Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The War in Africa 12/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism.Tags: Africa, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Special Operations
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Photo Credit: Army Times
STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)
When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”
In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.
The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.
Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:
‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’
The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them. The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:
‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’
The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now. A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:
• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.
• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.
• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.
• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.
• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.
• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.
• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.
• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”
• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.
• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.
Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]
Police: ‘Keeping the Peace’ Through Military Ways? 11/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Journalism, Law and Order, Policy.Tags: Militarization, Police, The Atlantic
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Photo Credit: National City Police Department
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America’s big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, “special” has quietly become “routine.”
ANYONE who has watched any National Geographic Television or Discovery Channel all-access program following law enforcement, or have witnessed them in action, or unfortunately have dealt with them first hand, will have noticed something: There is increasingly little difference between cops and the appearance of our modern infantrymen, deployed in war-zones.
The trend towards beefing up our police, military-style, started with Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams and high-priority, specialized gang units in big metropolitan areas, and was probably given momentum by watershed events like the violent and televised North Hollywood shootout in 1997; between bank robbers in full body armor, toting fully-automatic rifles, and woefully under-armed Los Angeles Police Department officers, that seemed to bring about imagery from the film Heat.
But it is mostly the great effect of 9/11 and the constant specter of myriad forms of terrorism that could potentially require military-type firepower, lurking just around the corner, that is mostly responsible for this new approach. Nationally, law enforcement had been reminded time and again, that in many ways they were not as well-equipped as they should be, to meet the challenges of modern-day policing. (And because Americans love their guns, it has increasingly fostered an arms race between cops and criminals, who can purchase an easily-converted-to-automatic AK-47 or an AR-15 at a gun show, and with some savvy and evil enterprise, load it with explosive rounds or those meant to pierce through body armor.)
As any global security analyst will tell you, law enforcement was and is considered one of the first lines of defense against terrorism. That is until the days after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and the focus shifted towards our military. Under the old paradigm, the basic nuts and bolts of thwarting terror was laid at the police’s doorstep: doing good detective work, showing a presence, working with the community to be vigilant, and so on. But our dramatic intelligence failure on 9/11 and the two successive wars to address Islamist terror — if one counts Iraq as having this justification — and the creation of several agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security, all have conferred this fight largely to the domain of the United States military and the national-security-industrial-complex.
This, in turn, has changed the posture of America’s law enforcement. The police, now feeling even more under-prepared to handle all of its duties along with the addition and prioritization of the staving of potential terror plots, began to invest in military-style weapons, adopt its tactics, consult with the military’s special operations units for training (as though they are some opposing guerrilla force to a dictator in a banana republic), and now work to absorb the military mindset. In The Atlantic‘s “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” Arhtur Rizer, a former officer and the article’s author, explains that the justification behind this “weapon inflation” is primarily safety.
What was once considered tactics or weaponry only to be used in special circumstances, say like a S.W.A.T. team or the application of once-limited, but now readily available, assault rifles, are being regularly employed in the more routine parts of policing. But as pointed to in “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” there are some legitimate civil liberty concerns because of this, as a recent mishap in a botched raid involving an innocent ex-Marine named, José Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq implies:
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot–or even switching his rifle off of “safety”–he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
The chief concern in regards to this escalation of firepower and this new mentality among the police is that the organizational culture in the military and its operational philosophy of: identifying if someone is a threat and neutralizing them, and if so, do it with limited civilian casualties; is unlike that of the police, whose role is to “keep the peace,” uphold the law and the rights’ of citizens, even those it suspects. If the police changes its posture from “keeping the peace” and treats everyone as criminals, the way the military treats everyone as a potential combatant, it creates more situations such as that of José Guerena, where excessive and lethal force is sometimes just the cost of doing business, and where suspects no longer have the rights that they are supposed to, as the officers become judge, jury and executioner.
When law enforcement begins to adopt the soldiers’ mentality, it tends to forget its original goals of maintaining a good solid relationship with its public, while upholding the laws when they are broken, along with the most important rights of the individual. This is not to understate the difficulty of their jobs or minimize their optimal chances for safety by not having them bring as many resources to bear as possible, as Arhtur Rizer put it:
The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.
Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.
Read “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” at The Atlantic [Here]
9.11.01 | A Confirmation 09/11/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Editorial, Essay, Global.Tags: 9/11, Foreign Policy, Politics
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9.11.01 | A Confirmation
THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.
A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.
Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”
The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)
9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.
I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”
Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.
Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.
This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?
What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.
The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.
