View 827, Wednesday, June 04, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

Jerry,

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/379481/why-team-obama-was-blindsided-bergdahl-backlash-ralph-peters via @Instapundit "Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

J

General Eisenhower had Private Eddie Slovik shot by firing squad in World War II for refusing to return to duty. Slovik boasted that he would go to an internment camp where he was safe, and he’d be released when America won the war. The sentence was confirmed on December 23, 1944, and carried out in January, 1945. Slovik was a conscripted soldier. He deserted after his request for a rear area assignment was denied by his company commander.

PFC Bowie Bergdahl, like all current American military, was a volunteer. AlJazeera America reports:

The circumstances surrounding the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl continue to ignite controversy, with mounting calls that he be prosecuted for desertion for having allegedly walked away from his base in 2009.

The U.S. takes desertion seriously. Under military law, desertion in wartime can carry the death penalty.

But despite mounting speculation and heated rhetoric, legal experts tell Al Jazeera that the military would be hard-pressed to make a legal case for desertion. And the military, while saying it will review the situation, said on Tuesday that Bergdahl "is innocent until proven guilty."

The Taliban captured Bergdahl in June 2009 after he walked off his base in Afghanistan, a decision that reportedly stemmed from his deep disillusionment with the war.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/3/bergdahl-is-thereacasefordesertion.html

One does wonder about the wisdom of trading five flag rank Taliban officers for PFC Bergdahl. I would think this inflates the price by a lot: the Israelis have famously made such asymmetrical trades, but the United States has not done so. 

‘In reality, the EU has never considered Ukraine fit for membership.’

 

To say that Western coverage of the Ukraine crisis has been light on facts and heavy on anti-Russian propaganda does not begin to do justice to the extraordinary levels of misinformation. In fact, the reality of the history of the relationship between Ukraine and the EU is almost the exact opposite to the claims being made in the mainstream media. Far from Ukraine being at the centre of a battle between West and East, actually the EU has consistently rejected Ukraine’s requests for membership. In place of membership, the EU has attempted to manage its relationship with Ukraine through various agreements and frameworks, all of which have been premised upon the refusal of the EU to accept Ukraine as a member. Most recently, the relationship has been managed through the European Neighbourhood Programme (ENP)/Eastern Partnership (EP) Programme. It was Ukraine’s rejection of an EP association agreement (which had been negotiated over several years and again was explicitly not a stepping stone to EU membership) that sparked the current crisis.

<http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-eu-is-no-friend-of-ukraine/

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Roland Dobbins

There is considerably more, worth reading for anyone interested in what’s likely to happen next.

It’s not entirely clear what Brussels wants – the EU leadership isn’t really responsible to anyone, and operates pretty much independently of the populations of its members, although presumably it is responsive to European oligarchs and member state power centers. There is an interesting analysis from the viewpoint of the standard NGO think tanks here: http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/04/16/why-does-ukraine-matter-to-eu/fzq3 . This is from the Carnegie foundation people http://carnegieeurope.eu/about/?lang=en , who tend to come from the academic centers but try to incorporate some realistic views.

In my judgment , Ukraine is far more important to Russia than it is to the EU, and infinitely more so than it is to the US. Allowing Ukraine to join NATO would be a declaration of hostilities to Russia, and Putin knows we know that. It is one reason why he is now interested in closer relations with Asian powers although Russia is far less influential in Asia than in Europe: it is still joined to the Pacific by a single vulnerable railway and a few rather badly maintained highways. Sheer geography – and a lack of transportation infrastructure – makes Russia more important to the Middle East and Europe, and not much of a Pacific power. President Putin is certainly aware of all this.

And Ukraine remains of interest to Russia because it has Russians and Cossacks, which Russia needs, and Ukrainians are seen by Russia as Russians who speak a different language. There are Germans who still consider Silesia a sort of Germania Irredentia. There are far more Russians who see Ukraine in much the same way.

“This committee found a number of compelling reasons to include the moon [sp] as a stepping stone on the way to Mars.”

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nrc-human-spaceflight-report-says-nasa-strategy-cant-get-humans-to-mars/2014/06/04/e6e6060c-ebd6-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html>

——-

Roland Dobbins

As of course I always have. Interplanetary colonization is not easy. When NASA studied self-replicating systems in Space in 1980 it was concluded that technology was not up to closing the loop: we could not build real self-replicating systems with the current technology. When the report was presented to the Administrator, I pointed out that we did have the technology to build one kind of self-replicating system: a Moon Colony. It would have a replication time of about 18 years. The Administrator asked “Why would anyone want to live on the Moon”, which sparked the L-5 Society study on lunar colonists that demonstrated there was no shortage of well educated adventurous couples who would undertake to go live on the Moon. But that was back in the days of great space enthusiasm.

The good thing about the Moon as a place to study problems of space colonization is that is is only a few days away for physical transportation, and only a few seconds away for communications. We don’t need great theorists on the Moon: we need craftsmen. The best heart surgeon in the world is available by high definition television; a skillful surgeon can do her work under the direction of the best.

Before we start trying to build self replicating colonies elsewhere we should learn to build them on the Moon – and they might well be both physically and economically successful.

As to getting to Mars, it has been decades since I ran the Human Factors Lab at Boeing and did serious professional study of such matters, but I have kept in touch, and I don’t believe we know how to get humans to Mars alive, much less maintain them there. I do know that if we have a Lunar Colony first, we’ll have a lot more confidence in Mars operations.

