Arms and influence

Debt and the great powers

Sven at Defense and Freedom cites some interesting statistics about debt as a percentage of GDP in Europe and Japan. It's certainly bigger in many cases than I expected. However, I'm not 100% sure of the conclusion:

This government debt situation has certainly implications for the ability to spend the same or more on military power in the future. The Grand strategy of NATO and its nations should attempt to avoid large arms races due to its mature and not vital enough economies/societies/governments.

The next several years will be the real test of how much debt constrains military power--at least for the United States. Assuming a more parsimonious regime than the debt-happy Bush Administration and Congress of 2001 to 2007, how fast can the US government return to a point where it can afford to fight another regional war? And even if it can't afford it, will the United States fight future wars anyway? Would it be restricted to the Operation DESERT SHIELD/STORM model, in which other countries that benefit from US military action help pay the bill?

In the last few weeks, we may have just seen the biggest constraint on future American military action: the interconnectedness of national economies. We were already likely to see a revival of multilateralism in US foreign policy, after the Bush Administration's failed experiment in weak coalitions and unilateralism. Now, we know that, if expensive military venures weaken the US economy, the cascade effect will hurt other economies as well. Even if a future President didn't want to embrace multilateralism, other countries might not leave us much of a choice.

Happy Norman Conquest Day!

Since today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, I thought I'd re-post this animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry.

World of Wankcraft

Note to future applicants for high-security DoD jobs: you might want to re-consider your membership in a World of Warcraft clan. You might also want to stop reading this blog right now. The part of the DoD that screens applicants for these jobs suspects that your online behavior indicates whether you're a security risk.

In my day job, I do a fair amount of research covering life in the Internet age. Not surprisingly, Web 2.0 (Wikis, blogs, social networking, etc.) has re-invigorated interest in what people do while they're on the web. Many companies are trying to figure out how to use any new technologies, such as massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), to attract the attention, contribution, and loyalty of people who fit these different profiles.

Therefore, I can speak with a little authority on the topic of whether online behavior is a good indicator of whether someone is a good security risk. I'm not aware of any data pointing to whether someone who contributes Wikipedia articles is more or less likely to leak secret information to Iran than, say, someone who comments on the same Wikipedia articles, or just occasionally reads them.

Nor am I aware of any indication that the question is worth pursuing. Some people like to play World of Warcraft, and other people are just plain bored by it. Some people write blogs, other people comment on them. Some people use Delicious to maintain hundreds of bookmarks, and some people don't bookmark much of anything.

There's no reason to assume one group is more or less dangerous than the other--unless, of course, you're a defense contractor or government agency looking for budget-enhancing projects. (In this case, the price tag is $800,000, paid to two contractors, neither of whom are exactly luminaries in understanding online behavior.) As Drew Conway notes, the unjustifiably paranoid assumption behind this study is "likely lead to standards that disqualify the exact people the U.S. military needs to recruit in order to reclaim dominance of cyberspace."

In other words, do you want to recruit people for the 'information battlefield" who don't really use the Internet, with the possible exception of Overstock.com and eBay? I thought not.

¿Donde esta el uranio?

Armchair Generalist notes the latest "Everyone panic!" notification from the Department of Homeland Security. This time, a DHS official murmurs ominously about a possible alliance between Latin American drug traffickers and Al Qaeda. The modern-day Escobars have the infiltration routes; Al Qaeda might someday have nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. This dark alliance of swarthy people might happen someday. Maybe.

Sure, there might be a "potpurri of scum" who do business with each other. After all, Al Qaeda members might need the occasional source for weapons and fake passports from somewhere. Opium from Afghanistan has to get into the US through some route.

But does that mean that Latin American drug smugglers have any interest in helping Al Qaeda infiltrate unconventional weapons into the United States? Um, assuming that Al Qaeda even had them, probably not. Look at how the Uribe government escalated its counterinsurgency campaign, once it found out the Venezuelan government was providing money and technical assistance to the FARC. Now imagine what might happen if either a local government or the US government discovered any collusion between drug traffickers and foreign terrorists.

