| Monday
October 1, 2001
I am in a rush and I'll have more mail
tomorrow. Here's a bit to think about from Joel Rosenberg.
I like the breadth of the choices at http://reason.com/hod/jw092101.html
-- but I think he's fudging a little, on the three final choices. (See
Mail172)
How, precisely, does he think that we *can* withdraw
from the Middle East? You've got a possible solution in SPSS, but it's not
a solution for this year, or this decade, even. It would take a long time
to bring SPSS online, even with it as a top national priority -- and,
right now, it's not even on the table, as a significant part of the public
discussion -- and I don't see any other way that the US can withdraw from
the Middle East, if only to guarantee the oil supply in the interim.
Nuclear power is another option that might help, and I'd like to see -- as
I said in my first published piece, on the NYTimes Ope-Ed page, some
twenty-odd years ago -- more fission power plants, but that would take
some time, even as a, err, crash program.
I think he accepts, uncritically, that using nuclear
weapons is fundamentally different in nature than "simply"
engaging in a lengthy, brutal war, and I think assumption ought to be
looked at very carefully. Nuclear weapons have taken on an iconic status
that goes beyond their simple destructive capability, and looking
carefully at the message buried in the icons seems to me to be only
sensible.
Question: how does the use of a nuclear weapon of,
say, a ten-kiloton yield differ in a significant way from the use of say,
a ten hypothetical one-kiloton conventional bombs? (Or forget the
hypotheticals, and stack up twenty BLU-66 fuel-air weapons, with upwards
of a half kiloton yield each, according to an ex-Air Force friend I just
checked with. Fairly cheap, too, he says.)
Is there a difference? I think so. What *is* the
difference, though?
>I want it to be in the interest of a great many
people in the Middle East >to pound down anyone proposing another
attack on the United States. >Hate us, yes; but be afraid. Be very
afraid.
Agreed, certainly -- given that being loved by all
sides is utterly impossible, as is being thought irrelevant.
Violence -- whether by a state or by individuals --
is always instructive, but it's worthwhile to consider what lessons it
teaches. (I think Ossama bin Laden may have been thinking, for some time,
very carefully about that very matter.)
We'd have to be very careful that the lesson we
teach isn't "don't celebrate openly, and be sure that your government
has plausible deniability over financial and other support to anti-US
terrorism", but something less nuanced, if what we want is for people
to think, in whatever their native language is, "omigod -- there's
some nutcase next door/in the capital/out in the boonies about to bring
death and destruction on everything I care about if I don't do my best to
stop him, or at least alert the Americans so that they can send their
bombers while I clear out."
Consider your Memorials -- given the list of states
where bin Laden has been supported and/or cheered, there's got to be a lot
of them. Would they be enough? I'm certainly willing to see it as a first
cut at a solution. Wish it was on the table in Washington, but I'm also
very sure that it would lead to the very "Muslim outrage" that
the avoidance of which is stated and implicit national policy.
Newt Gingrich has, just in the past few days, made
me for the first time unhappy that he isn't Speaker of the House -- and
not just because of his answers, with which I agree, but because he's
openly (albeit implicitly) asking the right question, which is not just
"what do we to about bin Laden and the Taliban?" and the
accompanying policy of "let's not think through or discuss the
implications of what we are and aren't doing until we've finished doing
that."
Denny Hastert may well be asking the same questions
-- but he isn't doing so openly, not even in the elliptical way that John
McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz are.
"Give a boy a hammer, and everything looks like
a nail." Colin Powell's hammer, of which he is fond, is the
organizing of a broad but shallow coalition and the purchase of others'
membership in such a coalition, with the consensus problems inherent in
such.
Is that the right tool to get to "hate us [ --
or don't; we don't care -- my addition]. But be very afraid"?
Maybe not.
Assuming he agrees on the goal, he must feel that if
bin Laden and his Taliban supporters are hit hard enough, that will
discourage other folks sufficiently, even though he's carefully avoiding
hitting others of bin Laden's and the Taliban's supporters and sponsors --
note, particularly, what's been done with regard to Pakistan.
(Is lifting the sanctions on Pakistan the right
thing? Perhaps. Does it have consequences? Yup. Will others understand
that it's not only safe but demonstrably profitable to promote violently
anti-US governments that knowingly and openly harbor terrorists bent on
murdering Americans on American soil -- as long as they're willing to
honestly disavow them after the shoe drops? Hope not.)
