would be more effective at terrorizing the American people than some guy lighting himself on fire above Detroit.

But, such is redundancy’s aura of near-invincibility that few are willing to entertain the notion that it may actually compound rather than reduce risk in some situations.

Back in 2004 noted nuclear-security expert Scott Sagan (recently engaged in a spirited debate in Survival magazine on first use of nuclear weapons) wrote an award-winning article for the publication Risk Analysis. Its enigmatic title: The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security.

First, let’s get the problem with the problems in the title out of the way. Presumably the duplication of the word is a humorous attempt (however stiff) to highlight the concept of redundancy. Sagan begins his piece by recalling that post-9/11 fears of attacks on U.S. nuclear facilities induced officials to authorize an increase in security personnel to protect them.

But first he explains how technological redundancy can lead to what’s called “catastrophic common-mode error” — the failure of all the components in a system.

[Many] serious accidents with hazardous technologies. . . are caused by redundant safety devices. … The October 1966 near-meltdown accident at the Fermi reactor near Monroe, MI, for example, was caused by an emergency safety device, a piece of zirconium plate [which] broke off, however, and blocked a pipe, stopping the flow of coolants into the reactor core.

Meanwhile, Sagan maintains, another potential contributing factor to catastrophic common-mode failure is adding manpower to guard critical sites. Huh? Apparently, despite the supposed success of the “Surge” in Iraq, a reflexive precaution such as adding reinforcements comes complete with a hole through which you could drive a truck bomb, I mean truck. To wit: an insider threat. Who, Sagan asks, “should guard the guardians?”

He’s skeptical of reassurances by the nuclear power industry — and even its regulators — that security personnel are ” thoroughly vetted through intense background checks, random drug and alcohol tests, and security management programs, like the Continuous Behavior Observation Program, which ensures that supervisors and colleagues will report on any suspicious behavior.” Overlooking the obvious reservations about that last course of action (C-BOP?) for the moment, why is Sagan suspicious?

Because “the criteria used to assess suspicious behavior are suspicious.” Here we go again with the redundancy. What Sagan means is that the criteria have failed to filter out what may charitably be called undesirable elements. “For example,” he writes, “security personnel of at least one nuclear weapons facility were known to have ties with members of anti-government right-wing militia groups.”

Just as long as it’s not al Qaeda. Compared to 9/11, Oklahoma City was only a blip on the terrorist-attack radar, right?

Moving on, Sagan writes, “The second way in which redundancy can backfire is when diffusion of responsibility leads to ’social shirking.’” We may not be familiar with this term, but we know all too well what it means. It’s a “common phenomenon — in which individuals or groups reduce their reliability in the belief that others will take up the slack.” Yet it’s “rarely examined.” Why?

“. . . because of a ‘translation problem’ that exists when transferring redundancy theory from purely mechanical systems to complex organizations. [It seems that in] mechanical engineering, the redundant units are usually inanimate objects, unaware of each other’s existence. In organizations, however, we are usually analyzing redundant individuals, groups, or agencies, backup systems that are aware of one another. [Emphasis added.]

True, this sounds like something out of a Malcolm Gladwell book, or the genre he spawned. Yet here’s another “outlier” (or something like that) — overcompensation, which occurs when. . .

. . . the addition of extra components encourages individuals or organizations to. … engage in inherently risky behavior — driving faster, flying higher, producing more nuclear energy, etc.

Think about the old argument: If boxers wear helmets, do they then suffer fewer qualms about inserting their heads into the action and risking cranial injury? In fact, Sagan writes:

Research demonstrates. . . that the increased use of ski helmets has not led to decreases in head injuries in accidents on the slopes because many skiers with helmets just go faster down more treacherous terrain.

Something similar seems to have triggered the January 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion. Sagan again:

A strong consensus [emerged that] the unprecedented cold temperature at the Kennedy Space Center at the time of launch caused the failure of two critical O-rings [in the shuttle's] rocket booster [which were] listed as redundant safety components. [The secondary O-ring was intended to] seal even if the first leaked. [The] decision makers falsely believed that redundant safety devices allowed them to operate in more dangerous conditions [the unusual cold -- RW] without increasing the risk of a catastrophe.

As for the optimal number of guards at U.S. nuclear facilities, Sagan writes:

. . . overcompensation should remind nuclear security analysts [that] increases in nuclear security forces should not be used as a justification [for maintaining] insecure facilities or increasing the numbers of nuclear power plants, storage sites, or weapons facilities.

It appears then that it would be wise to refrain from carrying redundancy over from other systems to one as critical as a nuclear power or weapons facility. At the same time, besides helping prevent a terrorist attack, unmasking the problems that redundancy can lead to in the nuclear realm might help shine a light on the difficulties that redundancy presents in other systems.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Mikhail Sergeyevich applies the idiomatic phrase “…… vydelyvnet Krendelya” to Karmal. We could use it do describe Karzai, Obama, Clinton, McChrystal, et. al.. It translates literally as “….. is walking like a pretzel.” The figurative meaning is that someone is staggering and weaving like a drunk; that is, not being straight-forward.

The Soviets had the exact same problem with Afghan government legitimacy that the US is having now. They had the same problem with the Pakistan-Afghan border land that we have now. They had a better Afghan Army to work with and still had the problems we’re having. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and in this case we’re merely looking at history translated from Russian to English.

Early in the proceedings on 13 November 1986, Gorbachev says to the Politburo:

“We have been fighting in Afghanistan for already six years. If the approach is not changed, we will continue to fight for another 20-30 years. This would cast a shadow on our abilities to affect the evolution of the situation. Our military should be told that they are learning badly from this war. … In general we have not selected the keys to resolving this problem. What, are we going to fight endlessly, as a testimony that our troops are not able to deal with the situation? We need to finish this as soon as possible.”

President Obama is, of course, dealing with the most insubordinate cadre of generals since MacArthur went and lost the Korean War. They are hoping for another 20-30 years to continue learning badly–and attempting to wash out the stain of Vietnam by repeating the same mistakes. Obama could fire the lot of them, but he won’t. The question remains to what extent they will influence the decision making process towards their own, institutional ends. That is the operative process for the DoD here; fighting terrorism or stabilizing Afghanistan is of no concern to Petraeus, McChrystal, etc., they’re concerned with their budgets and their glory. The fate of the nation comes in somewhere well below personal and institutional ambition.

A.A. Gromyko points out, “Too long ago we spoke on the fact that it is necessary to close off the border of Afghanistan with Pakistan and Iran. Experience has shown that we are unable to do this in view of the difficult terrain of the area and the existence of hundreds of passes in the mountains.” My goodness does that sound familiar. The Soviets, of course, could not pressure Pakistan to apply military force to its side of the Durand Line, but it makes little difference. The last eight years have shown the situation to be like applying pressure to a water balloon: press the Afghan side and the insurgents squirt to Pakistan, press the Pakistan side and the insurgents move back to Afghanistan. It is, in effect, the same problem with different uniforms involved.

Gorbachev is clearly thinking about ending the war by this politburo session (in a maximum of two years), much like the D.C. leak-fest is suggesting that Obama wants exit strategies. But the Soviets spend a fair amount of time discussing the problems they have with domestic politics in Afghanistan. Gromyko says, “In the Afghan Army the number of conscripts equals the number of deserters.” And the politburo must contend with distancing itself from Karmal without completely undermining the relationship. “It is also necessary to keep him [Karmal] on the general track; to cut him off would not be the best scenario. It is more expedient to preserve [his relations] with us.”

Domestic politics in Afghanistan are clearly bleeding into wider political questions. “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” If the reader would like to question American motives, he should refer to the statement of Ishmael Khan [a familiar name in current events], “The Americans want us to continue fighting but not to win, just to bleed the Russians.” Today there is no clear cut support for the Afghan insurgency against the US, but that doesn’t mean that regional players are not happy to see the insurgency bleed the United States as the mujaheddin bled the Soviets.

At this point, the politburo discusses involving regional players like India and puts a political settlement to the Afghan conflict at the top of its list. “In one word, it is necessary to more actively pursue a political settlement. Our people will breathe a deep sigh if we undertake steps in that direction.” My best guess is that there was hope in the administration that the Afghan elections would open the door for such a political settlement; to the same end we hear rumors of talks with the Taliban.

Shevardnadze, “Right now we are reaping the fruit of our un-thought-out decisions of the past.” And indeed, history does sometimes repeat itself with alarming precision. The Soviets were in a damned if we do/damned if we don’t situation by the middle of November 1986. We find ourselves in the same situation. Shevardnadze continues, “It is necessary to state precisely the period of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. You, Mikhail Serge’evich, said it correctly – two years. But neither our, nor Afghan comrades have mastered the questions of the functioning of the government without our troops.”

Akhromeyev (deputy minister of defense):

Military action in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels. … There is no single military problem that has arisen and that has not been solved, and yet there is still no result. The whole problem is the fact that military results are not followed up by political [actions]. At the center is authority; in the provinces there is not. We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. The government is supported by a minority of the population. Our army has fought for five years. It is now in a position to maintain the situation on the level that it exists now. But under such conditions the war will continue for a long time.

If the similarities between then and now, the USSR and the USA, weren’t frightening enough already, they get worse. The Politburo continues its discussion and moves into the situation of the Afghans as a population. Vorontsov, “Afghanistan is a peasant country (80 percent of the population are peasants). But it is exactly they who have least benefited from the revolution. Over eight years of the revolution agricultural production has increased by only 7 percent, and the standard of living peasants remains at pre-revolutionary levels.” He then quotes comrade Zeray, “because of various reasons, the status of the peasants in the government zone is in certain ways worse than in regions of counter-revolutionary activity.”

