Year: 2007

More on the Delusional USAF View of Airpower in Counterinsurgency.

No Comments

This time from Air Force Magazine, the organ of the Air Forces Association, see my post last night on the batsh%$ insane Air Force two star.

Petraeus basically argues that aggressive use of Air Force capabilities, except in a Tet Offensive situation, is actually counter productive.

Given the fact that the US air strike happy doctrine has led the Brits to demand that the US cease operations in their area (blogged here), it’s clear that Petraeus is right, “However, air assets should be at the disposal of the ground commander, according to the new doctrine manual.”

Needless to say, the USAF hates this with a passion. Not only does this belittle them, it also makes most of their newer toys unnecessary:

Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck, commander of the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., said he had seen the doctrine penned by Petraeus and Amos, and said that it reflected “a very two-dimensional view of how to fight a counterinsurgency.” If airmen had written it, it would be “different,” Peck observed.

He’s also completely wrong.

It’s like allowing a pyromaniac to advise on fighting house fires.

Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck, commander of the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., said he had seen the doctrine penned by Petraeus and Amos, and said that it reflected “a very two-dimensional view of how to fight a counterinsurgency.” If airmen had written it, it would be “different,” Peck observed.

And it would be wrong, and strengthen insurgencies, and cost soldiers and marines their lives.

Billo Hacks Wicki

No Comments

It appears that Bill O’Reilley, or one of his evil minions™ at Fox News, hacked Wikipedia.

It’s much less amusing than when Stephen Colbert hacked Wiki.

Scratch that….It’s just as funny, but we are laughing at at Billo, not with him.

He/They got caught because a tool has been developed to allow for easy searches of Wiki edits and IP addresses.

Here is the edit:
Original:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the National Public Radio program ”Fresh Air” on September 3, 2003, Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

Fox News edit:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal National Public Radio program ”Fresh Air” on September 3, 2003, Franken said that Fox’s case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

Busted.

This is Not About Reporter-Source Privilige

No Comments

A judge has ordered 5 reporters to testify about their government sources in the Anthrax mailings.

There will be hand wringing from the press and journalism schools, but considering the abuses in the use of anonymous sources, including this case, there is a deeper principle:

When a Source Burns You, There is No Privilege

A source can have any number of reasons to talk to a reporter, and the reporter has a moral obligation to protect his source, so long as the source does not knowingly lie to him.

It is clear that the Hatfill sources were deliberately lying. In so doing, the contract between reporter and source is broken.

This Man is Completely Insane

No Comments

The Armchair Generalist an article by the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the US Air Force, two star General Charles Dunlap.

Gen Dunlap would give Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper on a rant about “purity of essence” a run for his money.

Dunlap is calling for the United States to bomb Iranian Oil Refineries in order to conduct counter-insurgency in Iraq.

Specifically, despite huge reserves of crude oil, Iran nevertheless must import about half of its gasoline, largely because of a shortage of domestic refinery capacity. Targeting what refinery capacity Iran possesses could directly and concretely erode its ability to support Iraqi insurgents.

Oil refineries are ideal targets for air and missile attack. They are large, relatively “soft” facilities that are difficult for even the most modern air defense to protect. At the same time, they represent wholly lawful targets generally subject to attack with a minimal risk of collateral damage.

Besides reducing the fuel available to support insurgent activities in Iraq, the further cutback in refinery capacity could influence Iranian leadership, as the nation has already seen civil disturbances as a result of gasoline rationing.

This is just plain nuts. The Iranian government is increasingly unpopular, but one only has to look at Saddam’s attack on Iran in 1980, which cemented Khomeni’s rule in Iran, to prove that wrong.

What’s at the core of his arguments is that the new Pentagon counter-insurgency doctrine places the Air Force in the position of being a service to be used at the digression of the ground forces, and this is not acceptable to the general officer corps of the USAF. (I noted that this attitude by the Air Force is why the British want US operations to end in their operational area of Afghanistan.

Blowing S%$# up just generates more insurgents.

OH, This Time, and ONLY This Time, I’ll Believe Microsoft

No Comments

A few days ago, a protype “smart radio” was sent to the FCC for testing. The idea behind such a system is that it can communicate adaptively in the “white space” between TV stations, opening up spectrum. It failed abysmally.

Well, Microsoft is now saying that they sent sent FCC a defective prototype.

So they are now saying that they are complete pratts who could not be bothered to send a working unit.

Normally, I don’t trust Microflaccid enough to throw them, but this time, it rings true to me.

What the Other Matt Said

No Comments

Matthew Yglesias has a very good comment on the lunacy of fashion copyrights. (I’ve talked about a bit earlier and called Chuck Schumer names).

On a loosely related note, if you’ve been to a bookstore lately at all you’ll notice there’s a remarkable vibrancy in the cookbook section as the popularity of things like the Food Network, Top Chef, etc., seems to be driving more chef-types into the public consciousness. Cookbooks, of course, can be copyrighted. But the actual recipes they contain can’t be. And one suspects that this non-copyrightable nature of the recipes is integral to the cookbook industry’s vibrancy. Without it, the bulk of the market would already be locked-down by older cookbooks, and to publish anything new you’d have to be prepared to lawyer up and fight off a thousand lawsuits alleging that your recipes are too derivative.