I think his policy is suspect, given the compromises
with the goal inherent in giving, say, Saudi Arabia or the Emirates a veto
over strikes against bin Laden associates (and other terrorist
organizations with their eyes on our response to Black Tuesday) in Syria.
My own hammer -- the belief that the US's and
Israel's self-defense interests in the fight against terrorism directed at
the the US overlap almost entirely -- is also certainly worth examining,
as well, and I wish that those Congresscritters who don't think it's so
would have engaged in a dialogue with Netanyahu the other day (they
certainly had the opportunity), because I think the case for it is strong,
and not to be dismissed with a wave of the hand, or accepted (as it was,
at least apparently, by those present) without understanding that there
are some *very* serious policy implications, including, among others, the
much-to-be-avoided "Muslim outrage."
(Your own hammer -- SPSS -- seems to me a much more
useful tool to make the US independent of the oil states and therefore
able to let them work out their problems without it being the US's
problem, and I don't think that's just because I liked the idea before.
But I don't think it gets to "be very afraid" -- nor, obviously,
do I think you intend it to be, except indirectly, by being able to add,
"...because we don't need your damn oil".)
Yes, carrots have worked, but the stick is key --
note that Germany and Japan are both democracies, friendly to the US
(despite the disagreements that democracies have with each other), but
both came about after a huge loss of life among the indigenous population,
and an understanding that the US was an enemy that would not settle for
anything short of unconditional surrender.
I don't think that's the case in, say, Syria, not
right now. Nor the Emirates, where bin Laden's financing has come from, at
least in part, with, at best, the winking neglect of the governments. Nor
Iraq. Nor . . . well, you've got the list, too.
One bright spot on the list: Sudan.
Sudan is an interesting case. The attacks --
clearly, acts of war, by any reasonable definition -- on what apparently
turn out to have been a non-terrorist target, but was apparently thought
to have been -- have been followed by a significant, useful change in
Sudanese policy.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc?
Maybe. Maybe not. Worth thinking about, though.
Perhaps -- and my wishing it so doesn't make it so
-- the message received was, "Be very frightened at the poassibility
that we might have reason to think you're cooperating with terrorists bent
on murdering Americans."
Others, apparently, haven't yet gotten that message.
Joel Rosenberg
---------------------------- There's a widow in
sleepy Chester Who weeps for her only son; There's a grave on the Pabeng
River, A grave that the Burmans shun; And there's Subadar Prag Tewarri Who
tells how the work was done. -- Rudyard Kipling, "The Grave of the
Hundred Head."
What we do know is that it is 3 weeks
and not much visibly has happened. We can do little but have faith.
But I count it as the goal that the
rulers of every nation are willing to expend great effort to keep their
citizens from harming the United States: if that requires visiting the
equivalent of the Plagues of Egypt on their heads, then so be it.
And another:
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/09/21/iraq/index.html
Short form: there's some reason to believe --
nothing approaching proof, as of yet -- that Saddam's government was
involved in Black Tuesday, and it's beyond doubt that it's been involved
in other attempts, almost certainly including the previous WTC attack.
Question: if the Taliban are reduced to rubble and
bin Laden is killed/captured/etc., what will the deterrent effect be on
Saddam? (I don't think it's necessarily nothing; I do think it's an
important question.) On others? Colin Powell seems to be working toward a
"okay, this time we *really* mean it -- stop now" policy, as a
way to build and hold a coalition. That may be wise, but it does bear some
careful thought.
(Late news: the Saudis have, again, flip-flopped --
the Saudi bases, they say, can't be used for attacks against Arabs and/or
Muslims.)
One minor point: the FBI wasn't, in retrospect, wise
to so quickly dismiss the assassination of the much-hated Meir Kahane as
the work of a lone gunman; the assassin was, although the Salon article
doesn't go into detail, apparently part of "Ramzi Yousef's"
organization.
(Full disclosure: I knew Kahane, slightly, in the
early seventies -- before he clearly went nuts -- and liked the guy, then.
Broke with him over the shooting into the Soviet embassy nursery -- I
thought then, and think now, that he should have unambiguously condemned
that. His short letter in response to me taking him to task for that was,
to say the least, not gentle.)
"A man who calls himself Ramzi Yousef is
currently serving a 240-year sentence in federal prison for masterminding
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which six people died, though even
his trial judge noted at sentencing: "We don't even know what your
real name is."