‘The Anderson Platoon’ 05/13/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Film, Global, Media, Politics.add a comment
COUNTER-INSURGENT WARS are as hellish as conventional ones. (Perhaps more.) Everything is much more insidious in such conflicts: the enemy is more covert, more aware and exploiting of its surroundings, and much more able and willing to use local citizens to meet its ends. The farmer by day is now a soldier at night, the young man or young woman, obedient and sensitive, is just a personal and familial vendetta and a rifle away from being dangerous. All of which is exacerbated, motivated and inflamed at times, by the mere presence of foreign soldiers in a country, and the unintended consequences of interactions between those citizens and those soldiers. And that was Vietnam.
French director, Pierre Schoendorffer — originally known for his gritty and realistic 1965, French war film on the country’s Indochina excursion, La 317e Section, (clip here), which won a Cannes Festival prize for “best screenplay” — was a war correspondent for the national television station, and was originally embedded with forces in Vietnam’s infamous Dien Bien Phu in 1954, documenting and reporting on the French Army’s struggles there. But those reels and his intended full documentary never saw the light of day, as the material was confiscated upon his surrender alongside the French Army to the Viet Cong.
Photo Credit: EBONY
Following his work with French military forces and their departure from the region, and just months after he finished La 317e Section, Schoendorffer was given a second opportunity to finish his initial 1954 project, that immersive documentary following a military infantry unit in Vietnam, which had been confiscated. Only this time, he’d be swapping the French Army for the United States Army; as the American side of the war was beginning to escalate in the wake of France’s defeat and the Second Indochina War was set to fully ignite.
From September to October of 1965, he worked in a two-man crew, on a documentary following a rather unique bunch: the U.S. Army’s 12th Calvary, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon. The group was unique, precisely because of who was leading it, a 24-year-old, black West Point graduate by the name of Joseph Anderson. For six weeks, Schoendorffer followed Anderson’s unit on seek-and-destroy missions, where soldiers would wade through the dense jungle looking for an enemy to fight, and faithfully executing the cornerstone of the United States’ Vietnam strategy. The Anderson Platoon won the 1968 Academy Award in the documentary category. It is an honest meditation on the monotony, tremulous fear and odd experience of war.
Fiona Banner’s Harrier 03/22/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Art, Aviation, Defense, Design, Global.add a comment
Photo Credit: Fiona Banner
EVEN hung by the tail, the Harrier is a symbol of power. But, like the assassinated Mussolini strung up by his feet, it also shows that power is mutable. I couldn’t resist lying underneath, nose-to-nose, sensing the weight and mass and power of it above me, like a stilled pendulum. From this position all I could see was the circular nose cone, filling my vision like a football about to belt a goalie in the face. I am less certain that Fiona Banner needed to draw feathers on the bodywork and wings of the jet, even though she’s done it discreetly; the Harrier is in any case named after a bird of prey. Maybe she wanted us to think of vermin strung up on a gamekeeper’s gibbet, or a game bird hung in Tate Britain’s neo-classical larder. Banner probably also wants to remind us of earlier drawings she has made, using fighter-plane wings as her canvas or paper. Previously she has written moment-by-moment descriptions of war movies – including Apocalypse Now and Black Hawk Down – and of the experience of drawing from a live model. Now she gives us the real thing.
“Fiona Banner’s Toys for Boys Are a Turn-on at Tate Britain,” The Guardian
[...]
‘WE all hate war but these objects inspire a strange enthusiasm in us. When you reflect on their beauty it’s a strange thing, people say surely they are designed with an aesthetic in mind and, of course, they’re not. They are absolutely designed to function and that function is to kill, and that says something questionable about our aesthetic judgement and makes us ask questions about our moral position.’
Visit Fiona Banner’s site [Here]
Read “Fiona Banner’s Toys for Boys are a Turn-on at Tate Britain” [Here]
Read “Tate Britain: Fiona Banner Exhibition” [Here]
Read more about Fiona Banner’s exhibit prep [Here]
C.J. Chivers’s Tumblr: ‘The Gun’ 03/17/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Journalism, Politics.add a comment
Photo Credit: The Gun
TUMBLR. It’s a micro-blogging platform that changed everything, and “the game,” as they say, making posting text and media easier than ever before. In the ever-democratizing of the Web, where media persons become accessible citizens/commenting civilian and layman/woman/civilian become “citizen journalists,” and both are now a part of the Fourth Estate; the faintly ghosted demarcation between journalist and information consumers is now lighter and less-identifiable.