Russia Irredenta

When I was in Germany in the early 1970s, I saw graffiti showing a map with the shape of West Germany, East Germany, and East Prussia-Silesia to scale but as separate puzzle pieces. Underneath was the slogan: "Dreimals niemals!" I don’t know if it has been redrawn as "Zweimals niemals." In Austria, I saw a graffito reading "Südtirol bleibt deutsch!" That was a re-bordering made after WWI. Sometimes memories are long. Wasn’t there a Russian politician who was nostalgic for the return of Alaska?

And of course the nostalgia of the Irish for the Six Counties is legendary.

The Crimea always was Russian and when Stalin moved the boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR to include Russian regions, it was the era of the New Soviet Man. Ethnic distinctions were not supposed to matter. (Though curiously, both the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR received separate UN seats.) The Kazakh SSR was also re-bordered to include enough Russians to outnumber Kazakhs. (Though since then, demographics has reversed the majority, the northern tier of Kazakhstan is still ethnically Russia.)

John Lukacs, my old history professor, was fond of saying, "All the ‘isms’ are ‘wasms’." The only ism that mattered in Europe was nationalism. Memories are as long as language. Consider Quebec.

MikeF

Precisely. But these are now “territorial disputes in Europe,” precisely what President Washington warned us to avoid along with entangling alliances. Russian ambitions are no greater, and neither more nor less moral, than those of nations through most of history.  The Cold War with the USSR was different because communism claimed the world, and whether they believed it or not, Marxism was taught and taught well to every Soviet college and University graduate, and for that matter to all in high school.  So long as it was the official doctrine it remained the official doctrine, and you ceased to pretend to believe it at your peril, no matter how high – actually, especially how high – one might go in the Party.  After Stalin’s death Suslov became more important, and eventually became powerful enough to depose Khrushchev.  His antipathy to one-man rule kept him from becoming a new dictator, but he was powerful enough to prevent anyone else form achieving it until his death in 1982.  We used to call him The Last Communist.  After he died, the Nomenklatura, which had become a powerful faction, became even more important.

But for all that the goal of world communist domination remained the official doctrine and goal of the USSR so long as it existed.

My thoughts on air superiority

Dr Pournelle

I note that the F-35 is now 7 years behind schedule. Given the inexorability of Moore’s Law this means that the airplane is obsolete by current technology standards. We need to buy a hundred or so of the F-135’s, and finish working out the bugs, and get them into operational readiness; there are no prizes for second place in an air superiority airplane. On the other hand, we will not need to deploy them against very many countries; few will have anything that can challenge our current force.

The optimum strategy is to assure continuity by buying enough F-135 to dominate the air superiority mission in the next few years, while accelerating the design and development of the F-35’s successor. And about the time we are ready to deploy that, it’s successor should be well into the R&D cycle. –https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/negotiating-with-terrorist-more-on-the-new-russian-empire-notes-on-a-strategy-of-technology/

I know nothing of the F-135. Is that a typo?

It was not said in my classes or my briefings, but it was easily inferred: All air superiority is local and temporary. At this moment, North Korea enjoys air superiority over its land because it is uncontested. If the US or South Korea ever challenge them, that will change quickly.

Air superiority comes in two flavors: air denial and air control.

David Drake’s Hammers Slammers practice ground-based air denial. You cannot fly over them ’cause they have line-of-sight, speed-of-light weapons. In effect, Mr Drake ratcheted up the effectiveness of the ZSU-23 by six orders of magnitude. In reality, air denial is never complete, especially since the advent of PGMs.

Air control means that you can use your air power for offensive operations against the enemy. You can increase your control by knocking out his air force on the ground. But the point of air control is that you can deliver ordnance against his ground forces.

The F-35 is just a tool. I do not believe it is intended to replace the Raptor (F-22) as an air superiority fighter. My impression was that the F-35 is seen as the Viper (F-16) replacement.

I believe that what matters most for air superiority is not the fighter; it is the AWACS.

I think an AWACS upgrade will do more to ensure American dominance of the air over the battle area than any fighter in development. We can deliver tons of PGMs from the belly of a B-52, so why send a manned vehicle into a battle area where the pilot can get his butt shot off?

As for air superiority, it may be time to resurrect the Navy’s theory of a stand-off fighter vis-a-vis the Tomcat (F-14) and the Phoenix. Strike Eagles (F-15E) loaded with Phoenix missiles maybe?

80% of air-to-air kills occur on the first pass. The loser never sees the winner. In the air, the element of surprise is decisive. AWACS gives the USAF surprise.

Once you see fighters as ordnance delivery systems for AWACS your picture of what we need in the-next-generation fighter changes.

Methinks the reason behind continuing to build the F-35 in numbers vs. putting together a demo squadron to see how they work in practice is the old fighter jock feeling of "Oooh! Cool! Wanna fly it." The Eagle-Viper-Warthog-AWACS mix worked well. The Raptor is a worthy successor to the Eagle, but there are too few Raptors. I do not see that the F-35 is superior to the Viper in the delivery of ordnance on target. Frankly, I do not see coherence in the Air Force’s acquisition plans. It looks to me like they are buying things because they are cool, not because they suit a defined role better than an existing aircraft.

FWIW I think any upgrade to AWACS must include control and targeting of RPVs. (Yeah, I know AWACS is obsolete terminology. But you know what I mean. Besides, the F-35 is an obsolete answer to the question of how do we put hurt on the target.)

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Of course F-135 is a typo. 