"What is known about him is that he entered the
United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing Yousef's name, and then
promptly sought political asylum. Shortly afterward, he began organizing a
group of Islamic radicals in the Jersey City, N.J., area who had been
planning to pipe-bomb government officials and Jewish leaders in
retaliation for the imprisonment of one of their martyrs, Meir Kahane
assassin El Sayyid Nosair. However, Yousef promptly escalated the plot
into one with a bigger target -- namely, the World Trade Center. "
....
"Woolsey contends that even if no further
evidence links Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration
should at least look into the evidence now in hand, and determine if he
was behind the 1993 bombing. "If they determine that Iraqi
intelligence was behind '93, that should be enough. We got Al Capone not
for the many murders that he contracted for, but for income-tax evasion.
"In the '93 bombing, although six people died,
it was certainly not as major a thing as what happened on Sept. 11.
There's no statute of limitations on terrorism, and as far as I'm
concerned, if he did the '93 bombing, that's enough to get him on the list
of folks who need to have their regimes changed."
Joel Rosenberg
I need to think on some of this.
Thanks.
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Subject: Abolish the air force?
Dear Jerry:
After due consideration, I think the question is
wrongly phrased. There are really at least three general questions here.
First, what are armed forces for? Leaving aside the
near-meaningless ("Ensure National Security"), my answer is that
they exist to destroy actively resistant, intelligent targets, or as Uncle
Rush might put it, "To kill people and break things, even though the
target is fighting back."
From this point of view, the whole idea of
"Service" organization is suspect. We need to be able to put
17-year olds with rifles on the real estate of defeated enemies, but do
they need to be "Army," or "Marines" or "Naval
landing and occupation troops," or just "Ground fighter small
arms specialists?"
The idea of being able to drop bombs and missile
warheads on people half to all the way around the globe seems sensible,
and it might be a good idea to have a "Long Range Bomber Force"
for this. We might also wish to include land based missiles in said
service, and possibly sea-based missile carriers as well. Last I looked,
the Ohio class boomers lived in their own little world ("We hide with
price"), apart from the rest of the Navy. They look like they'd fit
well in such a "Strategic" bombardment force.
Or maybe not. Maybe the subs should all be in the
same branch, even though some are independently operating boomer, some are
independent hunter-killers, and some are protecting surface flotillas.
They use highly similar technologies, after all. Besides, technology isn't
the whole of war. Service pride and tradition count for much when the
fighting starts. The whole subject needs thinking about.
Second, should the 'fighting' functions be in the
same organization as the support functions. Since the 17-year olds with
rifles have many incurable bad habits, such as eating and expending
ammunition, we need to supply them with stuff, but do we need an Army land
based transport service, a Navy sea based service, and an Air Force air
transport service, a single unified logistics service, or what?
Note that the job of an infantry man has no civilian
equivalent except maybe SWAT team member, while the job of naval cargo
carrier has a nearly exact equivalent in merchant marines. There are good
arguments for having your supply people subject to military discipline at
least some time, but perhaps rather than have a land/naval/air transport
commands, we should subsidize civilian firms but require all employees to
be Reservists in the "Logistics Service," and call them up as
needed during hostilities?
Finally, if we're going to have a long range
bombardment capability, what do we wish to bombard, and why, and with
what? The greatest weakness of SAC specifically, and the Air Force
generally, is that it ends up being commanded by people who enjoy flying
aircraft. Combined with the fact that most services spend the majority of
their time at peace (thank God), it produces a mentality that sees inputs
as ends in themselves. Success is counted by the number of sorties.
As you noted, this leads to a lack of thinking about
strategy. In WWII, the RAF and USAAF both went into the war believing
"the bomber will always get through," and quickly found that
against determined defenses, unescorted daylight bombing was impossible.
What they didn't realize till after the war was that their choice of bombs
to destroy factories was wrong.
It's easy to damage walls and floors with HE bombs,
but remarkably hard to destroy machine tools that way. Only when it lands
almost directly on the lathe, drill press, or whatever does the bomb
destroy its target. What works in destroying factories is fire. As we were
just grimly reminded last Sept. 11th., when steel gets hot enough it
softens, and gravity will do the rest.