That’s how a large power loses a counter-insurgency in an undeveloped nation, and that’s how the US is losing the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Being under the control of the occupier has little or no benefit to the population. Being under the control of the established central government is often worse than being under the control of the insurgency.

Gorbachev sums up the meeting:

“In October of last year [1985] in a Politburo meeting we determined upon a course of settling the Afghan question. The goal which we raised was to expedite the withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan and simultaneously ensure a friendly Afghanistan for us. It was projected that this should be realized through a combination of military and political measures. But there is no movement in either of these directions. The strengthening of the military position of the Afghan government has not taken place. National consolidation has not been ensured mainly because comrade Karmal continued to hope to sit in Kabul under our assistance. It has also been said that we fettered the actions of the Afghan government.”

It seems that Obama’s first strategic review of Afghanistan took a similar shape to the Politburo’s 1985 decision, and roughly one year later the Obama administration finds itself in the same position as the Politburo’s 13 November 1986 meeting details. If there is any hope for the nation and the Obama administration, someone is brandishing the sheets of paper quoted above. The American experience in Afghanistan will be as fruitless and, ultimately, the same sort of failure as the Soviets experienced…for exactly the same reasons.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it is not hyperbole to suggest that the long-term fate of the United States will mirror that of the Soviet Union if our leadership does not head the lessons available. The USSR expended money and energy badly needed at home in Afghanistan; Afghanistan alone did not destroy that nation, but it was certainly one straw too many. The United States is not unbreakable, and the time for basing decisions on national myths is long passed.

Choose well, Mr. President. The fate of your nation may well rest with the decisions made today.

PDF of the Politburo meeting minutes

Further archival material here and here

What’s worse is you’ve got a pediatrician appointment today for both of your kids – their asthma is acting up and the drugs aren’t working as well as they should be. Furthermore, your son is still recovering from a case of malaria he picked up, probably from a mosquito bite he got during the pee wee football game by the reservoir a couple of months ago. At least the rains will damp down on your environmental allergies some today. Better rain, even flooding, than the dust storm that blew through the area a couple of weeks ago. That caused several major pileups and fouled up ventilation so bad that some of the buildings downtown are still closed..

As you pull together breakfast for the family, there’s no milk because it’s too expensive. Most of the local dairies were forced to close down over the last few years as the drought reduced the cows’ milk production. The few diaries that survived can charge almost as much as they want to since the supply is far lower than the demand. The same is true of eggs and cheese, although beef has been cheaper recently as dairy cows are slaughtered for their meat in a last-ditch effort to pay off drought-driven debts.

You take the kids to their appointments and find out that your son’s malaria isn’t quite gone yet – it’s apparently a strain that’s become resistant to the more common, and cheaper, anti-malarial drugs. The next course of drugs is not only more expensive, but also has more side effects that will make it harder for your son to be effective in school. Both kids’ asthma is doing OK, but the pediatrician points out for the third time that you might want to consider moving out of the suburbs and into a rural area with cleaner air. Unfortunately, because of your spouse’s job, that’s just not possible. And with the chronic conditions you and the kids have, you need the company’s good health insurance.

After dropping off the kids at school, you head to the grocery store. The produce section is half the size that it was just a few years ago, and all the produce you do see is expensive – almost all of it was shipped in from out of state. Over the last three months there have been two e. coli recalls of produce from out-of-state farms where the water got polluted, and there have been dozens of others over the last few years. You’ve tried to grow a garden yourself to supplement the meager grocery store selection, but growth issues and the drought has forced your town to go on strict water restrictions. It doesn’t help that the garden plants always seem to be out-competed by the invasive weeds in your yard. The bindweed and thistle have grown largely immune to the commercially avaialble herbicides.

There have been several large dry lightning-sparked wildfires recently that tore through mountain communities. As a result, the insurance companies gave up on insuring homes in the mountains. The regional wildfire fighting coordination office had to give up on fighting fires – there is just too much fuel and temperatures have been too high for safe fire suppression, and when the city’s conserving every drop of water for human consumption, using city water to fight wildfires just was not possible. As a result, your neighbors were driven out of their beloved mountains down to the suburbs where they could be safe and get homeowners insurance.

Your neighbors’ daughter is in the U.S. Air Force, piloting an armed drone patrolling the Mexican border as air cover for the Border Patrol. There’s been a massive influx of immigrants and refugees from Central and South America recently, and even though the Border Patrol is now three times the size it was in the early 2000’s, there’s still not enough agents to police the border without military help. She’s worried that she’ll be deployed soon to southern Europe as back-up for our allies’ efforts at keeping the EU from being overwhelmed by Turks, Arabs, and Africans pouring northward. There have been a few brushfire wars recently, but most of Africa and parts of the Middle East are looking more and more like a powder keg just waiting for the right spark. As a result of the worsening national security situation, taxes have skyrocketed to pay for the large military required to maintain all the active deployments. Worse yet, there’s a chance that your neighbors’ daughter might be deployed to guard the Venezuelan oil fields that the previous President “annexed” in support of U.S national security interests and that the Venezuelans are resisting as an invasion and occupation.

After dinner, you let the kids stay up late for the first time in months – the flooding dumped enough water into the reservoirs and local streams that the power plants have enough water to operate all day instead of shutting down or operating on a rolling blackout schedule. You wish now you hadn’t voted to approve the nuclear plant (or elected the public utilities commissioners who approved the increase in your electricity rates to pay for it), since it’s no better than the coal plants – they all need so much water for cooling that just hasn’t been there the last few years. Well, until today’s flooding, anyway. So you let the kids enjoy the special treat.

———-

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, one of the largest peer-reviewed studies of climate science performed to date, a scenario similar to that described above is 90% likely. More recent scientific data suggests that the IPCC’s conclusions about the severity of climate disruption were overly conservative. As a result, both the IPCC’s projections for climatic upheavals later this century and their 90% confidence in those projections are very likely under-estimates of the severity of the problem.

Knowing all of this, how much would you spend on an insurance policy that lowers the chances that the overly conservative scenario described above happens? How much is your quality of life, your family’s health, your friend’s well being, your lower tax rate, worth to you? 1% of your annual income? 5%? 10%? More? Or nothing at all?

In 2008, the average American spent approximately 16% of their salary on health, home, car, and life insurance premiums¹. That’s a huge amount of money. The reason people pay that much is because they want to be insured against the likelihood of something horrible and expensive occurring. And the more likely something is, combined with how expensive it it is, the more we pay in insurance.

The table below illustrates the difference^{2, 3}:

The table clearly shows that Americans pay the most overall money for our health insurance, but given how high the risk of needing the insurance is (estimated at 100% in a given year), the risk value metric is actually pretty good.

What the table doesn’t show, however, is that we have homeowners or renters insurance not because of the average claim, but because the small chance of a severe financial loss is still risky. The table below illustrates this point:

Remember, insurance premiums cost the average American 16% of their annual salary in order to insure against future financial losses that could be, but usually aren’t, extraordinarily high. So the question is how much should the world be willing to pay in order to insure against future financial losses?

As was mentioned above, the likelihood of substantial risk is at least 90%, with more recent studies than the 2007 IPCC report saying that the risk is actually higher. The next question has to be “how much is the future financial risk” of doing nothing?

A University of Oregon analysis estimated 4% as the bare minimum cost of doing nothing. An International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) study estimated that the benefit:cost ratio of addressing climate change was at least 8:1. Recent worst-case estimates (discussed below) say that the annual GWP cost of addressing climate disruption is approximately 3%, so the IIED study says that the cost of doing nothing could be as much as 24% of GWP. This number is similar to that calculated by the Stern Review (which, not coincidentally, is what the IIED used as their baseline) back in 2006. The lowest estimates of the cost of doing nothing are in the range of 1-2% of GWP, and a few scientists have suggested that the upper range of the cost could literally be the end of human civilization.

As for the cost of mitigation, aka climate insurance, a recently released study by the E3 Network calculated how much money the world would have to spend in order to return the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s air to a recent estimate of a “safe” level – 350 parts per million (ppm). The study reviewed the available literature and found that the worst case estimate was 3.0% of global gross domestic product (aka gross world product, GWP), and the E3N models estimated the estimate put the cost at approximately 2.5% of GWP.

The table below compares the insurance paid by Americans to three projected climate costs vs. risks.

Notice that Americans pay more in premiums than they get in benefits (ie claims), so the risk divided by the expense is less than 1. The difference represents insurance company profits, and clearly Americans are willing to pay for the comfort that insurance gives them. The table also shows that the risk of significant damage due to climate disruption divided by the global expense of addressing climate disruption varies from 0.33 to 100, and in five out of the six cases shown above, the future financial risk that is effectively insured equals or significantly exceeds the cost of insurance.

To put this all into perspective, the GDP of the U.S economy in 2008 was about $14.4 trillion. 16% of that (the money spent on average for insurance) is a little less than $2.6 trillion. According to the World Bank, the GWP was just over $60 trillion in 2008. The percentage of the global economy that is likely at risk is 24%, or $14.4 trillion. And the economists are estimating that the cost of insuring against losses that could equal the size of the entire U.S. economy will be no more than 3% of GWP, or $1.8 trillion.