The simplest definition of air supremacy is “I can fly. You can’t.”  Air supremacy is not achieved by dogfights, and the air superiority mission isn’t really the key to winning the air war; this was the mistake Goering made. He had more air war experience than just about anyone else, first from his experiences as Freiherr von Richthofen’s successor in World War II, then in the Spanish Civil War; but it wasn’t in strategic air war. If you want to clear your yard of hornets you don’t swat one hornet at a time.  You clear out the nest. The WW II USAAF strategy of taking out fabrication of aircraft or of critical components of aircraft was sound, but it did not take account of the repair and reconstruction capabilities of German workers.  The costly Schweinfurt raids intended to stop German production of ball bearings, did not achieve their objectives, although it was difficult to know this at the time. Had Goering directed his air attacks on the British Fighter Command installations, particularly fuel storage, the outcome of the Battle of Britain might have been different.

Similarly the Army strategy of knocking out German airfields ahead of the advancing ground forces was quite sound, but resisted by the advocates of the Independent Air Force which had been persuaded that “victory through air power” was possible.  On the other hand, sometimes for political reasons it is important to swat the hornets one hornet at a time: that is to fight air penetration and interception battles. In those cases air superiority aircraft are vital, and “dual purpose” air superiority/recce strike weapons like TFX (FB-111) turn out to be nearly useless: there are no prizes for a really good second place airplane in air combat.  The TFX turned out to be an excellent weapon for recce strike and for isolating the battle area; nearly useless for close ground support; and very good but not quite good enough for air superiority missions.  When we pointed all this out to McNamara and recommended that we use everything we had to take out the three military airfields in North Viet Nam, he decided that we could target one of them.  When that was knocked out all the MiGs were moved to the other two, and their effectiveness was not much diminished – after all, they were in the combat area quickly, and didn’t have to fly any distance to get there.  I see I am rambling. I was involved in the strategic arguments in that situation, and I was on the design team for Boeing’s TFX proposal.

Structuring the force – Air Force, Navy, Marine, and Tactical Air – is complicated. We discuss much of this in Strategy of Technology. As technology advances rapidly it is important to build some operational system so that you can develop doctrines and tactics for the new weapons.  It is also important not to waste too much money on intermediate models.  None of tis is going to be settled in a few paragraphs.

But one thing is clear to me: the electronics, both hardware and software, of the F-35 is several years obsolete. It is still better than anything anyone else has; but five years we have three Moore’s Law cycles: capability doubles, and cost falls by half.  The rapid growth of technology makes it possible for newcomers to jump into the game. China is doing this now. We could and should be designing and building a fighter system at least twice as good as the F-35, and advances in technology have made that possible.  We must build enough F-35 to learn the new tactics and doctrines, but since funds are limited it is a mistake to spend billions on an obsolete airplane.  Structuring the Air Force is always a problem, because from the Army’s point of view a somewhat improved Warthog would be more than good enough.  Of course that airplane is entirely dependent on being protected by aircraft that are fairly useless in air superiority battles. Pilots good at close support of the field army are not likely to have a chance against middling good air superiority aircraft.  None of this is insoluble, but it must be resolved at the Presidential, not the Services, level – and at present the White House seems utterly unaware of this. 

As to what you call AWACS, with drones, the concept was developed by the Boeing advanced planning team back in the early 60’s. Boeing proposed building a fleet of KC-135 aircraft, some with lots of air to ground missiles (“Thoth Missiles”). Others would have a plethora of air to air missiles.  And of course they would be controlled by electronic warfare aircraft – all Boeing KC-135 but configured differently for each.  We had teams working with missile design companies on the armaments.  The fleet would be guarded by air supremacy aircraft to mop up anything that got through the missile interception drones.  War game analyses shoed this to be a pretty good system, but it was not loved by either the Army or the Air Force.  I left Boeing and air warfare to work on missiles and strategic defense in 1964, and I note that no contracts for the air supremacy fleet were ever issued.  Schriever’s Project Forecast, directed by Francis X. Kane, came up with some important concepts in the early 60’s, and some of them were implemented; but the conflict between the services always as to be resolved at the Presidential level, and few Presidents have been equipped to do that.  All services will buy things because they are cool if given the opportunity. Who doesn’t?

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 827, Monday, June 02, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Napoleon Bonaparte

My son Phillip had a five hour plane change at LAX today, so we had planned to go down and spend some time with him. Alas, Roberta wasn’t feeling up to it, so I went alone. I took him to lunch at the Proud Bird, one of my favorite places to eat in Los Angeles. It’s been around a long time, and has a lot of WWII and previous airplanes parked on its grounds, as well as a complete collection of photographs from the early days of airplane times. It was a pleasant lunch and all went well.

It takes an hour to get to LAX from Chaos Manor unless the freeways are working, and they never are. I checked my morning mail, and found:

I’m not on Twitter so I cannot confirm this directly. This source chain has been uncommonly good in the past regarding things Islamic and political.

We may very well have traded 5 very nasty Jihadists for a home grown Jihadist who happens to be a deserter. This is very not good. His father is known to be a convert to Islam. (He greeted his son with the Bismallah prayer, for example.)

This is a soldier’s report on Bergdahl’s time in his unit including his desertion. If this is on the level this SHOULD bring down Obama’s regime.

U.S. Soldier Who Claims To Have Served With Bergdahl Casts Doubts On Official Version http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/218196.php

More as I learn of it. I do note that Michael Yon has been noting rumors of such events since shortly after Bergdahl was "lost" from his sources as an embed in Afghanistan. He’s alluded to it twice since the trade, very indirectly as if he feels what he knows is classified if he brings up details.