Smugglers are businesspeople that exercise extreme caution, given the number of law enforcement agencies are constantly trying to monitor or infiltrate their organizations. Even if Al Qaeda agents did not have NUKE AMERICA tattooed on their foreheads, the smugglers would have reasons to turn down anyone they don't completely trust. Smugglers sneak drugs into the United States, not people, and certainly not people from the Middle East.

Just because something is imaginable doesn't mean it's a real concern--particularly when the US government is already spending billions of dollars to track suspected drug smugglers. The DHS should not be getting ideas for "public service announcements" from the technothrillers sold in the supermarket check-out line.

UPDATE: Maybe this is all a prank designed to publicize the planned remake of Red Dawn. We can only hope so.

Tete a tete with the Taliban

It's too early to jump to any conclusions about talks with the Taliban, for the following reasons:

• It's not exactly new. NATO forces and the Afghan government have already been trying to get Taliban commanders to defect to the government side. In some cases, such as Mullah Abdul Salaam, they've been successful. These defections couldn't happen if there were no quiet talks happening already.
• Which part of the Taliban are we talking about? Certainly, the Taliban as a movement is vulnerable to a divide-and-conquer strategy. Many of the ambitious clan leaders who have joined the Taliban might drop the mask of revolutionary Sunni doctrine if they get a far better offer. The core of the movement, the doctrinal purists that coalesced around Mullah Muhammed Omar, are a much tougher sell. So, too, would be Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami, which seems to believe firmly and sincerely that it will always have more clout as a foil to the Karzai regime than as its ally.
• Is the Taliban interested in peace talks? Given their recent successes, Taliban commanders are much less likely to negotiate seriously. However, they might come to the negotiating table simply to be intransigent, and in the process, humiliate the Karzai government. We need to be wary of replaying the worst days of Vietnam War-era talks with the intransigent North Vietnamese government.
• What's the Afghan government's interest? Getting the Taliban, in part or in its entirety, to the negotiating table is a means to an end. But what does the Afghan government want from the Taliban? It's hard to believe that Karzai's brother was trying to get the Taliban to surrender. The real topics under discussion might be as prosaic as prisoner exchanges, or as ambitious as a temporary cease-fire.
• What's the US and NATO interest? And does it gibe with what the Afghan government wants?

I don't want to sound like a complete party-pooper. The offer of negotiations is important, if for no other reason than to give potential defectors an easier time of quitting the Taliban. However, I'd hate to see expectations get too high, if negotiators spend the first few months arguing over the shape of the table.

Russia bails out Iceland

The latest example of how the high per-barrel price of oil plays mischief with US national security: Russia offers to bail out Iceland:

More likely, this act of benevolence is being viewed as a way of helping Russia secure a bridgehead for an advance into the Arctic regions to claim the vast hydrocarbon and other mineral deposits there. Iceland happens to possess a once vital NATO base, which has been in mothballs since 2006, and the Russians may be eyeing that as well.

Last month's example was the Russian fleet's planned visit to Venezuela. And no, I'm not a Russophobe. I also worry about how high oil prices have complicated US national security on other fronts. On the other hand, Vladimir Putin has been playing a new form of brinksmanship with the West, not with nuclear weapons, but other sources of national power and leverage. The big pile of petrodollars makes it easier to afford risky, confrontational foreign policy ventures, such as the recent war with Georgia.

So much wrong, so little right

Last week's story about NSA employees eavesdropping on Americans abroad calling home to the United States was no shock. Things like "greatest hits" of phone sex and other intimate conversations, recorded and passed around NSA offices like joke e-mails, are just the sort of abuse you'd expect when you grant ordinary people extraordinary surveillance powers with no oversight.