In other words, for less money that the U.S. spends on insuring itself, the entire globe could be insured against climate disruption. Then imagine taking your four favorite cities in the world – and then erasing one.

And for another dose of reality, the United States is presently arguing over spending money to insure the U.S. against climate disruption to the tune of 0.25% to 3.5% of GDP (ACES analysis by the CBO). 0.25% to 3.5% of U.S. GDP in 2008 would be between $36 and $500 billion ($0.5 trillion)⁴. That’s well below what the U.S. already pays for insurance and is several hundred billion dollars less than the financial bailouts.

Ultimately, the analysis of what the U.S. already pays to voluntarily insure itself against future losses illustrates that insuring the global economy against future financial losses makes economic sense. After all, Americans already pay more to insure against smaller future losses that have a smaller chance of occurring than does climate disruption.

If the U.S. is willing to insure itself against future financial losses due to damage to home, vehicle, and health, then there’s no good reason why the U.S. and the world should be unwilling to insure themselves against future financial losses due to climate disruption.

———-

¹ According to the national car insurance comparison site CarInsurance.com, the national average annual premium for car insurance was $1,600 in 2008. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the national average premium for homeowners insurance was around $800, although it varies widely from state to state. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the annual cost of health care per person in the U.S. is nearly $5,300. Life insurance premiums vary so widely that it’s difficult to come up with a solid number, but $300 per year is a reasonable estimate. The total from this estimate is $8,000.

Average salary was derived from 2008 Census Bureau data.

² Derived from the Federal Highway Administration and the National Highway Transportation Safety Board, and the Insurance Industry Institute. Percentage is defined by the number of collisions divided by the total number of private, commercial, and publicly-owned vehicles on the road. Average Insurance claim is the total for all claim types (injury, collision, comprehensive, and property damage) divided by the number of accidents.

³ “Risk value” is a term defined for this analysis only. While the insurance industry undoubtedly has its own metrics, this metric is my own and may or may not be equivalent to an official industry metric.

⁴ This “cost” is not an accurate accounting of the actual costs to the economy. This money would be circulating in the economy still, but would not be going to the interests that it goes to presently, especially oil and coal companies and coal-burning utilities. Instead, the money would be directed toward energy and carbon-efficient companies. As a result, the argument in Congress is clearly not one of economics, but rather a battle between entrenched, old-energy interests protecting their profits and influence and up-and-coming, new energy interests hoping to gain profits and influence.

In fact, this entire analysis illustrates that the reasons behind opposing insuring the world against losses due to climate disruption are neither scientific nor economic. Instead, the reasons are ideology, profit, and political power.

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working.

The OIG report described an EPA process that, after 10 years of recommending a set of procedures to the Mississippi drainage states, had resulted in the following:

the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico had become the second largest on record and the second largest dead zone in the world.

Further, the report found that, “[i]n the 11 years since EPA issued its strategy, half the States still had no numeric nutrient standards at the end of 2008.”

The states involved have claimed that the costs of creating their own numerical nutrient limits are onerous, and while the states could adopt the EPA standards, “many States viewed EPA’s criteria as overly protective.” And given that the largest sources of nutrients are agricultural states, the OIG report claimed that the political ramifications and costs to agribusiness were likely significant.

In 2001, the EPA published rules in the Federal Register which said that the EPA would force all states in the Mississippi River watershed would be forced to adhere to EPA standards if the states didn’t come up with their own standards by 2004. The OIG report found that “about one-third of the States did not have a nutrient criteria development plan or were not in the administrative phase of adopting standards.” Further, the report found that “States knew that EPA would not use its promulgation powers so the States were not pressured to accelerate progress” and that “EPA had not established measures to hold itself accountable for achieving the goals of its 1998 strategy” by a 2007 audit.

As a result of the findings of the report, the OIG recommended first and foremost that the EPA determine what waterways needed numeric nutritional standards to protect clean water downstream and that the nutritional standards be set according to the authority granted the EPA by the Clean Water Act. The EPA disagreed with these primary recommendations, claiming that:

“a strategic approach to leverage resources and existing authorities” for “waters of regional, local and multi-State value” is the best way to establish effective standards.

In response, the OIG report said “[h]istorically, EPA has said it would use its authority to set standards as a motivator and then failed to set standards…. These States have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently, it is EPA’s responsibility to act.”

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Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote

According to a new article in the Center for Public Integrity’s “The Climate Change Lobby” series, there are now 1150 companies and organizations registered to lobby Congress on climate disruption legislation. This represented an increase of 31% in the total number of organizations lobbying Congress on this single issue.

The article guessed that at least $27 million was spent lobbying Congress leading up to the House vote on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES).

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New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion

What do you think erodes land faster – glaciers, rivers, or human farming? According to new data from various glaciated regions around the world, this is a trick question. Specifically, a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that all three erode land at approximately the same rate.

Previously, glaciers were believed to erode landscape at a rate faster than rivers. New information presented in the paper shows that this is not the case. In fact, the rate of erosion appears to change in proportion with the stability of the land that the river or glacier is eroding – in highly tectonically active areas like the Himalayas, glaciers and rivers both erode the land faster than in tectonically stable areas like Australia or the Oregon coast. In addition, erosion from glaciers and rivers appears to roughly match the rate of tectonic change – areas that are uplifting at a rate of 10 mm per year tend to see glacial and river erosion cut through the terrain at roughly the same rate.

There are a couple of other interesting observations described in the paper as well. For example, glacial erosion appears to increase as glaciers are retreating. The paper describes a number of possible mechanisms for this (namely increased flow of meltwater washing away sediment from the base of the glacier and glacial acceleration scraping off more terrain).

the time-dependent variability in glacial erosion rates we are seeing instead suggests that the erosional impact of glaciers is far greater during periods of warming at the end of a glacial cycle than when averaged over a full glaciation (~10⁵ – 10⁶ yrs). Several studies have recently documented a synchronous increase in retreat, ice loss and acceleration of many of the outlet glaciers in Greenland and Patagonia. Such synchronous ice loss and flow suggests that, contrary to previous conclusions, sediment yields and thus calculated erosion rates are more rapid during glacial retreat…

This suggests that glacial melt as a result of climate disruption will cause a significant amount of additional erosion to those areas that are presently deglaciating, namely Greenland, Alaska, Patagonia, and similar regions of the world.

In addition, the authors point out that lowland erosion from agriculture is approximately the same as the fastest glacial and river erosion, and much faster than river erosion in the tectonically stable lowlands would normally be.

[I]f we compare these erosion rates with rates from overland flow associated with conventional agricultural practices, as compiled previously, we see that farming erodes lowland agricultural fields at rates comparable to glaciers and rivers in the most tectonically active mountain belts (Fig. 3). In other words, the relatively recent advent of farming practices has accelerated erosion of many lowland basins at rates on a par with alpine erosion, rates that far exceed long-term rates not only of uplift but also of weathering and soil formation.

The image below is the aforementioned Figure 3.

Thanks to lead author Dr. Koppes for a copy of her paper for my review.

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Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes

According to an Associate Press article, wind farms can be mistaken by Doppler radar as tornadoes. Specifically, the spinning blades at the top of a 200 foot tower look like the rapidly rotating winds of a powerful thunderstorm or a tornado. And in places like Texas, where there are lots of both wind turbines and tornadoes, turbines have generated erroneous tornado warnings.

As with all plans, the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

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First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational

The BBC reports that the first tethered deep water wind turbine is now operational in the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The Carboholic first covered the Hywind deep water wind project back in June, when it had been installed but was still undergoing testing. But now the turbine is adding 2.3 MW to the Norwegian electric grid when it’s windy out 10 km in the North Sea.

According to the BBC article, part of the reason that the turbine was placed in the North Sea was because of the severity of winter storms. The idea was to test how well the turbine withstood potentially damaging winds and seas over a two year test period. In the video that accompanies the BBC article, Hywind asset manager Sjur Bratland estimates that it’ll be at least another 10 years until deep water floating wind turbine technologies are advanced enough to deploy widely. According to the BBC article, part of that would be the development of turbines that are smaller, lower to the water surface, and that produce more electricity per turbine, up to 6 MW.

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Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Two new articles in Reuters last week pointed to a known but little publicized problem with hybrid vehicles and wind turbines – the large scale use of rare earth metals in the motors, batteries, and generators used in hybrid vehicles and turbines.

The first article points out that the Prius uses 1 kg of the rare earth metal neodymium, 10-15 kg of lanthanum, and trace amounts of terbium and dysprosium. These are used in the electric motor as a lightweight alternative to iron magnets and in the high capacity nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. The problem is that the largest source of these elements is China, and the Chinese government is limiting exports specifically to ensure a supply of the rare earth metals to Chinese industry. As a result, Toyota and wind turbine manufacturers are looking to rare earth deposits in Canada, Vietnam, and a previously worked mine in California.

The second article is about the California mine. The mine used to be the largest source of rare earth metals in the world until Chinese mine production drove the price down so far that mining in California stopped being economical. According to the article, the mine not only has the largest known deposit of rare earth metals in the world, the ore has very little uranium or thorium, two elements that make extracting the rare earth metals more expensive. And with the development of a new extraction technology, the mining company expects to be able to start extracting 1,000 tons of refined rare earth metals from the mine per day by 2012. Just in time for the mine to fill in the expected gap left by Chinese export restrictions.