Note also that this soldier’s story corroborates one of the three early accounts just after Bergdahl left. It has more detail and is slightly different from the "he walked away" and "last seen walking with three Taliban" story.

That is why I figure this report is a live one.

{^_^}

I hadn’t been paying much attention to this story over the weekend, and my morning papers were full of the story of bringing PFC Bergdahl home, and the TV news last night was all approval. I don’t want to be part of spreading rumors, particularly ones that can do real harm, so I sent some inquiries and drove off to the airport. I’d no sooner got started that the radio talk shows were all over the story, complete with plenty of sources: apparently PFC Bergdahl left his unit by crawling under the fence, having left behind his firearms and armor, and once he was sell away from the camp, used his cell phone to call the camp and inform someone that he had left voluntarily, and was gone. He was never charged with desertion, and it wasn’t long after that the Taliban claimed to have him as a prisoner of war.

When I got back home there were many confirmations of all this. PFC Bergdahl was promoted to Corporal and then to Sergeant while in captivity, and was listed as a Prisoner of War – an interesting designation since it make the Taliban a legal enemy of the United States and the Afghan operation a “war” within the war powers act, at least in the eyes of the White House and the Department of Defense.

And the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and presumably the Secretary of State have negotiated the trade of five (5) very senior Taliban officials – war criminals under most definitions of war crimes – for one PFC deserter. This does not look like a very attractive trade, nor does it speak well for the negotiating powers of those sent to make this deal. Five flag rank officers for one PFC seems a bit extreme, particularly since the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.

The President of Afghanistan is horrified because he had hoped to take custody of those five flag rank Taliban officers to use in his negotiations of a treaty of peace after the US departs. He’s going to need them. The great fear is that once the US military departs, Afghanistan will revert to a Libya-like state of civil war. Libya has become a failed state much like Somalia, spewing weapons all over Africa and generally contributing to chaos. Iraq hasn’t quite reached that status, and there are tranquil civilized areas in the conglomerate ‘nation’ built from old Turkish provinces after The Great War, but there’s no real assurance that it won’t go that way. Saddam kept Sunnis and Shiites from killing each other (and protected Christians, Druze, and a few Jews while he was at it); his price was having to put up with his despoty – not as bad as some have been there – and his completely decadent sons, who were determined to show that those who will not study history will have their noses rubbed in it.

The Libya collapse makes it clear that cringing before the United States won’t earn you much: Khadafy gave up his nuke stuff, his chemicals, a scapegoat for Lockerbie, and just about anything else we demanded, and it didn’t even earn him a place in exile for himself and his children. But then the United States, having driven Saddam Hussein into his spider hole, proceeded to dismantle the Army, send the soldiers home with rifles but no jobs, and impose the most incompetent proconsul since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Kurds did learn and learn fast, and have come out of our intervention in Iraq much better off than they were before we went in. It’s not so clear who else can make that statement.

Afghanistan is about to elect a new President, and it’s unlikely that his writ will run much further from Kabul than the current President’s does. The best thing the US can do for him is to get out fast – the only thing that unites Afghani’s is the sight of armed foreigners on their land even if they claim to be allies of the Mayor of Kabul – and to leave him as many bargaining resources as possible. Five Taliban flag officers would have been very useful; but he won’t have them now.

It’s late. I have been trying to come up with a US policy that would make this POW swap reasonable, and I am not sufficiently clever. If there’s a good reason for doing this, it’s well beyond my ken, and nothing I have heard from the President’s men enlightens me.

Interesting commentaries:

this was posted on the Marine Corps Times Early Bird enews blast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/we-lost-soldiers-in-the-hunt-for-bergdahl-a-guy-who-walked-off-in-the-dead-of-night.html

 

Report: Military Knew Where Bergdahl Was Being Held But Didn’t Want To Risk Lives Of Troops To Rescue A “Deserter”… http://weaselzippers.us/188152-report-military-knew-where-bergdahls-was-being-held-but-didnt-want-to-risk-lives-of-troops-to-rescue-a-deserter/

Dear Jerry,

"Any realistic assessment of American strategy must take into account that while Russia is not as powerful as the Soviet Union was, it remains a Great Power, at least as much so as any European nation, and arguably not greatly inferior to the European Union."

Supply chain disruption when the USSR collapsed in 1991 was profound. Since that time the "Brain Drain" of scientists and engineers from the former USSR states has been equally profound. Their destinations were the USA and western Europe. These people are not returning merely because Putin began to dog whistle for them. His regime is even more rife with corrupt and massively incompetent cronyism than the end stage USSR.

There is no industrial base reset button for Putin to push to return to Cold War III.

Ex-KGB thug Igor Sechin at state-owned Rosneft Oil is illustrative of the Neanderthal gangster mentalities now controlling Russia. Here is a real life Biff Tannen. Compare Igor to Rex Tillerson, civil engineer and CEO of Exxon-Mobil. Or we can compare him to Bill Dudley, chemical engineer and CEO of BP. Or how about Ben van Buerden, chemical engineer and CEO of Royal Dutch Shell?

To no great surprise Igor’s main idea for oil and gas development is to outsource the real work to Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell. These companies and their subcontractors are where real expertise resides. This includes a great many Russian engineers who fled the post-1991 gangster state corruption driven by ex-KGB bully boys like Putin and Sechin.

We have both lived to see a time when the USA’s deployable air-land combat force is at least three times as large as Russia’s numerically. Qualitatively it is probably five times as strong. The active US Army and USMC alone are double the regular Russian Army of 380,000. And which army still relies on very poorly trained 12 month conscripts for half its manpower.