Except, most citizen journalists have yet en masse covered wars, because, well, insanity and monetary reward are sorely lacking on that point. And so, mainstream journalists are still the primary voice for our understanding conflict, but still, traditional journalism is limited by profit concerns and editorial space issues, and while many of the journos at C.J. Chivers’s New York Times employer are provided blogs to flesh-out their own stories and give their coverage even more depth, sometimes, there are still stray shots from the mind that need to be broadcasted. Much like The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Mother Jones and Newsweek, C.J. Chivers, the war correspondent, and member of the traditional news complex, has joined Tumblr to also provide depth to his coverage which spans print, online, and the New York Times‘s At War blog and a companion Twitter feed.
Chivers has used his Tumblr account as both a personal advertisement for his eponymous book, The Gun — seriously, you gotta move units when you have a book; not even kidding — to producing content for it as another outlet for his coverage of the still-going war in Afghanistan and the newer one in Libya. Recently, Chivers posted on the Ghanzi Province Taliban, and some captured photos reflecting this branch’s use of children for propaganda, and which may also imply their use in actual combat, which isn’t unfounded, and has been the case in every recent modern war there in the region.
The At War blog also published a companion post, about an engagement in January during which three Taliban fighters were killed, and then a pre-teen or early teenaged boy tried to retrieve a dead Talib’s rifle, and was killed, too. Among the captured photographs were the three above, not of teenagers but of very young children in an assortment of martial poses. These images, reminiscent of the pageantry sometimes seen in propaganda from various Palestinian groups, are unusual for Afghanistan. Child soldiering, by its broadest definition, has been common in Afghanistan for decades. But photographs of children this young under arms are not part of the usual Taliban pablum. The boy who tried to pick up the dropped rifle and flee, and these much younger boys copping fighter stances, offer much to think about.
Read more from The Gun [Here]
Underground (Ice Nuke) Ops 02/24/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism, Science, Technology.add a comment
Photo Credit: BLDNGBLG
WHILE I’d like this title to be used for another historical post (as opposed to this one) dedicated to subterranean warfare and “tunnel rats,” the time hasn’t come yet. So I’m using it here, with the parenthetical, “Ice Nuke.” Recently, the fantastic BLDNGBLG site that has consistently garnered nothing but an enthusiastic-near-religious following and rave reviews from many sectors of the Web, had a post on Camp Century or “Project Iceworm”; the U.S. Army’s Cold War research into the feasibility of creating a web of ballistic missile sites beneath the Greenland ice sheet. According to BLDNGBLG, Camp Century was to be a completely self-contained city beneath the ice that harnessed the power of a mobile nuclear reactor — the Alco PM-2A, according to BLDGBLG’s interview subject, Frank J. Leskovitz, who runs his own Camp Century Web site — to keep it lit.
Photo Credit: Frank J. Leskovitz
Per “Project Iceworm’s” Wiki entry, the web of nuclear missiles was intended to be numbered at 600, and the actual missile locus were to be rotated to different points, periodically. The city at Camp Century featured a shop, a movie theater, a hospital; and water for the camp was provided by the melting glaciers, and was regularly tested. Ultimately, building a network of intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites, targeted at Russia, beneath the ice, failed because of an inability to take into account the shifting of ice in such a tenuous arrangement between man and nature; the modus vivendi between the goals of the U.S. government and Mother Nature were just never ironed-out. On the creation of the network of tunnels that were later filled with more habitable prefab spaces:
Long ice trenches were created by Swiss made “Peter Plows,” which were giant rotary snow milling machines. The machine’s two operators could move up to 1200 cubic yards of snow per hour. The longest of the twenty-one trenches was known as “Main Street.” It was over 1100 feet long and 26 feet wide and 28 feet high. The trenches were covered with arched corrugated steel roofs which were then buried with snow.
[...]
Each seventy-six foot long electrically heated barrack contained a common area and five 156 square foot rooms. Several feet of airspace was maintained around each building to minimize melting. To further reduce heat build-up, fourteen inch diameter “air wells” were dug forty feet down into the tunnel floors to introduce cooler air. Nearly constant trimming of the tunnel walls and roofs was found to be necessary to combat snow deformation.
Read more at BLDNGBLG [Here]
Read more and watch additional media at Frank J. Leskovitz’s site [Here]
D.A.R.P.A.’s Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Experiment 01/28/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Law and Order, Politics, Technology.add a comment
THE IRAN uprising and the parallel media conversation concerning Twitter’s role in it as a means to “get the word out” to the world, were an indication of both the power of the Internet and social media, at least in perception — even if as Malcolm Gladwell argues otherwise in “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” — and their ultimate, long-term usefulness outside of personal expression and commercial applications; as intelligence agencies, hackers, foreign governments and the upper echelons of the American defense apparatus already know. The question is, however, just how powerful and useful are these social media tools? Since, as noted, there is plenty of skepticism as to how well they can mobilize a disparate group. And is this “power” even something able to be “metric-ed”?