Given that the U.S. could possibly be trading a dependency on Middle East oil for a dependency on Chinese rare earth metals, a domestic source of elements critical to renewable energy would be a good thing to have.

Image credits:
Science Education Resource Center
Nature Geoscience
REUTERS/David Becker

William Forstchen’s brilliantly disturbing book, One Second After, takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The country has been brought to its knees by three nuclear missiles launched by unknown foes. The power of the attack comes not from the blasts themselves but from the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it emits.

An EMP, Forstchen points out, could completely knock out America’s electrical infrastructure. Miles and miles of high-tension wires would absorb the power of the EMP, magnifying it beyond the ability of virtually any circuit-breaker to stop. Electrical systems would overload. Anything with delicate electrical circuitry—like cars, computers, and even calculators—would be fried.

And in Forstchen’s world, America without power would be hell on earth.

“We’re back a hundred and fifty years,” one character says.

“No, not a hundred and fifty years,” says another. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do…. We were like sheep for slaughter then.”

One Second After is not a cheerful novel, nor should it be. Forstchen wrote the novel as a cautionary tale against the threat of an EMP attack. Nearly every desperate situation a reader could imagine—and many that readers couldn’t imagine—unfolds in the book.

Forstchen unveils one small horror after another. How do you keep the water in your swimming pool potable? What do you do with the family dog when you’ve run out of food to eat? What do you do with the thief you’ve shot dead in the middle of the kitchen? What do you do for your diabetic daughter when all the insulin is gone?

What do you do when the strong begin to prey on the weak? How do you maintain law and order when civilization becomes uncivilized?

Although many readers would like to think the better angels of our natures would shine through in a time of national crisis, Forstchen draws from past historical situations—like the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad in World War Two—to show just how low mankind will sink in times of desperation.

The story never goes “Mad Max.” Forstchen wisely keeps events plausible, no matter how terrible they seem. He does create a nagging feeling, though, that things could get even worse than his story suggests.

The entire time, Forstchen beats the same drum: America is virtually unprepared to defend itself against an EMP attack. Communities are unprepared. Individuals are unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared.

Although the book may be a warning first, it’s a compelling piece of fiction in its own right. The characters are well-crafted and add dramatic weight to the story. The novel’s protagonist, John Matherson, is a college history professor who works at a small, Christian liberal arts school in the western North Carolina mountains. He’s a fictionalized Forstchen who provides context and insights into events as they unfold, and he also serves as the moral foundation for the story, too.

Forstchen writes what he knows, so the entire community of Black Mountain, N.C., feels at once homey and heartbroken. He populates the community with people who could all be out of a Norman Rockwell painting—except Rod Serling starts to tinker with them as the story progresses.

The grim reality Forstchen shows in One Second After demonstrates the high cost of unpreparedness. He wants to spook readers into doing something—anything—whether they start stockpiling supplies just in case or they write to ask their Congressman to take an interest in the issue.

“This is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen said. “What I hope I’ve done is put a voice to it.”

One Second After makes that voice, and that message, worth listening to.

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.

In this young century, however, Americans have suffered increased assaults on their rights — especially privacy — by their own government, all in the name of the proclaimed need for “national security.” Because of fear, government continues to attempt to foreclose on constitutional protections.

Government may erode constitutional guarantees in the absence of the watchful eye of the governed. Rights not exercised may become rights lost. It is an obligation of citizenship for Americans that they continually critique and comment on the actions of their government. That is how we shape our government. Failure to do so allows government to shape us and our rights instead.

At the moment, America has a slew of problems confronting it — record unemployment, a shrinking economy, two foreign wars, a two-party system run amok, and an enormous fiscal deficit, just to name a few.

As we toss the steak on the barbecue and watch the fireworks today, let’s keep in mind the rights and riches we do have, the historical cost of attaining them, and the future risk of losing them if we fail to speak up when government displeases us.

College is 120 credits: That’s eight semesters at 15 credits per semester, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And it’s pricey: For the academic year just ended, public four-year colleges charged for tuition and fees, on average, $6,585 (up 6.4 percent from last year), and private four-year colleges cost $25,143 (up 5.9 percent from last year) for the same. Now add up to $10,000 for room and board. In a recession, that’s tough for many students and their families to afford.

Hence the recent surge in colleges touting three-year degrees. Save money, they promise. Get a head start on life, they say.

Don’t bet on it. Three-year degrees short-change both the student and society.

Colleges do not need to formally offer three-year degrees. An astute prospective student who studies the curriculum requirements of the universities she is considering can figure out how to finish in three years. A good academic adviser can help.

In my 13 years of advising journalism students, I’ve had only two finish their undergraduate degree in three years — and both stayed to complete their master’s degrees in a fourth year. I’ve had a few dozen finish in seven semesters instead of eight.

These students took advantage of Advanced Placement courses in high school for which they were awarded college credit. Generally, a student who shows up at my university as a journalism major with 15 to 18 credits from AP exams (and those have to be major-appropriate credits) may easily finish in seven semesters, saving nearly $20,000. Add in a few 18-credit semesters and summer school, and she’s out in six, saving nearly $40,000. (Another issue: Is AP exam credit truly the equivalent of a college course?)

So I drew up a three-year journalism degree program. Even assuming no incoming AP or college credit, a student could finish it in three years and two summers. Oh — she’ll have to fit in those 400 internship hours, too.

A three-year degree is a bad idea for all but the most focused and mature of incoming freshmen. However, as the cost of higher education climbs at two to three times the rate of inflation, more colleges are pitching it to potential students. But if those colleges assert that the three-year degree is of the same quality as the four-year degree, they’re misleading their market.

Cramming 120 credits into three years reduces the time necessary for that leavening of the young. A steady diet of 18 credits plus summer school reduces the time available for reflection and meditation on what’s been learned. And three-year students miss out on a helluva lotta fun. My dean tells freshmen at orientation: “If you don’t have fun in college, you’ve failed college. It’s all about wisely balancing academics and fun.”

Proponents of three-year degrees argue that students get a “head start.” On what? Life? That’s specious, given increased life expectancy. The work force?

How does a potential employer — or graduate school admissions board — distinguish between a three-year degree holder and a four-year graduate? GPAs may be the same. Holders of degrees with 120 credits will have a major and probably a minor.

But if the freshman arriving with AP and college credits stays a fourth year, perhaps she’ll walk across the stage with two majors and two minors or a dual degree (bachelor’s and master’s) or one major and three minors.

She will likely have earned 135 to 142 credits. She will be more marketable than others on the stage with her because she will be far more accomplished. She will be easily distinguished from her peers.

It’s frustrating to see colleges turning to three-year degrees as a marketing tool to maintain or increase enrollments by dangling a money-saving carrot in front of hard-pressed families. It’s not necessarily colleges’ fault; after all, other factors driving tuition and fee increases are outside their control.

The American value system so far has not viewed reducing college costs as a principal route to economic stability (or national security). At all levels of education — primary, secondary, post-secondary — a national consensus has failed to emerge that places bailing out a flawed educational system on par with bailing out General Motors.

I’ve been bumping into a wandering soul at various stops along the information highway of late who claims to have “lost soldiers in war.” In one discussion thread, this ostensible leader of lost soldiers insists that the surge in Iraq was successful because “we had the lowest number of casualties ever last month, which sounds like a win to me.”

I can’t tell if this person really commanded troops in war, or is a Pentagon viral propaganda operative, or if he’s just a computer generated personality disorder. I’d like to believe that someone who led troops in combat knows that casualty rates (aka body counts) are seldom if ever accurate indicators of how a war is going. The Union suffered more casualties than the Confederacy in the Civil War. The best Vietnam casualty figures we have indicate that roughly 1.1 million North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong personnel were killed in action compared to 47,378 Americans (U.S. combat and non-combat deaths combined totaled over 58,000).

Alas, the people who wear four stars who are presently in command of our wars seem to believe body counts are a perfectly good measure of effectiveness. We hear reports all the time from the Pentagon about the deaths of more evil doing number two men than you can take a number one on, but very little comment about how, given our proclivity for collateral damage, we manage to make two or more new evildoers for every number two evildoer we do in.

My cyber bud who lost soldiers in war informs me that the “metrics of success in Small Wars are things like who collects the taxes, who runs the Courts, and who teaches the kids in the little villages and in the neighborhoods of the large cities.” In a saner American century, other countries’ taxes and courts and schools were their business, and if we stuck our nose in that kind of business, we did it with the Peace Corps, not the military. In the American century we have now, faux scholars of war use things like numbers of “soccer balls handed out to neighborhood kids” and “little Afghan girls going to school” to tout the “success” of COIN, or counterinsurgency, or what in that saner century we called being the world’s mommy.

I wonder if it will ever occur to my friend with the lost soldiers that if “lowest number of casualties ever” sounds like a win, bringing all the soldiers home and having no casualties at all would be an absolute rout. Interestingly enough, at the end of the discussion thread in question, my leader of lost soldiers noted that what “General [David] Petraeus and his brain trust” did to win in Iraq was the “antithesis of ‘body count,’” apparently having forgotten that he started the discussion by saying a favorable body count was the criteria by which we’ve “won” in Iraq. Maybe he got confused. So many people do that these days.