Does Putin possess a domestic mandate to run up large casualties with this ill trained and equipped conscript force in a Slavic civil war? No. This is the reason he is relying on forces like the "Vostok Battalion" of adventurers, mercenaries and locally recruited ex-convicts, alcoholics and the chronically unemployed.

Start surfing the US Army National Guard brigades in Wikipedia. All of them now sport Iraq and Afghanistan campaign streamers on their colors. This force alone has more experience and is better staffed, trained and equipped than the active Russian Army.

Whether this unexpected fact should ever be germane to US policy deliberations is a second issue.

I also think that Russia’s real headcount of serviceable land-based ICBM’s could easily be under 200 missiles. The only way we can reach a higher total is start including 1980s Soviet missiles. And these had how much maintenance in the 1990s and early 2000s?

And their SSBN force may have no operationally usable units at all. There is no indication the Bulava SLBM’s development problems have been solved. This leaves three newly built Borei class SSBNs unarmed. The remaining ex-Soviet Delta IVs are all that is left. Russia long ago stopped conducting routine deterrent patrols. The real condition of these dock queens is open to interpretation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Superjet_100#International_participation

This is a cute little regional airliner. It is comparable to aircraft produced by Embraer in Brazil and Bombardier in Canada. And it is entirely dependent on avionics from US DoD contractors, including EADS’ subcontractor base in Europe. Is this the Russian aerospace industry that will get the mythical Pak FA "5th Generation" fighter combat ready? I think not. The Pak FA’s ultimate fate will be the same as the T-95 tank project in 2010: Cancelled due to unworkability and unaffordability.

So what if Putin is refusing to sell Soviet designed RD-180 engines to the United Launch Alliance. How much will you bet that Egon Musk and his engineers (including how many Russian emigres?) at Space-X celebrated this news? Their only real fear is that Putin will quietly reverse this decision.

These data points do not outline the profile of a great power or even a country with great power potential. It is the profile of a Potemkin Village that has been erected on ruins by an oil state dictator pretending to great power.

Putin is not going to be remembered as the man who rebuilt Russia into a great power. He is most likely to be remembered as a figure comparable to Napoleon III, and as the man who set the stage for Russia to lose most of Siberia to the Chinese.

I propose you seriously reconsider and reassess Russia’s present condition, its actual economy and its realistic future power potential. An objective description of Russia’s real economy is a good starting point. I believe all of these indices are far lower than is generally believed, and which Putin wishes us to believe.

The immediate issue of who will dominate some obscure eastern Ukrainian oblasts is not vital except to the unfortunate inhabitants of these tormented regions.

The big question for the USA is who will possess Siberia in the year 2040. If China under its present regime appears to be a trustworthy and pacific successor to this vast resource then there is nothing to worry about. If not, then very profound thought is needed.

It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be. President Putin is acutely aware that his Russia is not the USSR, and has not the military, nor economical, nor ethnological resources to be a superpower. He is also acutely aware that the promises given by America not to move NATO eastward to encircle Russia were worthless and were broken less than a decade from when they were made. And he is certainly aware that the oligarchs are corrupt and not greatly competent. He also understands that restoring the central command economy isn’t going to fix things. He is quite aware of the economic differences between East Germany and West Germany before the Wall came down.

As to the status of the Russian nuclear forces, I have no special sources, but I am certain they have far more serviceable ICBM capable of being placed on alert/ready status than any other power except the United States. Incidentally, Ukraine will have a few as well; not as many as Russia, but more than North Korea.

Your last paragraph reflects the problem nicely: but what is the American interest? Kissinger under Nixon negotiated with China to curb the USSR. In those times China was by far the weaker of the two. This is no longer the case, and it is not at all clear that China is a potentially more reliable partner than Russia could be. The realist balance of power strategy would be for the US to move closer to the Russians, who have a common interest in opposing Chinese expansion. Meanwhile, nothing we can say or do will cause Russia to shed its interests in the parts of the old Soviet Empire that contain ethnic Russians; and to Putin that term “Russian” is an ethic term, almost congruent with Slav.

Putin has no real choice. The United States showed the new rules in 1999 when we bombed Serbia until Kosovo was turned over to the Albanians, who promptly demonstrated that they know of the joys of ethnic cleansing as well as anyone. Since there had, up to the American bombings, ever been a single legal Albanian immigrant to Kosovo, and the US intervened at 10,000 feet to protect the Albanians from the Slavic Serbs, the lesson was hardly lost on the Yeltsin government; and Putin as Yeltsin’s heir understands all this very well.

China, meanwhile, sees all this ethnic self-determination with concern. The Chinese solution to ethnic problems is to import enough Han Chinese into an area to suppress the Tibetans, or Uighurs, or Mongols. Granting autonomy to different ethnic groups is not greatly attractive to the present leadership of China.

The West tried to move the Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and over into that of Brussels. The problem with that is the results of putting yourself under the yoke is that the EU doesn’t really make you rich, as witness events in Greece, Spain, Portugal — and their remedy tends to be austerity. The Russians paid many of the Ukraine’s bills for a decade. How they’re calling in some of the debt. The Crimean gambit worked better than expected, and is now a done deal. What else does Russia want?

Applying the formula, Russia wants loyal Russians, where is a good supply of them? Well, in the southern Ukraine; they call themselves Cossacks, and they made up the loyalist elements of the Tsarist armed forces. Well over half of the White Guard Army troops in the Russian Civil War were Cossacks.