When it came to target selection, 'strategic'
bombardment didn't really become strategic till the run up to D-Day. Then
the USAAF and RAF were compelled, much against their will, to drop bombs
on bridges and railroad marshaling yards, and put mines in canals and
rivers. This was done to keep the Wehrmacht from rapidly reinforcing the
troops attacking our beachheads, but in the event it damaged the overall
German war effort so badly it was adopted as a general strategy, and came
damn close to shutting down the German economy on its own.
Note in this connection that when le May took over
the bombing effort against Japan, he went almost immediately emphasized
firebombing and attacks on transport. The air assault against Nippon left
very few factories functional for long, outside of the five cities he was
forbidden to bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura, Kyoto, and one I forget)
-- but bombing of harbors, ferries and bridges, and the air delivery of
sea mines disrupted raw materials delivery so badly that factories were
largely idle even when undamaged.
And note that in WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam, we tried
to strangle the enemy front line supply with "tactical"
aviation, and failed each time. Yet in Desert Storm we succeeded. The
reason is that Saddam's supply convoys couldn't hide, while Hitler's,
Mao's, and Ho's could. The secret of tactical air success thus lies in
detection of moving targets. That, in turn, will usually probably require
someone on the ground, reporting via radio. But these are jobs we give to
Rangers, SEALs, LRRPs, and CIA deep cover agents -- that is, people whose
only common factor is that they don't talk with the Air Force.
So maybe what we really need is to require the heads
of the Air Force to have spent the first five years of their career doing
something not concerned with getting planes in the air, and the last five
before high command not being pilots!
Best, Stephen
There is also this:
Dear Dr Pournelle, "It's worth noting that
during World War II, aircraft carriers were the sine qua non of seapower -
and that the only nations with worthwhile carrier fleets were those
nations that did NOT have an independent air force."
Um. The Royal Navy in World Wars I and II had a
carrier fleet which did great execution among Italians, Germans, and
Japanese. Britain also had an independent Air Force - the Royal Air Force
has been a separate service since early in World War I; it grew out of the
Army-based Royal Flying Corps. There is a Fleet Air Arm serving the same
purposes as Naval Aviation in the US; that grew out of the Royal Naval Air
Service. It was not confined to fleet actions.
Was it a worthwhile fleet? There is a case to be
made that the UK had better aircraft carriers than the US. This became
clear in the closing stages of the Pacific War, when the large British
contingent besieging the islands of Japan alongside the Americans came
under the same kamikaze attacks, but suffered very little damage in
comparison. The British carrier's decks were steel; impacting planes
simply bounced off. US decks were of wood.
Evolution of different British services followed
availability of different aircraft types. It had very little to do the
intraservice rivalries, though these could be bitter (cf. Bader and
Leigh-Mallory vs. Dowding and Park).
The RAF was divided into 'commands' with distinct
functions and traditions. For example: The Desert Air Force flew in
support of the Eighth Army. Service traditions were not allowed to get in
the way of ground-support innovation, like tank-busting Hurricanes (armed
with humongous cannon whose recoil practically stopped the aircraft in
midair).
I've never seen it put in so many words, but the
Brits tended to use Fighter Command in a manner similar to cavalry, Bomber
Command as an extension of Artillery, ungodly hybrids like the Mosquito
squadrons as raiders. Ground support fell to Hurribombers, Tempests, and
Typhoons. There was a lack of something like mounted infantry, eventually
supplied by the Harrier jump-jet. (By no coincidence, the US Marines
decided that they wanted Harriers too, appropriately modified and made
under licence in the US).
It was all very efficient, but you see it had to be,
because their country's future depended on it. That is why debate about
merging the US Air Force back into the Army is sterile. Military
philosophy is not helpful here. The real issue is how much a military
service sees itself as part of a greater whole. One has only to look and
the bitter disputes between US Generals like McArthur and Marshall or
Eisenhower to see that if you bring disputes under one roof, they won't be
any more easily solved. If you're going to do any such thing, you had
better have a Commander in Chief with unchallengeable authority.
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) (tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz)
System Administrator, Dept. of Maths. & Stats., Otago Uni. PO Box 56,
Dunedin, NZ.
The US did all right with Navy and
Army for a long time. I think we could again. USAF doesn't seem to have any
useful missions. We need to keep long range heavy bombers, but I don't think
fighter pilot generals are all that useful at figuring what to do with them.
I used to be an Independent Air Force
advocate but I think I no longer am.
For a reply see
below.
g
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