Defense secretary Robert Gates, America’s number two man in charge of losing soldiers, seems confused about the surge and General Petraeus as well. In a September 2008 press conference, as Petraeus ascended from commander of forces in Iraq to head of all Central Command, Gates called the general the “hero of the hour” for presiding over the “remarkable turnaround” of Iraq. Gates also used the opportunity to tell the press, “Let’s continue to listen to the commanders in terms of the pacing of these withdrawals so that we don’t put at risk the successes that we’ve had.” The commanders, of course, will always say we should withdraw at the pace of a very sick snail.

Journalist and Petraeus idolater Thomas E. Ricks may be confused about his hero’s merits, but his assessment of the surge is spot on. Ricks slipped Freudian at length about it in a February 2009 interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. We’ve armed the militants “to the teeth” he said. We have “trained and organized” the Shiite dominated army and put the Sunni insurgency “on the payroll.” Thanks to Petraeus, we have poured “a lot of gasoline on the fire,” and if we leave Iraq, “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.”

In a February Washington Post article, Ricks confessed that Petraeus’s goal with the surge was “not to bring the war to a close” but “simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” Petraeus’s stratagem from the outset, Ricks revealed, was that “The surge itself would last 18 months,” but “what neither [Petraeus] nor Bush had articulated—and what lawmakers, the public and even some high up the military chain of command did not recognize—was that the new strategy was in fact a road map for what military planners called ‘the long war.’”

How lawmakers and the public and some military leaders failed to recognize the surge’s real agenda is understandable. As Ricks also notes, Petraeus testified at open hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the surge’s purpose was to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.” Petraeus didn’t bother to elaborate that he meant “allow our soldiers to disengage some time in the next American century.”

One would like to think a venerable Pentagon correspondent like Ricks would be outraged by mendacity of this magnitude on the part of the military, but that would be the wrong thing to think. In his latest book, The Gamble, Ricks states unequivocally that, “The surge was the right step to take.”

In a finer century of American journalism, Ricks’s peers would condemn him for endorsing Petraeus’s grand scale abuse of trust and power. But this century’s American journalists seem to agree with that pseudo-liberal popinjay Matthews, who at the end of their February interview on Hardball thanked Ricks and said, “You‘re going to help us learn.”

We live in confusing times; and this century’s American journalists seem confused about a lot of things related to national security. An amusing April 9 New York Times headline read “Standoff With Pirates Shows U.S. Power Has Limits.” The lead paragraph explained “The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military.” A U.S. warship being held at bay by a dinghy is the state of American foreign policy writ small, all right, but after our misadventures in Iraq and the Bananastans, we hardly needed this illustration to see the impotence of America’s military-centric grand strategy. The difference between our pirate pratfall and the bigger wars is that there is a military solution to the pirate pratfall: a single one of our 11 carrier strike groups, with its organic wide area surveillance, escort, lift and special operations capabilities, could shut down the jolly Somali buccaneering quicker than you can say Avast! Unfortunately, all 11of the carrier groups are occupied with things like dropping bombs and cruise missiles on Muslim weddings.

Whether they contribute to national security or not, all 11 carrier groups will stay in the arsenal until at least 2040 according to the defense budget proposed recently by Secretary Gates. Gate’s budget proposal is another national security issue this American century’s journalists are totally at sea about.

The New York Times, the newspaper that has been America’s propaganda portal of record since it helped Dick Cheney sell the invasion of Iraq, is talking about Gates’s “cuts to an array of weapons” that include the “cancellation of the F-22” stealth fighter. Gates hasn’t actually proposed a “cut” to much of anything. In most cases, he’s merely asking Congress not to give more money to questionable big-ticket projects than have already been allocated to them. The F-22 won’t go away. Lockheed will still make four more of them by the end of 2011 to bring the total buy to 187, as previously arranged, and nothing Gates recommends shuts off the possibility of ordering more F-22s after the present contract has been filled. That’s pretty much the way it is with everything Gates has supposedly “cut.” He’s just kicking the can down the street, a trick that weapons industry friendly defense secretaries have been pulling since President Dwight Eisenhower warned us they were pulling it in his 1961 farewell address.

No one is paying attention to the most far-reaching tenet of Gates’s proposal, his commitment to “completing the growth in the Army and Marines.” The only reason for growing a larger Army and Marine Corps is to continue to squander them throughout the eastern hemisphere in a type of war that the best available study done by the world’s finest national security analysts concludes should be pursued with “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.”

In The Prince, his seminal work on the nature of power in 16^th century Italy, Niccolo Machiavelli acknowledged that the fall of Rome came about largely because emperors like Commodus (the bad guy in the movie Gladiator) couldn’t keep their army under control. Keep that in mind when you read about things like General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s recent decree that he may ignore the Iraq Status of Forces Agreement withdrawal timeline.

A decade from now, Chris Matthews will ask a round table of “experts” how we let our military maneuver us into a state of ruinous perpetual war. The experts will avoid addressing the question, but the answer will be obvious.

We’ll have spent too much time trying to “learn” from the likes of Tom Ricks.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The propaganda war on the American public appears to have entered a new phase.

In a March 30 post at his Foreign Policy blog, Thomas E. Ricks wrote, “I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn’t think that would begin happening this quickly. It’s only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.” Ricks cited a number of recent confrontations between members of the Sunni Awakening movement and Nuri al Maliki’s government and got all giddy about how he “wouldn’t be surprised to see Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia re-emerge.”

At the end of his blog, Ricks asks “Question of the day: What should I say the next time someone tells me the surge ‘worked’?”

Ricks will almost certainly say the same thing he’s been saying to Chris Matthews and David Gregory and Washington Post readers and everyone else who’s wasted bandwidth on him since his latest book came out: “General Odierno…would like to see 35,000 American troops [in Iraq] in 2015.” That is, after all, neocon message number one these days: Status of Force agreement and campaign promises be damned; the generals say we need to stay in Iraq so that’s what we need to do. And Ricks, along with the rest of the so-called liberal media, is falling all over himself to help the neocons echo it.

Ricks might also answer along the line of propaganda operations hinted at by a March 31 New York Times story that leads with “As the American military prepares to withdraw from Iraqi cities, Iraqi and American security officials say that jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight.” Obama’s announced withdrawal timeline, goes the narrative, is what has caused the “new insurgency.” That’s a branch of the original story line that said once we announced a withdrawal date the evildoers would “wait us out.” (“Branches and sequels” are the parts of operational plans that describe what to do when things don’t go according to plan.)

The new narrative argues that Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki wants to mop up on the Sunni Awakening fighters while we’re still around to help him do it. As journalist Gareth Porter notes, Maliki has drawn us into a fight—possibly a long term one—with the very Sunni militants we bribed to stop fighting Maliki and us, and whose cooperation we previously credited for the “success” of the surge. In a saner American century, this would have been the camel straw, the signal that finally, for God’s sake, it was time to roll up our tents and bring our sideshow home, two-headed chicken and all. But in the present American century, where Newspeak and Doublethink have supplanted logic and reasoned discourse, it is all the more reason to stay. As in George Orwell’s 1984, we switch sides whenever necessary in order to keep the war going.

It’s quite possible that all our yesterdays in Iraq will have merely led that country back to the dusky state it was in before we invaded it. Having consolidated his power with backing from us, al Maliki is on the brink of becoming another Saddam Hussein. That too, in the hands of bull feather merchants like Ricks, will become a reason for us to stay in Iraq. We’ll need to keep Maliki from becoming a new Saddam Hussein, or to make sure he becomes a new Saddam Hussein who plays ball with us, or to overthrow the new Saddam Hussein and make sure the next new Saddam Hussein does or doesn’t become like the old new Saddam Hussein and/or the original one.

Don’t think that justifying eternal occupation of Iraq is a cakewalk, though. Using the country’s unraveling as the excuse for staying throws a torpedo into the myth of a successful surge strategy. So first, the spin merchants have to re-revise their own revised history, then they have to plaster over the gash they’ve made in the time space continuum.

Ricks led the charge in that sector of effort. In February, he told NBC’s Chris Mathews that “we have armed to the teeth many Iraqis” and have “trained up and organized a Shiite-dominated army” and “made friends with the Sunni insurgency, put them on our payroll,” so “there‘s a lot of gasoline that Americans have potentially poured on this fire” and if we leave Iraq “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.” On Meet the Press, he told David Gregory “none of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve have been solved.”

At first blush, that kind of talk doesn’t speak well of General David Petraeus, the Macarthur of Mesopotamia and, according to defense secretary Robert Gates, the “hero of the hour” who presided over the “remarkable turnaround” of Iraq.

Fear not, though, Ricks has King David’s back covered. According to Rick’s new book The Gamble, it wasn’t Petraeus or even neocon luminary Fred Kagan who invented the surge. It was General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno, the guy Ricks earlier told us was the big dumb slob who made such a mess of things right after the fall of Baghdad with his 4^th Infantry Division and caused the insurgency and the civil war and everything else that went wrong. Sometime after that, according to Ricks, Odie went through a “transformation.” An angel came unto him in the night and gave him an immaculate conception of what a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq ought to look like, or something like that. The important thing is that when there’s anything good to be said about the surge, the warmongery can credit Petraeus (and to a lesser extent Kagan), and when it’s time to tell the truth about it, they can blame the oaf.

It’s important to maintain the illusion of Petraeus as “the best general in the Army,” which was how Ricks described him at the beginning of the surge. That’s because the warmongery needs Petraeus’s clout in mugging President Obama into further escalation of—and entanglement in—the war in the Bananastans. On April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, Petraeus told a Senate panel that extremists in Pakistan ““could literally take down their state” if left unchallenged, thus endorsing John McCain’s initiative to send an additional 10,000 troops to the Bananastans on top of the 4,000 additional troops Obama just promised to send on top of the 7,000 additional troops he already promised a to send on top of the 38,000 troops already there.