I note that the F-35 is now 7 years behind schedule. Given the inexorability of Moore’s Law this means that the airplane is obsolete by current technology standards. We need to buy a hundred or so of the F-135’s, and finish working out the bugs, and get them into operational readiness; there are no prizes for second place in an air superiority airplane. On the other hand, we will not need to deploy them against very many countries; few will have anything that can challenge our current force.

The optimum strategy is to assure continuity by buying enough F-135 to dominate the air superiority mission in the next few years, while accelerating the design and development of the F-35’s successor. And about the time we are ready to deploy that, it’s successor should be well into the R&D cycle.

We covered all this in The Strategy of Technology, although the examples of course were drawn from much lower technology. But Moore’s Law is inexorable, and exponential curves have a way of making things obsolescent much faster than you had expected. So it goes.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 826, Saturday, May 31, 2014

John Quincy Adams on American Policy:

Whenever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Fourth of July, 1821

The VA Situation

As I expected, General Shinseki resigned before his threat to fire all the officials involved in the Phoenix Office could take effect, and his request for authority to actually manage the VA and fire incompetent senior VA officials everywhere was never sent to Congress. We will see what the outcome of his “firing” the Phoenix officials will be, but since it will be vigorously resisted by both the Civil Service Commission and the public employees unions, we can safely predict that it will be a long time before anyone actually starts packing his office memorabilia into bankers boxes.

If anyone had been serious about reforming the bureaucracy, his resignation would not have been accepted before US Marshals or the VA Police Service escorted a dozen officials out into the street while the news media broadcast their shame to the world. Of course that did not happen and won’t happen. The Civil Service knows it will be protected from incidents like that, although given the popular demand for swift and immediate remedies there were moments of actual terror within the VA.

Some military publications are taking the firing seriously: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/05/30/shinseki-fires-phoenix-va-leaders-others-to-follow.html I would like to think they are right, but absent any reports of actual departures – surely some local with an iPhone would get something up on the net if there were — I remain skeptical. And his threat to go through the bureaucracy with fire and sword is now nullified, to the vast relief of the bureaucracy and the White House. This was, after all a crisis, with genuine public anger. It could not be ignored, and Shinseki, having retired as a four star general, had no reason not to carry out his threat. For the VA bureaucrats who participated in the recent activities, the threat was real, and they knew General Shinseki’s anger was not only real, but fired by guilt for not having discovered earlier just how much wool had been pulled over his eyes.

Everyone has known that there were problems in the VA’s performance. Candidate Barack Hussein Obama, having served on the Veterans Affairs Committee from 2005 to 2008 was in a position to know more than most, and in several campaign speeches chided the Bush Administration for not doing enough for Veterans. Congress enacted the “performance bonus” system in an attempt to give VA officials an incentive to get the lead out and get to work. VA appropriations have risen as number of veterans served fell (due to deaths of aging WWII and Korean vets) so that the dollars/ vet available to the VA has doubled in recent years. The increased money was spent. Much of it was spent on performance bonuses to the VA officials – and of those many cooked the books, keeping secret lists of veterans with long wait times while officially reporting reduced wait times. Assuming the facts now being reported are even partly true, some of those senior officials seem to have been rewarded for their superior service to veterans while in actuality the veterans were dying while awaiting treatment.

Of course the real problem is that the entire Civil Service is improperly organized.

The intent of the Civil Service was to replace the hordes of people seeking government employment at each change of administration with stable and competent long service technicians who would carry out the orders of the political appointees, and do so professionally without regard to their own political views – and to insure that, they were shielded from political demands. Under the old Hatch Act, government employees could not contribute to any political campaign in any way. They could not donate money, they could not raise money, they could not hold political meetings, and they were discouraged from engaging in any political activities whatever. Their compensation for this restriction on their political freedom was that they could not be coerced into contributing to or supporting political campaigns.

They could not form unions, either, nor would the government serve as a collection agency for any employee association: if they wanted to donate money to a non-political association which proclaimed itself a non-partisan civic betterment group, they had to make the donation themselves; they couldn’t ask the government to withhold the money.

This worked reasonably well. The theory was that if you made a career in government service, you gave up your political rights while you did it. You could vote, but that was pretty well the extent of it; and you didn’t need a union because the Civil Service Commission protected you from unfair labor practices, and did that more efficiently than any union ever could while maintaining the wall between Civil Service and political activities.

Over time this changed.

We now have a unionized civil service whose members can participate in politics, and in California the unions pretty well run the state, governing in their own interest, and are a very large source of political contributions. Union dues are collected by employers and paid directly to the union.

But with all those protections the VA wasn’t getting the job done, so Congress raised the VA appropriations, and authorized performance bonuses for VA bureaucrats. The result was predictable and has been predicted.

The VA system contains some excellent facilities and there are outstanding VA organizations. It also contains officials who cooked the books to deny veterans needed care while showing that the bureaucrats had ‘earned’ bonuses. It was apparently this which so infuriated General Shinseki. I won’t apologize for his not knowing about this earlier. As a former Chief of Staff he must have been aware of the general staff practice of “directed telescopes” – junior officers sent to look at field operations and report directly to the commanding general – but apparently never deployed any such mechanisms. Of course the pressure within the White House to support the President is enormous.

But I can’t help thinking that allowing General Shinseki to resign without visiting Phoenix with fire and sword and armed VA police was very bad for the veterans, however good it was for the White House.

It’s dinner time. I’ve been working on other stuff. I’ll try to get another installment of the assessment of the Eastern Europe situation. Remember: when Moscow hears European Union, she thinks, with good reason, NATO, an explicitly anti-Russian alliance; and when Moscow hears about international law and state sovereignty, she remembers that both the EU and NATO recognized Serbia as a sovereign state, but chose to back the Albanian insurgents in Kosovo.