As pointed out in Foreign Policy‘s “Misreading Tehran,” it’s hard to spearhead a political revolt through social media and the Net, particularly when those tweeting and updating their Facebook are often not actually in the location of the place they want to start a revolution in, and aren’t necessarily as privy to the spontaneity of the word-of-mouth interactions in crowds, which is what happened with many of the prominent figures behind the social media involved in the Iran protests; many of whom were merely following the demonstrations from the United States.
But, nonetheless, if conditions were made so that most of those using a media platform to air grievances and express dissent against the authority of a state or dictator, were indeed in the area, like a Radio Free Europe; social media helping to grease the wheels and multiply manpower quickly for demonstrations, would be undeniable.
(Example, though a relatively nefarious application, depending on the situation:) Can governments/hackers/terror networks use social media to help foment uprisings in nations already teetering in the balance; particularly when those nations are rocked by economic, political and social unrest; and with a youth population chomping a the bit for democracy? Since Iran seems to indicate so, and even though, that kind of meddlesome approach to other nations’ affairs of the state by Western governments has only been troubled and universally presumed, it is nonetheless an interesting answer to have.
Can social media provide a clearer picture of real-time, on-the-ground intelligence or more likely, accentuate it? Can it help in the spotting of a wayward, priority object, or a high-valued asset or person of interest quicker? Like a suspect on the lamb? Or a downed pilot? After all, status updates and tweets are many times location and first-person reportage of events, which are the very basis of raw intelligence. And can social media tools be effectively used as an open intelligence network in and of itself? Say, if enough were recruited and incentivized, to work as a low risk, multi-eyed intelligence network via social media, in foreign lands, that could augment existing human intelligence and signals intelligence?
In late 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (D.A.R.P.A.) looked to answer some of these questions and identify some blind spots, concerning just how powerful social media are, and at least begin working towards finding some answers on similar questions of what social media tools can be applied to what problems, with some specifically goal-oriented data to back it up. D.A.R.P.A. conducted an experiment allowing everyone who wanted to participate to do so, in an experiment on Web-based “crowd-sourcing” — a term that refers to the application of many anonymous or unidentified parties, or an entire community, to meet a goal through open means — and how it could help in the augmenting of the traditional means of information gathering.
An example of crowd-sourcing is as simple as when you ask the Tumblr community for their “reax” on a movie, or when one asks the Twitterverse about the particularly great restaurants in a city they’re in on vacation: the answers flood in, and your decisions are based on a synthesis and analysis of the information. The experiment wasn’t just a crowd-sourcing endeavor, though, it was a competition known as the “D.A.R.P.A. Network Challenge” that awarded $40,000 USD to the first correct identifier of the locations of 10 “moored,” red weather balloons scattered across the contiguous United States, in areas readily visible. The geniuses at M.I.T.’s Media Lab won the 40K, not surprisingly, and did it in nine hours.
Just how the M.I.T team did it, was through a parallel social network — a pyramid scheme, essentially — which rewarded the participation of everyone who joined the network, geared to finding the balloons, even if they knew that they could not find the red spheres. What this yielded was a singular-minded intelligence unit working over the Web, which could find the balloons’ coordinates and provided a structure where even those who could not find the balloons, would still assist in identifying people who could find them.
How this could be useful, is beyond defense. Everything from Amber Alerts, to use in apprehending the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted; to use in a world-wide hunt for a terrorist, just hours after an incident; or it being implemented as another form of an Emergency Broadcast System, or any other form of dragnet or national early warning system, could come of this, or employ this schema.
What is remarkable is how quickly the M.I.T. team achieved the goal, without any kind of prior infrastructure. What if the government and law enforcement employed a similar system, but with a well-developed infrastructure, as a multi-use tool? Though there are the inevitable drawbacks of information overload/bottle-necking, thus creating inefficiency, and then there is also misinformation; something the M.I.T. team had to ferret out and isolate, as there was another team providing them with false locations.
Moreover, there are concerns on the civil liberties front, as this could become a virtual Big-Brother network, where perhaps, citizens themselves have tacitly agreed to their own participation and questionable surveillance, in the name of security. As we saw with the legal ramifications of 9/11, the potential usefulness of this application of social media to defense, law enforcement and the security apparatus, must be hand-wringingly weighed against the potential benefits.
Read the official press release from D.A.R.P.A. [Here]
Read M.I.T. Media Lab’s press release [Here]
Read an interview at CNET [Here]