Sadly, even if we have half a million troops in the Bananastans (like we did in Vietnam), they can’t accomplish anything without a coherent strategy, which they still don’t have despite the recent unveiling of Obama’s new Bananastan plan, the tenets of which sound like his policy team stole them from Scientology. The new strategy’s stated objectives include a “capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and a “stable constitutional government in Pakistan,” goals impossible to achieve without extraterrestrial intervention. Inexplicably, while these two aims would constitute the reengineering of an entire region’s social structure, presidential advisers who crafted the strategy maintain that it does not constitute nation building. Even more inscrutably, prominent foreign policy analyst Pat Lang agrees that the new strategy avoids “multi-decade nation building.” This observation suggests that Lang has been nipping at the Kool-Aid he accused so many of chugging during the Bush administration or that he’s suffering from the long-term effects of having been a military intelligence officer. It’s hard to say which; the symptoms are nearly identical.

The strategy’s objectives also include “Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” That might be achievable, but it’s not a goal worth pursuing. If evil ones can plan and launch terrorists attacks from a bleacher seat in the mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, they can do it from the other side of the Van Allen radiation belt (and the North Koreans can put them out there now!)

The aspect of the new strategy I find hardest to believe is that none of the goals involve keeping the Islamofabulists from getting control of Pakistan’s nukes or the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. Those are the only real national security concerns we have in that region, ones we can decisively address with military power by blowing up the nukes and the pipeline, declaring victory and bringing everybody home.

Alas, that would be counter to the real objective of the neoconservative agenda, which is progressive military entanglement. If you’re not yet convinced that’s what the war mongrels are after, take a look at what their most prominent pundits are saying about Obama’s new strategy. Bill Kristol cries, “All hail Obama!” Kritol’s partner Bob Kagan cheers, “Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan.” Charles Krauthammer calls the Obama strategy one that you can imagine “John McCain having adopted had he been elected.”

This is the clearest signal I’ve seen to date that America’s collective brain activity has flatlined. Obama’s election was above all a national rejection of the militaristic adventurism of the previous regime. Yet here we are, not only continuing Bush era foreign policy but expanding it, and America is watching it unfold dumbly, like a dazed Jake La Motta, clinging to the top rope and rasping Come on, hit me. Harder.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Deterrence 2.0

Graham Allison has been a pioneer in issuing clarion calls about nuclear terrorism. He’s been accused of alarmism, but Cassandras are supposed to err on the side of caution. Especially when it comes to an issue that’s susceptible to being elbowed aside in this Age of the Emergency that we’re living through. Between garden-variety terrorism and the economic crisis, we have enough to freak out about, thank you.

Last year the House and Senate passed the Nuclear Forensics and Attribution Act “to strengthen efforts in the Department of Homeland Security to develop nuclear forensics capabilities to permit attribution of the source of nuclear material.”

Forensics and attribution are not intended to determine what state has initiated a nuclear attack — that would be apparent — nor necessarily even which terrorist group. That news also wouldn’t be long in coming. The idea is to use these techniques to figure which state should be assigned attribution for supplying the terrorist group with the bomb.

In a recent Newsweek article, How to Keep the Bomb From Terrorists, Allison explains nuclear forensics to the public.

Nuclear experts are now at work assembling a vast database of all known sources. In the case of uranium and plutonium. . . every step in the nuclear-fuel cycle. . . leaves traces that can identify where . . . the material came from.

After a nuclear bomb detonates, nuclear forensic cops would collect debris samples and send them to a laboratory. …. By identifying unique attributes of the fissile material. . . one could trace the path back to its origin. …

“After a nuclear bomb detonates” might better have been phrased “Should a nuclear bomb detonate.” He continues (emphasis added):

As we face the threat of nuclear terrorism with a weapon that could come not only from North Korea but also from Pakistan or, in time, Iran, the challenge is to revitalize the concept of deterrence. The goal would be twofold: first, to deter leaders of nuclear states from selling weapons to terrorists by holding them accountable for any use of their own weapons; second, to give leaders every incentive to tightly secure their nuclear weapons and materials.

Again, the objective isn’t to deter the undeterrable — al Qaeda — but states that have actual populations and land masses to worry about being retaliated against. Also, let’s get this out of the way: Even if Iran did develop the bomb, what are the odds it would offload the thing? It’s neither addicted to the adrenaline surge of brinksmanship like North Korea, nor careening towards the status of a failed state like Pakistan. Besides, what would Hezbollah want with a nuclear bomb? Al Qaeda-like apocalyptic fervor isn’t their modus operandi.

Canadian Michael Levi is the director of the Council on Foreign Relations program on energy security and climate change (and has acted as a consultant to the TV program 24). The element of energy security with which he’s most concerned, judging by his output, is nuclear terrorism.

Levi’s book On Nuclear Terrorism (Harvard University Press, 2007) features an image on the cover of a high-wire walker. The implied tension may be a product of states possessing nuclear weapons, but trying to keep them from terrorists. To this reader, however, the balancing act is the book itself, which demonstrates how hard it is for terrorists to bring exploding a nuclear bomb to fruition, while managing to keep from minimizing the threat of nuclear terrorism.

In truth, due to the technical nature of the book, I set it aside halfway through. But in November 2008, Levi wrote a report on attribution and deterrence for the Council of Foreign Relations titled Deterring State Sponsorship of Nuclear Terrorism. It’s more accessible to the lay person than his book. But, it’s considerably more in-depth than Allison’s Newsweek piece, which was intended for general readership. Levi writes:

[Analysts] have long argued that the central pillar of Cold War strategy — deterrence by threat of punishment — is largely irrelevant to [combating nuclear terrorism because terrorists] lack the clear return addresses of warheads mounted on missiles [and] unlike states, do not present clear targets for retaliation.

The United States attacked by a nuclear bomb — all dressed up with no place to bomb.

Most efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism have instead aimed to eliminate the threat directly. … by stopping terrorists from acquiring the nuclear explosive materials [as well as cooperating] with states to secure their weapons and materials [and prevent terrorists from acquiring them] in the first place.

But, Levi writes, thanks to concerns North Korea might transfer weapons or materials to a terrorist group:

. . . traditional deterrence is enjoying a resurgence in popularity, albeit in a supporting rather than a central role. … the United States has responded by implicitly threatening North Korean leaders with retaliation should terrorists use its stockpile to mount an attack against the United States.

By relegating the new, improved deterrence to a “supporting role,” Levi doesn’t do forensics and attribution justice. In truth, it’s Deterrence 2.0.

North Korea aside, Levi then admonishes the United States to be careful about wielding deterrence in the traditional ways:

Threatening retaliation against countries like Russia and Pakistan in response to terrorist attacks stemming [in this case] from lax security practices is unwise. It undercuts efforts to work cooperatively with those states to improve their nuclear security.

Returning to Allison:

Establishing a general principle of nuclear accountability that will apply to Pakistan, Iran or even Russia and the United States is an undertaking for [a] global alliance. But this will take months of consultations. [Meanwhile, the] time to deter Kim from the extreme act of selling a nuclear weapon to terrorists is now.

As you’ve no doubt guessed thus far, Levi shares Allison’s preoccupation with North Korea (emphasis added):

North Korea is. . . unique among nuclear states in that there is a real prospect that, absent the possibility of retaliation, its leaders might deliberately transfer nuclear materials to a terrorist group.

[The] United States must [state] that the U.S. president may. . . decide, based on compelling but imperfect evidence, to retaliate following a nuclear terrorist attack [while] stopping short of regime change.

As for that “imperfect evidence” and just how advanced the capabilities of attribution are, former Los Alamos chemist Cheryl Rofer has her doubts:

It’s not a matter of one box tells all about the sample; it never is in analytical chemistry. You have to know a bit about what you’re looking for. Many of the tests destroy the sample, and most need some minimum amount. But it really, really helps if you have some idea of what the starting material was. [Physicist Andrew] Foland notes that the molybdenum signature might help to identify an Iranian bomb, but there’s plenty of molybdenum in structural steel. And concentrations of the various components are important, too, and will be scrambled in a nuclear explosion.

To an extent, Levi agrees:

[The attribution capabilities of the United States] are and will always be limited. … anything close to perfection is an unreasonable goal.

How then should the United States compensate for limited attribution capability?

[It] has two basic choices. It can place the burden of proof squarely on itself. . . threatening retaliation if and only if nuclear weapons or materials used in an attack can be unambiguously traced back to North Korea. Alternatively [it can declare a willingness] to retaliate on the basis of very strong evidence [as opposed to] certain attribution. This second option, approached properly, is best. …

Finally, Levi warns that, in the aftermath of an attack, the American public needs to have confidence. . .

. . . that their government had exceptional capabilities to identify the sources of an attack. … Wielded wisely, [this] new twist on deterrence can make important contributions to strengthening nuclear security. But applied incautiously and indiscriminately, it could deeply undermine efforts to that same end.

By which he means entangling us in the wrong war yet again.

The Deproliferator (the column’s title, not the author’s nom de plume) covers nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, with an emphasis on treaties, negotiation, and diplomacy. The author is not employed in the arms control field.