Faced with an alliance like NATO while deprived of the WTO, Moscow sees the increasing power of the bureaucracy in Brussels which ignores the democratic opinions of the people; and remembers life under nameless bureaucrats and their nomenclature leaders. And recalls that NATO was an alliance formed to destroy the Soviet dragon, but stays on, moving ever eastward.

Shenseki, The VA and Frederick the Great

Frederick the Great observed the people are either intelligent or stupid and either industrious or lazy. He found the intelligent and lazy made the best commanders because they would always figure out the easiest way to accomplish their mission. The intelligent and industrious made the best staff officers for the obvious reasons. The stupid and lazy are ever with us and with supervision you can always find a place for them. The one group he advised to avoid at all costs are the stupid and industrious for these are the source of virtually all of your problems.

Unfortunately, the stupid and industrious seem to be attracted to government service and are embedded in the bureaucracies, usually in the mid-level.

Shenseki is an army commander, intelligent and lazy, but he seems to have lost track of his mission, so in the 5 years or so he held the office he hung around Washington and although it appears that he was aware of problems in some VA facilities he did nothing about them. This may be because he was working for one of the least competent leaders to ever hold the office of president. One of the most significant duties of a leader is to give his subordinates a mission and directions to accomplish that mission.

Competent officers know this, General Shenseki certainly knew this. If he has forgotten it perhaps it is because he spent so little of the latter portion of his service actually leading troops.

I was a platoon leader and a battery commander. One of the things you learn quickly is that the unit does best what the boss checks. If there are deficiencies it is the duty of the boss to get the deficient back on track. Most often this is done by additional training and direction. Sometimes it involves removing that individual entirely from the organization. If, for whatever reason, this is either not possible or undesirable at least that person can be re-assigned to some place where they can do no harm.

The VA is a large, complex organization, but so are army divisions, corps, and armies. The size of the organization does not make it unmanageable, only the incompetence of its leaders can do that.

The problems with the VA do not lie with those actually providing the services – the doctors, nurses and technicians – but rather rest exclusively in the bureaucratic management. Moreover, the most egregious problems seem to be regional. My own experience is in central New York and I have observed no neglect, delay or abuse. I have yet to meet anyone in the clinic or the hospital who I did not admire for their competence and like as a person.

I had two genuine emergencies, both spontaneous pneumothorax, a life-threatening condition, and both were treated promptly at non-VA facilities at no cost to me. There was no delay and no paperwork problems.

Virtually all of the recent major scandals (VA, IRS, Abu Ghraib, etc.) are the result of the boss being MIA. The new head of the VA would be well advised to organize a small group of inspectors and spend a few days every month actually visiting, unannounced, VA facilities – something that Shenseki never did.

When deficiencies are noted immediate corrective action is called for. In many cases this can be no more than verbal correction. If replacement is called for perhaps reassignment to supervise the bed-pan cleaning unit would be desirable.(In the army, the threat was transfer to the 118th Mess Kit Repair Battalion in the Aleutians.) In the event false reports are filed to obtain unearned cash bonuses criminal charges are called for and must be promptly filed. To paraphrase Voltaire, we should hang a bureaucrat from time to time to inspire the others. At all times the stupid and industrious must be identified and either fired or moved someplace where they have no authority and can do no harm.

Ralph DeCamp

Palatine Bridge, NY

Thank you for an informed analysis. I agree on just about every point.

I have known of the General Staff classification of officers as brilliant or stupid, industrious or lazy, for most of my life, but I only knew the origin as being in the Great General Staff of von Moltke the Elder. Col. Joseph Maxwell Cameron makes this division an important part of his theories on military management, in one of the most important books on that subject that I know of. (The Anatomy of Military Merit.)  I have also used that theory in much of my fiction.

I have already said I am not writing an apologia for General Shinseki.  I can appreciate the difficulty of serving as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet, but as DeCamp observes, Shinseki could not have been entirely unaware of the tendency of non-combat bureaucracies to shift to cover your ass mode, and that some of the complaints of the friends of veterans were legitimate. He had the power to do something about all this, and he did not use it, and his resignation was inevitable and appropriate: but I do regret that he as not given a few months to apply drastic remedies.

]

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 826, Wednesday, May 28, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

     SECURITY ALERT:

The reports of ‘ransom’ locking of iDevices from Australia are starting to spread to other countries, including the US. The process involves locking your phone as if you had reported it stolen. The attacker changes the access PIN on your phone, and asks for $100 (US/Euro) to unlock.

One clear explanation is here http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/apple-ids-compromised-iphones-ipads-and-macs-locked-held-ransom .

Any iDevice user (not just iPhone) should immediately change the password on their Apple account, and also change the access lock code on their device. The above article has good advice on what to do to prevent the attack.

Regards, Rick Hellewell, security guy

There is some discussion among experts as to the best way to proceed, and it may be that no one in the US is compromised, but that is not certain. Just in case, go to the Symantec link above and see for yourself what to do.

More later.  I am doing a bit about Putin’s strategy and US problems.

The Hungarians acted like Poles. The Poles acted like Czechs. The Czechs acted like swine.

This was the general summary of national behavior during the Hungarian uprising against the USSR in 1956. The event had some lasting consequences over time, among them the formation of the Nomenklatura who eventually became the actual ruling class of the USSR.