This is true, and applies everywhere. IP is public interest law, and it is a restriction on individual freedoms (not having IP does not prevent one from creating) and as such, these laws should be limited in scope.

There should be restrictions placed on IP only to the degree that there is reasonable proof that the public is receiving benefits in excess of the restrictions placed upon.

I would note that under the current US IP Regime, the works of Shakespeare would be lost forever (the folio that was found would still have been under copyright, and would not have been reprinted or preserved), and most of us would never have read Moby Dick (a failure when first published, and it only became recognized as a classic after Melville’s death, when it was reprinted because it had entered the public comain).

Why Mercenaries Are a Bad Thing, Part II

No Comments

This story has a picture mercenaries in Iraq, and it is not pretty.

They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.

Not one has faced charges or prosecution.

There is great confusion among legal experts and military officials about what laws — if any — apply to Americans in this force of at least 48,000.

They operate in a decidedly gray legal area. Unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there.

What follows is a litany of misdeeds that would get a soldier locked away in Leavenworth for decades, and in Bush’s Texas, get them executed.

Their behavior alienates the local population, endangering our troops, and they are a massive brain drain on the military.

Violence in the context of a military operation must be the monopoly of the military, not mercs.

Who NOT to Bailout of the Mortgate Debacle

No Comments

Dean Baker has a very good take on many of the bailout schemes for the mortgage debacle*.

His point is very basic, that, “the hedge fund crew is doing what all good capitalists do when things go badly: run to the government.”

What’s more, he argues, rather convincingly, that they don’t want the problem fixed, but rather that they want enough time to sell these assets to less sophisticated investors.

He gives the actions of Citibank with regards to Enron as an example. They tried to get the Fed and the Treasury to lean on the ratings agencies not to downgrade Ken Lay’s pyramid scheme.

There actually was an effort at a federal bailout of Enron. A former Treasury secretary, who had taken a top job at Citibank, called a Treasury staffer to see if he could stop the credit rating agencies from downgrading Enron’s debt. At the time Citibank held several hundred million dollars of Enron debt. While the staffer refused to intervene, if Citibank had gotten its wish, it would have had the opportunity to dump its Enron debt on less informed investors before the price collapsed.

These examples should frame the debate on a bailout. If the assets held by the hedge funds are sound, and it’s just an issue of stemming a momentary panic, then the Fed should step in as lender of last resort and try to stabilize the market. However, if the issue is just one of giving the hedge fund crew time to dump their bad debts, then the Fed has no business getting involved.

*It’s not just subprime…It’s everything in housing, it’s just moving first in subprime.

Linda Chavez is a Bunco Artist

No Comments

So is her Husband, Christopher Gersten.

The Monday WaPo had a very very good article describing how Chavez and Gersten used a phony PAC to bilk people out of money. Only 1% of the money contributed went to politics. The rest went to salaries and expenses of Chavez, Gersten, and her friends and family.

Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.

“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.

There is nothing illegal about running political committees the way she and her family have done, and Chavez said that none of the money has been spent for personal items and that she has done nothing wrong.

They are useless, both of them. Linda Chavez is little more than a talking head, and Gersten took AIPAC down it’s right wing Likudnik path.

In a community with a moral center, it is unlikely that either of them would ever work again. In Washington, DC, not so much. They probably got high fives from political consultants on both sides of the aisle.

The Problem With Mercenaries

No Comments

It appears that about one-fifth of British intelligence officers have quit over the past 3 years.

It appears that, “many of the officers leaving were choosing well-paid private security jobs instead, forcing the ministry to hand jobs to people who do not have relevant training or experience.”

Well-paid private security jobs, i.e. Blackwater and the rest of their despicable ilk.

The US and the UK have declined to sign the 1989 UN Mercenary Convention, and this is just one, of many (will post on this later) problems with this position.

The Rush for Arctic Resources Begins

No Comments

After the Russians planted a flag on the sea bed at the North Pole, it was inevitable that some sort of scramble for the arctic regions would commence. Now Canada is building a deep water port facility on Baffin Island.

There are two things driving this:

  • It is believed that 25% of untapped oil and gas reserves are there.
  • The Canadians in particular are banking on global warming to make the Northwest passage viable.

US Government Cripples South Korean T/FA-50 Export Prospects

No Comments

It appears that thethe US Government is forbidding the use of an advanced radar on the Korean FA-50 trainer derivative (subscription required).

Let’s make this clear, this is not a technology transfer issue. The radar, the Vixen 500E (PDF)

But in declining to permit advanced FA-50 capability, the U.S. side is only exercising rights that were set out when the then-General Dynamics combat aircraft division agreed in the early 1990s to support South Korean development of a fast jet. Under the agreement, the aircraft’s combat capability had to remain below that of the F-16, to avoid competition.

Korea Aerospace will struggle to sell the fighter overseas without the preferred radar, the Vixen 500E active electronically scanned sensor built by Finmeccanica’s Selex unit. But Korean industry officials assume that that was the intention of the U.S. authorities: To ensure the FA-50 would be unattractive on export markets and offer no competition to the Lockheed Martin F-16.

I’m really not sure why anyone with equibalent choices uses US systems, such as choosing the F-15K over the Rafale, which performed better in tests.