A term coined by sociologist and professor of international relations Amitai Etzioni, “deproliferation,” he writes, “calls for removing the access to nuclear arms and the materials from which they can readily be made — first and foremost in unstable and noncompliant states, and only then in all others.”

Whatever the merits of this approach, it lends itself to reinforcing the distinction between the nuclear haves and have-nots. Fond of his phrase, though, we’re appropriating it to our own ends. For the purposes of this column, deproliferation means, simply, disarmament.

Worse for the Republicans, it looks as if dramatic inroads are being made into territory Republicans have long claimed as their own — national security. In other words, we may finally be zeroing in on Osama bin-Laden.

The New York Daily News reports:

Where’s Osama? Try Chitral, once a trekkers’ paradise in Pakistan that has been sealed off to outsiders and is now regularly buzzed by American spy drones.

The U.S. won’t say it officially, but an exhaustive Daily News investigation finds the world’s biggest manhunt for the monster who murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 has zeroed in on Chitral’s stunning peaks and deep valleys.

Six U.S. and foreign officials confirmed to The News that northwestern Pakistan’s impenetrable Hindu Kush mountains. . . in the Chitral region have been eyed as Bin Laden’s hideout since 2006 by Osama hunters aiming for the big kill.

Okay, this story is less breaking than hype. But there has been a slow accretion and synthesis of facts, especially regarding the drones, which haven’t fired any missiles, but were “first spotted spying on Chitral last summer and were seen again as recently as Feb. 2.”

“Drone Aaya!” blared a Nov. 24 Chitral News headline about a visit by the “dreaded” spy planes. “People were looking [up] with a mix of curiosity and anguish,” they reported, adding, “Some said it was looking for Osama.”

Should bin-Laden’s capture or death come to pass, the Republicans would no doubt claim, “Yeah, but who laid the groundwork and softened him up for the kill? Bush.” Nevertheless, it would go a long way to snuffing out the canard that Democrats are soft on national security.

Let’s just make sure we bring him back alive. That way we can auction off interviews with him to the international media and add that money to the next stimulus package.

The Keystone Kollege of Armed Konflict Knowledge that all our generals seem to have attended doesn’t place much importance on coherent strategy making, either.

Who’s on First?

As investigative historian Gareth Porter revealed recently, Obama was willing to go along with the full 30,000 troop escalation monty for Afghanistan until the Joint Chiefs admitted they didn’t have an end game in mind and General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, couldn’t tell him what he planned to do with the extra troops. Back in the day, all those four-stars would have kept smoke grenades handy so they’d have something to blow up the boss’s skirt if he asked a hard question. Things changed over the last eight years. McKiernan must have made the sound of one jaw dropping when he heard a commander in chief ask “why?” Talk about shock and awe.

Defense secretary Robert Gates and his rear echelon commandos have been working on an Afghanistan strategy for dog years and still haven’t hit the dartboard. One segment of the security brain trust thinks the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen says the Afghan people are “the real centers of gravity.” Senator John Kerry says the center of gravity in Afghanistan is in Pakistan. Let’s hope Obama stays mindful of Kerry’s track record vis-à-vis winning strategies.

Like most military matters, the center of gravity concept is broadly misunderstood, especially among the military’s top brass. Clausewitz dictated that the center of gravity must be “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” For his admonition to have any meaning, centers of gravity must be related to our objectives. Hence, the enemy center of gravity is the main obstacle between us and our goal and is the thing we must defeat, destroy, annihilate, deceive, bypass, sucker punch, pacify, erode, eradicate, and otherwise put the whammy on in order to achieve victory. Once we formulate a reasonably concrete and achievable goal, the center of gravity becomes relatively easy to identify.

Unfortunately, the “concrete and reasonable goal” factor has been AWOL since the neoconservative movement turned U.S. foreign policy into a radical equation.

We won’t make western democracies out of either of our Bananastans. We won’t eliminate corruption in them. We won’t stem opium production. If we effect regime change we’ll just be swapping out puppets. It’s too late to keep them from becoming failed states because they already are. We might make things so Afghan girls can go to school, but that’s a cockamamie reason for a bankrupt hegemon to wage war, especially given that half the kids in urban America don’t finish 12^th grade.

Young Mr. Obama has said he wants to ensure that Afghanistan—and by extension Pakistan—”cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” That at least reflects a legitimate U.S. security goal, which is more than you can say for any of the gas his generals have been passing off as strategic acumen. Unfortunately, as objectives go, it’s so unrealistic as to be downright hallucinatory. If you can launch an attack on the United States from atop the Himalayas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can launch one from any spot on the surface of the earth, or buried beneath it, or floating above it.

We can’t draft enough people to occupy that much territory.

We Don’t Know

We don’t know the enemy. The term “Taliban” describes an array of groups with different leaders. Warlords and drug lords are a whole separate power paradigm: some are aligned with one Taliban or another, some aren’t. The line between good guys and bad guys in the Bananastans is wafer thin; the official governments and their agencies are hardly more than sanctioned gang bangers. Then there’s the average Joe Bananastan who’s just fed up with the U.S. air strikes on all the weddings he goes to. And, oh yeah, none of those people had anything to do with 9/11.

Air strikes have, however, “heightened the threat” of al Qaeda “to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells [there] and fights to maintain its sanctuaries.” That’s according to the New York Times, the newspaper of record whose sources for that factoid were “senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy.”

Great. Caesar’s. Ghost. Anonymous Pakistani intelligence officials are to reliable sources what Pig Latin is to Latin. Equally unreliable and equally anonymous CIA officials recently told NPR that their airstrikes in Pakistan have “decimated” al Qaeda leadership and that they now foresee a “complete al-Qaida defeat” in the region. That’s a remarkable conclusion considering that the CIA’s best sources of intelligence on Pakistan are Pakistani intelligence officials. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to sniff two separate agendas here.

Despite knowing nothing about ourselves and even less about the enemy—Sun Tzu’s recipe for disaster a la king—Obama is going ahead with the Bananastan escalation his feckless generals and defense secretary have recommended. Obama says “the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action.” He probably feels pressured to shoot first and think later, but that’s never a good idea. I’m not a world-class military historian, but I’m a fair one, and I know of no instance in war where doing nothing proved to be an inferior course of action to doing something stupid.

The closest thing we have to legitimate security concerns in the Bananastans are that evildoers might get control of Pakistan’s nukes and the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. There’s a very simple military solution to both of those problems: blow up the nukes and blow up the pipeline. Blowing stuff up is the one thing Obama’s generals know how to do real good.

In a March 6 interview with the New York Times, Mr. Obama said he is considering a plan to “reach out” to moderate elements of the Taliban. That’s a fantastic idea, and the best possible way to reach out would be to have our troops line up and shake the hand of each and every one of those mother’s sons and then climb on a plane for home.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

– George Orwell, 1984

It looks like the fat lady will become a Victoria’s Secret model before she sings the finale of our woebegone war in Iraq.On Friday Feb. 27, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, young Mr. Obama announced that, “by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”We can speculate till the troops come home why Obama chose to make this announcement on a Marine Corps base as opposed to, say, on an aircraft carrier, but it’s a dead cert that the mission will be no more accomplished by August 2010 than it was in May 2003.

Obama also said in his speech that 35,000 to 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq after August 2010. Re-label them trainers, force protectors or whatever you like, the troops that stay behind will be combat troops.They won’t be training Iraqi security forces to peel potatoes, nor will they be protecting the day care facility for children of single Iraqi soldiers.

What’s more, the enabling trainers are likely to be in Iraq past the December 2011 deadline called for by the Status of Forces agreement. Key Pentagon figures who have voiced opposition to any sort of withdrawal timeline include defense secretary Robert Gates, who may be the only civilian officer holder in Washington who understands less about warfare than Joe Lieberman.Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen has said a deadline for withdrawal would be “dangerous,” and National Security Adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, cautioned that a timeline to leave Iraq would be “against our national interest.” General David Petraeus, as always, has avoided saying much on the subject that might stick to his body armor.Petraeus’s sidekick Ray Odierno, though, says he wants to keep at least 35,000 troops in Iraq through 2015, and the once credible Tom Ricks has echoed this metric over every major information outlet in America.

Both Odierno and Mullen kick started the “a lot can happen in three years” chant as soon as the Status of Forces agreement was signed.It’s evident that no one in the Pentagon considers the SOF and its 2011 benchmark a done deal, and why should they?They’re used to discarding treaties—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on Torture—like day-old candy wrappers.The SOF isn’t even a treaty.The Senate never ratified it, so how hard could it be to abnegate?

Time Bandits

The main vector of the warmongery’s timeline argument is that successful military operations can’t be conducted with time constraints.This flies in the face of reality, of course; if military operations didn’t have D-Days and H-Hours, the Normandy invasion would still be on hold.

Gates is probably unaware of this; he is quite possibly the only civilian officer holder in Washington who knows less about warfare than Joe Lieberman.Mullen and Odierno and Jones either a) know that timelines are essential to military operations and are lying or b) they’re as ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession as Gates and Lieberman are. It’s entirely possible that both a) and b) are true.

Ricks himself admits that Petraeus’s task was never to produce a victory in Iraq.He simply needed time, “to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”In other words, Petraeus needed time to fake us out of demanding a timeline.