As is typical of these sad counterterrorism tales from the Bush years, there are lots of bad sides--and no good side. NSA employees violated the privacy of innocent Americans in humiliating ways. The entire program exists under a legal and Constitutional cloud. And no one is claiming that this surveillance led to the capture or killing of any foreign terrorists, or the prevention of a single terrorist attack.

By now, Americans should have seen enough of these failures to accept the dodge, "We'd love to tell you about the successes, but we can't." We gave up the instruments of good government, designed for both difficult and easier times, so that we could fight Al Qaeda better. Instead, we got sweaty civil servants eavesdropping on husbands and wives in their most private moments.

So what's the big secret? Part II

As covered in the previous post, there's definitely something afoot in Iraq that's reducing the number of attacks on US forces. (Less so on Iraqis.) So what could it be?

Red herrings
If Woodward's comments are any clue, it's a technological innovation. Woodward compared it to the invention of the tank and other military technologies, which means it's probably not merely a change in technique. While US military and civilian personnel have been operating in a more joint fashion, following the example of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. However, this joint approach is nothing new: in US military experience, it's at least as old as the CORDS program in Vietnam. And again, if Woodward's hints are any guide, we're on the trail of something that has some kind of technological angle.

We might increase our chances of finding the mystery innovation if we re-think what makes it secret. Rather than limiting the search to things we don't know exist, we might also include things we know exist, but don't know exactly how effective they are.  The secret, therefore, may be the effectiveness of some new technology, or how it's used.

To extend the tank example, the big innovation of WWII wasn't the tank, since armored fighting vehicles first appeared on the battlefields of WWI. Instead, what changed by WWII is how national militaries used the tank. Rather than treating them as an infantry support weapon, tanks became their own type of unit. Rather than infantry being the "arm of decision," tanks became the most important instrument of maneuver warfare. Rather than tying down tanks to infantry units, armies created special divisional and regimental organizations centered around the tank.

The secret new counterinsurgency weapon, therefore, might be something right in the open, but perhaps not receiving much attention in the US press. That makes me wonder if the Big Secret is the biometric database.

The information weapon
The US and Iraqi militaries have been building on top of the national registries of Iraqis started under the Ba'athis regime, updating it and adding further information such as biometric data (fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.). Iraqi and American forces use it to identify criminals and insurgents at checkpoints, during sweeps, and other occasions.

It's clear how this biometric database might be very effective at identifying the people who have been killing Americans. With more resources and technical skill than their Iraqi counterparts, US military personnel might have enjoyed more success at finding the people attacking them than those attacking Iraqi security forces.

Woodward indicated that the secret program, whatever it is, has been critical in helping US forces "to locate, target and kill leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders." That implies the innovation is some sort of information gathering technology--or, perhaps, an information analysis tool, or something that makes information more readily available, like the biometric database.

Improving the biometric database might also fit the "Manhattan Project" comparison Woodward makes. Over time, Iraq and American officials have needed to add data, and also to improve the data mining tecniques used to identify potential targets. While similar efforts, such as the ridiculous Total Information Awareness project, might have failed, Americans in Iraq might have had the resources, incentives, and sense of realism needed to make this data warehouse project succeed.

Uncomfortable questions
If my guess is correct, it's also clear why the US government would want to keep the success of this program under wraps. Iraqis with access to the database might abuse it. Even if religious or clan affiliation were not recorded, it might be possible for Iraqi officials to infer it from the data that is available.

And the potential problems don't stop there. US officials outside of Iraq can use the same information to track Iraqis abroad, including in the United States. And why stop at Iraqis? Why not use the same resource to track suspected Iranian agents who move in and out of Iraq, and plenty of other places, too.

The biggest problem with the biometric database, of course, is the risk that it may not only legitimize monitoring inside the United States, but also expand it. If it works in Iraq, why not use the same sort of biometric database to track suspected domestic or internaional terrorists in the United States?

Therefore, if the biometric database is Woodward's secret program, US military officials have plenty of reasons to avoid talking about it.