Vladimir Putin was four years old at the time of this uprising. In 1968 the Warsaw Treaty Organization – some of it – invaded Czechoslovakia to restore communist rule. Hungarian troops were part of the invasion. Putin was 16 years old.

In 1991 the Soviet old guard tried to regain control at the siege of the Russian parliament building in Moscow. The last Soviet army unit was called out to besiege the white house and surrounded it with tanks. A young Russian lieutenant was invited inside “to meet our President.” He came outside and told the mission commander that he thought they were on the wrong side, and Yeltsin wanted to talk to him. Yeltsin came outside, spoke from the top of a tank, and commander turned the tanks around so that the guns faced out to protect the building, not to besiege it, and the Soviet Union was ended. Putin was a 39 year old Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB. He resigned his commission on the second day of the attempted communist restoration.

In 1997 Putin became Deputy Chief of Staff to President Boris Yeltsin, and in 1998 he was appointed Director of the FSB, essentially the successor to the KGB. In 1999 President Yeltsin appointed him Acting Prime Minister of Russia, and when he promised Yeltsin that he would run for the Presidency he was formally appointed Prime Minister and confirmed by the Duma. In December 1999 Boris Yeltsin resigned, and under the new Russian Constitution Vladimir Putin became Acting President until the next election. His first Presidential act was to sign a decree which in effect granted amnesty to Boris Yeltsin and his family for any offenses committed while in office.

He was elected to the Presidency in a complicated election and installed as President in May of 2000. He was 48 years old. (John Kennedy was 44 when he was elected.)

The Cathedral of Jesus Christ, Savior, was demolished by Stalin to make room for a people’s palace that was never built, and became the site of a public swimming pool. One of the last acts of the Soviet Government before its final collapse was to give permission to the Russian Church to rebuild the Cathedral, which it did in time to be the site of the funeral of Boris Yeltsin. The principal speaker at Yeltsin’s service was Vladimir Putin, who was also present at the installation of statues of Tsar Alexander II, and of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. He was also present at ceremonies bestowing sainthood on the last Tsar, Nicholas II. He often attends events at the Cathedral.

It should be noted that Putin has always been a serious man. His KGB career was not spectacular, but he seems to have made friends within the service, and to have left without making many enemies. He was loyal to Boris Yeltsin. He is outwardly a loyal and religious patriot; it is the impression he has worked to give, and there is considerable evidence that much of the Russian population believes it. He has operated skillfully during the dismantling of the Soviet Union, and his statement that the destruction of the USSR was a great tragedy is made as a Russian patriot, not as a communist. Like all KGB officers he was a Party member, of course, but he was, he says, secretly baptized by his mother. He received a second baptism as Prime Minister. He publicly supports the established church and treats its officials with respect.

According to Gorbachev, at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall the United States assured Russia that there was no intention to expand NATO to the east. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/13/a_diplomatic_mystery NATO would be a partner in the rebuilding of the new Russia. There is some controversy as to who promised what, but there is little doubt that Gorbachev and Yeltsin – and thus Yeltsin’s friend, advisor, and successor – believed this. The United States, it was thought, would confine its activities to its own interests. Russia would withdraw its support for communist regimes of no importance to Russia. This all ended when Clinton expanded NATO to the east, while the US took the anti-Slavic side in the Balkan wars. By the time Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister of Russia, there was deep suspicion of the intentions of the United States, and Russia began an new assessment of its foreign policy interests and objectives. The potential era of an American-Russian cooperation had pretty well ended, supposedly to the deep disappointment of Yeltsin.

Any realistic assessment of American strategy must take into account that while Russia is not as powerful as the Soviet Union was, it remains a Great Power, at least as much so as any European nation, and arguably not greatly inferior to the European Union. It is no longer the Second World, but it is not a minor power. As a Great Power Russia has a legitimate sphere of influence, and the Ukraine and Belarus are at least partly within it. The boundaries of Europe are unsettled. After World War II the boundaries of the Soviet Union – Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania (then part of the USSR) shifted west. The Polish populations were expelled. It should be understood that Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania had historic claims to those lands. Poland was compensated with Pomerania, part of East Prussia (the northern half went to the Russian FSR, and is now part of Russia), and large parts of Eastern Germany. The German population was expelled and replaced with Poles, including many of those expelled from the part of Poland that went to the USSR. East Germany accepted this; West Germany did not for many years, and there remains some sentiment for readjustment of the borders.

So long as the United States is part of NATO, these border disputes, actual and potential, are very much a concern for America.

Note also that many of the new border areas were settled by ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians. Note that most of Belarus speaks Russian, and the genetic differences between Belarussians and Russians are fairly small. Then we have the Cossacks. Their relationship with the government at Moscow has been complicated, and after the Ref Revolution Cossacks made up much of the White Army during the civil war. When that was won by the Red Army, “deCossackization” became a Stalinst policy, and that mixes with the “Harvest of Sorrow” in which starvation was used to pacify the Ukraine. Following WW II many Cossacks returned to Russia.

It’s getting late. The point of this is not a mere ramble. If the United States has an interest in the territorial disputes of Eastern Europe – and NATO requires us to take an interest in some of those affairs – we had best understand them. You may be certain that President Putin pays attention to these matters. His concern is the preservation of Russia and its return to something of its glory. This is the nation that defeated Napoleon when everyone else had failed to do so; and it was the Army of the Soviet Union that occupied Berlin when the second World War ended.

I will continue this another day, and put all of it together in a single essay after it is finished. The purpose is to show the situation as I believe Putin sees it, and to look at the situation of eastern Europe from the viewpoint of American interests. That doesn’t seem very common now.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.