Mullen and Gates were both circumspect message managers on last Sunday’s political gab show circuit.On CNN, Mullen said he is “comfortable” with Obama’s withdrawal schedule, but also said he is confident the president will be “flexible” with the timetable if conditions on the ground change.On NBC, Gates admitted that the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way, “but at a very different level than in the past,” which is Newspeak for “the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way.”Sounding eerily like Mullen, Gates noted that Obama has said he “retains the flexibility and the authority to change a plan or adjust it if he thinks it’s in the national security [interest] of the United States.” Gates and Mullen both gave the impression that renegotiating the Status of Forces agreement would be along the same order of difficulty as getting a pizza delivered from Domino’s.

Both men also stressed the importance of following the advice of the military commander on the scene, who is now Ray Odierno.Thanks to a two-inch thick make-over by Ricks, Odierno has transformed from the raging ox who did nothing right in post-invasion Iraq to the military genius singularly responsible for the surge, so when he says he needs 35,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2015, gee, who’s to say he’s wrong?And oh, Gates made a point of confiding to David Gregory (with the rest of the world listening in) that “if the commanders had had complete say in this matter that, that they would have preferred that, that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”So anything that goes wrong after August happened because Obama didn’t listen to Ray of Arabia.

For the moment, Ricks is the chief propagandist of the Iraq Forever movement, but he has capable help from the likes of neocon luminaries Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollock.In a Feb. 25 New York Times op-ed piece, O’Hanlon and Pollock baldly assert “The mission ceased to be a ‘war of choice’ the moment American forces crossed the border in March 2003. Now we have no choice but to see Iraq through to stability.” This is akin to saying that once we board an airplane, we have no choice but to ride it until it runs out of gas and crashes into the sea.Wahoos like O’Hanlon and Pollock never admit that there is a broad menu of sane alternatives to what they propose, the best of which amount to taking control of the airplane, returning to the airport and landing safely.

One hopes that Obama can resist the pressure from the lunatic right to perpetuate the counterproductive occupation of Iraq, but it’s important to note that in his Camp Lejeune speech, he said, “I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”

Even in the Newspeak Dictionary, you could drive the entire Army and Marine Corps through the distance between intend and shall.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy(Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

On February 2, foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter revealed that in a January 21 meeting, Petraeus, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were unable to dislocate President Obama from his 16-month redeployment policy. Porter also reported that a group of senior retired officers were preparing to support Petraeus, General Ray Odierno and their allies by mobilizing public opinion against Obama’s decision. I estimated that support to be part of the larger information campaign that was an integrated effort of the surge strategy from the outset.

D-Day of the latest phase of that information campaign arrived on February 8 when Pulitzer Prize winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks launched a series of TV interviews and Washington Post articles to promote his new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. It’s not pleasant to call Ricks out for prostituting his credentials, but you can’t sleep in a general’s tent for years the way Ricks has and pretend not to be a camp follower. Ricks has become for Petraeus what Ned Buntline was to Buffalo Bill Cody: his official legend maker.

In his 2005 book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Ricks painted Petraeus as the only division commander who got it right in post-invasion Iraq. By January 2007, when Petraeus became the new commander of forces in Iraq, Ricks described him in an interview as a “force of nature,” and recalling the sight of the general doing one-arm push ups with teenage privates sent Ricks into a breathless arrhythmia. With The Gamble, Ricks promotes Petraeus to five-star deity. Both Brainiac and action figure, Super Dave defies the establishment and changes the course of mighty strategies to save America from the agony of defeat in Iraq. He’s got a PhD from Princeton, he wears Kevlar, he’s a complicated man—but no one understands him but Tom Ricks, can you dig it? By the time you finish The Gamble, you’ll pray on your knees that Dave Petraeus runs for president in 2012.

Ricks used a crate of lipstick to make Petraeus’s sidekick, General Ray Odierno, look presentable in The Gamble. He savaged Odie in Fiasco: ox-like Odierno is “confused by criticism” that his 4^th Infantry Division, the “worst outfit” in theater at handling prisoners and civilians, is a virtual corps of “recruiting sergeants” for the insurgency. Odierno himself denies an insurgency is in progress, and is the epitome of the dysfunctional leader who doesn’t want to hear the “bad stuff.” But in The Gamble, Odierno has experienced an “awakening.” It is Odierno, more than anyone else, who is responsible for the surge’s success. “White House aides and others in Washington…had nothing to do with developing” the way the surge was executed. Odierno made all those decisions. You can trust Ricks on that score because he got the information straight from source: Odierno.

In fact, almost the entirety of Ricks’s surge saga is told from the perspective of Petraeus, Odierno and the rest of the surgin’ safari. If Ricks picks up another Pulitzer for The Gamble, the inscription should read “best stenography.” Petraeus and Odierno are assisted by crafty retired Army general Jack Keane. Big Jack wields his mighty influence to break down the doors of the Washington bureaucracy, and helps his protégés maneuver around their chain of command to place their surge concept before young Mr. Bush himself. The three wise warriors vanquish a host of fakes, liars, fumblers and meanies, and put their enlightened counterinsurgency scheme to work in Iraq, so gosh, we can’t just give up now that things are going so good. Well, better. Sort of.

In his book, his Post columns and his interviews, Ricks manages to run through the gamut of neocon talking points on why we still need to stay the course, a compendium of doublethink mantras that in real-speak boil down to “Buy our war or we’ll shoot this soldier’s dog” and “Don’t forget to be afraid of Iran.” At the same time, remarkably, Ricks generates a mountain of fog in an attempt to cover the neocons’ tracks.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Ricks absolved the neocons, saying they get “too much credit and too much blame” for Iraq. Nothing was the neocons fault, really. It was that mean old Dick Cheney who duped the public into supporting the war, and that grouchy old Donald Rumsfeld who ran the war so badly. Never mind that Cheney and Rumsfeld were charter members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that first publicly called for an invasion of Iraq in early 1998. Ricks makes a single passing mention of the PNAC in The Gamble. That’s a stunning omission when you consider that along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage and many other PNACers also held key positions on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy team. Eliot Cohen is a featured player in The Gamble, a key figure in the selling of the surge and, according to Ricks, the man who told Bush he should make Petraeus the top commander in Iraq. Not once does Ricks note that Cohen is a luminary in the neoconservative constellation and that, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the PNAC.

Also noteworthy is Ricks’s glaring omission of any reference to Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the September 2000 PNAC manifesto that delineated the foreign policy the Bush administration would adopt in whole. Unfinished issues from Desert Storm, it said, provided the “immediate justification” for an invasion of Iraq, but the need to establish a large, permanent military footprint in the geostrategic heart of the oil rich Gulf region transcended “the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 9/11 gave the neocons the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed to launch their scheme, and the rest is history—as rewritten by the likes of Tom Ricks, who is now abetting them in pursuit of their original purpose.

As is the case with all revisionists, you’ll find grains of truth along the path of Ricks’s narrative, just as you’ll find grain in every pile of horse manure. The only honest thing you’ll find picking through Ricks’s prose, though, is the insanity behind the argument for staying in Iraq.

The real secret of Petraeus’s “success” at counterinsurgency is payola. As commander of the 101^st Airborne in Mosul, “he bought everybody off.” The enemy “was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out.” When Petraeus left Mosul, it went up for grabs. As top commander in Iraq, Petraeus bought everybody off again, making “a lot of deals with shady guys” who are “just laying low,” so we can never leave, or the whole country will go up for grabs like Mosul did.

Odds are things will be worse if we leave than they were under Hussein, Ricks told NBC’s Chris Matthews. Hussein was a toothless tyrant, but now that Petraeus has “armed everybody to the teeth” it’s too dangerous to get out. We’ve made the Iraqi security forces strong enough that they might attempt a coup if we’re not there to stop them. The surge may have averted a civil war, but one colonel tells Ricks he doesn’t think “the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” so we have to stick around so we don’t miss all the fun. As Iraq becomes more secure, it moves backwards. There’s a “long-term trend toward increasing authoritarianism,” so we have to stay in Iraq so things don’t go back to the way they were under Hussein even though, as Ricks just told us, things were better under Hussein than they are now.

Ricks says the surge is a strategic failure because it didn’t bring about the unification government it was supposed to produce. But that’s okay, because an analyst Ricks knows says “power sharing is always a prelude to violence,” so we have to stay in Iraq to make sure we don’t achieve our strategic objective, which will be easy because “the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq” was “absolutely ludicrous” from the get go.

If you’re thinking Petraeus was plotting all along to create a situation we couldn’t extract ourselves from, you’re right. As Ricks notes, Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”

Even Ricks seems uncertain that we’ve seen genuine progress; maybe we’ve actually just “poured more gas on the fire,” he says, and even though the surge is a failure, its “attitude is right” so it was “the right step to take,” and we should continue to support U.S. presence in Iraq because we’ll be there a long time whether we support it or not.

As Ricks explained to David Gregory on Meet the Press, Petraeus and his henchmen have Obama over a barrel. If Obama continues to stand up to them, they’ll accuse him of betraying the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace poofter vote. If things go the way Ricks predicts, the president will fold, the military oligarchy will consolidate its hold on American political power, and the neocons will live to make other people’s sons fight another day because they conned Tom Ricks into covering for them.

How sad it is to see that Thomas E. Ricks, dean of the Pentagon beat, has been pants down, bent-over-the-table seduced by the neoconservative cabal. He is as mad as they are, and as madly in love with their eternal crusade in the Middle East as he is with David Petraeus.

UPDATE: Ward Carroll of Military.com, where I have contributed a weekly column for nearly three years, refused to run this essay.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.