What if World War 3 has started and nobody knew it? If conflict in the 21st century takes takes the form of intelligence operations and targeted assassinations is it really war any more? Maybe it’s illegal to attack a government but if you do it slowly, quietly enough, then no red lines are crossed; no Security Council resolutions are enacted. The Daily Telegraph quotes former British Labor Environment Minister as saying his party has been infiltrated by a secret cell of Islamists who are slowly but surely taking parts of it over.
“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.
But Islamists aren’t the only ones who’ve discovered that it’s possible to conduct war by other means. The Weekly Standard described the extraordinary extent and success of the Administration’s Drone War. Kenneth Anderson says that America is policing the lawless parts of the world from the air with robots.
The Predator drone strategy is a rare example of something that has gone really, really well for the Obama administration. Counterterrorism “on offense” has done better, ironically, under an administration that hoped it could just play counterterrorism on defense—wind down wars, wish away the threat as a bad dream from the Bush years, hope the whole business would fade away so it could focus on health care. Yet for all that, the Obama administration, through Predator strikes, is taking the fight to the enemy.
Anderson bemoans the Administration’s failure to put forward a legal doctrine under which it conducts this extraordinary program of targeted assassinations. But why should it? If the press doesn’t demand it and conservatives are content to watch the perps zapped then perhaps it is better not mentioning it at all.
Newsweek says Drone warfare has become so attractive that everyone wants them. “At least 40 other countries—from Belarus and Georgia to India, Pakistan, and Russia—have begun to build, buy, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicles … all told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.” Invasions are so yesterday. Today you just send over a drone and whack who you don’t like. And for those who can’t afford them or who prefer old fashioned methods, there’s always the hit team. One thing assassins can do that drones can’t is cover up their tracks or make them lead the wrong way. Defense Update says the question of who ordered hit on the Hamas leader in Dubai is getting murkier with each passing day. Did the Mossad kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh? Or were they same people who killed “Imad Mughniyah in central Damascus”, whoever those were? And “they” might just be a consortium. Amazingly the list of suspects may include the Saudi secret services who are rumored — just rumored mind you — to be making common cause with the Jewish state when the occasion suits.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah is also still bent on avenging the 2008 killing in Damascus of its leader, Imad Mughniyeh. The Mossad was blamed for that, too. Israeli sources claim that Hezbollah has already made 10 attempts to attack Israeli targets inside and outside the Jewish state since Mughniyeh was blown up by a booby-trap inside the high-security zone in central Damascus. Israeli security authorities expect Hezbollah to try again marking the second anniversary of the death of Mughniyeh, who until Osama bin Laden came along was the most wanted terrorist fugitive on the planet.
It is a common “secret” that Israeli and many foreign intelligence services are thought to cooperate closely in a variety of areas of common interest – including on the Iranian nuclear program, and in the fight against Sunni ‘Global Jihad’ organizations.
It’s not wholly out of the question. In fact Spacewar claims the Saudis have secretly helped America turn the tide in Afghanistan by bribing and otherwise pushing the ISI into betraying their proteges in the Taliban. Their men in Lebanon say:
The flow of high-grade intelligence from Pakistan’s leading security organization that has led to the recent capture or death of a dozen top Taliban chiefs was the result of high-level pressure from Saudi Arabia, diplomatic sources said. …
The Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s, was persuaded to cooperate with the United States by the powerful head of Saudi Arabia’s principal intelligence service, the General Intelligence Presidency, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, younger half-brother of King Abdallah.
He conducted shuttle diplomacy between Riyadh and Islamabad, where he convinced Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of staff of the Pakistani army, to order the ISI to play ball.
Saudi petrodollars had a lot to do with that. The sources say that Riyadh has been helping the Pakistani military pay for its recent offensive against the Taliban.
America’s enemies may not have much in the way of lasers, satellites and missiles but on thing they have a lot of is a lack of scruples. And ruthlessness may be the one military commodity worth anything any more on our politically correct planet. Maybe the reason Kenneth Anderson will never get his wish is that it is so much more convenient to deny you did it rather than to ask for permission. The basic principle of 21st century warfare is that that like CS Lewis’ devil it’s main aim is to convince everyone that it does not exist. The days of uniformed armies, navies and air forces may be numbered and in their place a world where disputes are settled by assassins, robotic or otherwise, cris-crossing the continents looking for a man with a problem.
Where would you go to monitor a World War 3 without contiguous battlefields? Maybe on Twitter, which you can mine for nuggets of things that never were. Wired says the Pentagon is sort of, kind of lifting its restrictions on the use of social networking sites so there’s a chance for journalists there. “On Friday, the Pentagon announced a new social media policy that will the troops to use Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, within limits. True to form, Pentagon social media czar Price Floyd announced the policy change in a Twitter update.” And you might surf the Web from Iceland, which is considering becoming the Switzerland of online secrets. “Could global news organizations with a home office in Reykjavík soon be as common as Delaware corporations or Cayman Islands assets?” But maybe it isn’t lawsuits journalists will be hiding from in the frozen. But in a world where there is no war and no formal enemies, what is there to fear? Just the shadow in the doorway which is only a trick of your imagination.
Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And like that, poof. He’s gone.
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Seems to me that if warfare really does take that turn, it is only a matter of time before somebody realizes that the best way to deal with a foe sending out assassins is to inavde his country and wipe out the infrastructure that trains and supplies said assassins. At which point we will have come in a full circle.
I am reminded of the story, perhaps apocryphal, about the first Assassins, the followers of Hassan, and the Templars. The Assassins terrorized everyone around them, for those around them knew that if they attempted to lay seige to the Assassins’ home base, then their leaders would be murdered, for the Assassins always got through. Then the Assassins asked the Templars for tribute, and the Templars declined to pay, and threatened to lay seige to the mountain fortress that the Assassins resided in. The Assassins pointed out that if that happened the leaders of the Templars would die, whereupon the Templars replied that every knight had resigned himself to death when he joined the Order, and they would simply appoint new leaders and continue – every night if they had to – until the Assassins fell. The Assassins believed them and realized that they were no match for the Templars on the open field – they ended up paying the Templars tribute. Moral of the story: assymetry works both ways.
May have been the Hospitallers, not the Templars. I forget.
Maybe the days of armies, navies and air forces are over.
Don’t believe it. The purposes of Intelligence work and of covert operations are to support the Diplomatic policy and military operations of a nation. They do not substitute for them. The lawyers and bureaucrats love the secret services because they think in their conceit that these are brother Black Arts, with more effective sanctions. The lack of pressure to get a legal doctrine published could come from an administration of lawyers with a cynical contempt for the law. It matters that Bush spent time and effort seeing that his Is were dotted and Ts crossed in getting opinions issued regarding GITMO and other issues. All that earned was the threat of prosecution for the lawyers who had the temerity to work for a Republican. One day, if the system fails, an old fashioned army of twelve divisions will cross from China through the Dzungarian gates and head south. Another army will come down the Brahmaputra to flank India from the East and the Chinese Navy will contest control of the Indian Ocean. If all that the US and India and Japan and Australia have are drones and “Smart Power” then it will be game over. The “Looking Glass War” was fought to keep the BAOR and the US Black Horse Regiment aware of what the Bear was doing. The spooks did not plug the Fulda Gap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcDUBmxf6WI
The apotheosis of the Drone is appropriate for those who consistently look for the cheap way, in both financial and moral commitment costs, to fight a war. Drones are great and have their purpose but they become emblematic of an excuse to cut infrastructure, and to downgrade industrial assets and vast other sectors of intelligence work. Nukes also were originally desired as a cheaper alternative to large standing armies, and with reduced social costs that militarization entailed. We do not want to be a nation permanently mobilized in arms. The answer is to have a real effective military and the will to use it so as to forestall small threats getting out of hand. Bush understood this and he would have built a more peaceful world, without Chavez and others testing for weakness. The sedition of the Congress and the Democrats emboldened our enemies and made the world more dangerous. Now there is more of a need for old fashioned steel and boots militaries, not less.
From the Weekly Standard link:
I suggest none of these carry any legal weight, when there has been no declaration of who we are fighting.
Here is a better moral regarding the use of assassins. They only work if your enemies doesn’t possess the will and means to take you out. Hat tip USS Clueless (back in the day when Den Beste wrote about things that mattered rather than anime):
The Mongols’ prime objective was the Caliph of Baghdad, but before confronting him they meant to eliminate the other major power in the region, The Ismailis or Assassins. They had emerged because of a schism in the Shia Muslim sect and established themselves in northern and eastern Persia by taking and controlling a series of mountain fortifications. Behind their walls they lived a contemplative life, producing beautifully wrought paintings and metalworks, buy beyond their retreats they terrorized those civilizations they deemed heretical and so earned the enmity not just of the rest of the Islamic world but eventually of Europe. Rather than confronting his enemies in open combat he preferred to sponsor a campaign of political murder, usually executed with a dagger in the back, as the means to his ends.
The Mongols has their own reasons for launching a campaign against the Assassins. First, they had received a plea of help from an Islamic judge in Qaswin, a town near the Assassins’ stronghold at Alamut, who had complained that his fellow citizens were forced to wear armour all the time as protection from the Assassins’ daggers. According to Rubruck, another reason that determined Mongol attitudes was the discovery of a plot to send no fewer than 400 dagger-wielding Assassins in disguise to Qaraqorum with the instructions to murder the Great Khan. The Assassins had encountered the Mongols once before, during Chormaghun’s terror raid through northern Persia 1237-8, which led them to send an envoy to Europe to beg help.
…
On 1 January 1256 Hulegu’s army crossed the Oxus River and brought into Persia the most formidable war machine ever seen. It possessed the very latest in siege engineering, gunpowder from China, catapults that would send balls of flaming naphtha into their enemy’s cities, and divisions of rigorously trained mounted archers led by generals who had learnt their skills at the feet of Genghis Khan and Subedei. As news of Hulegu’s army spread he was soon presented with a succession of sultans, emirs, and atabaks from as far apart as Asia Minor and Herat, all come to pay homage. Its sheer presence brought to an end nearly forty years of rebellion and unrest in the old lands of Khwarazmia, but to the inhabitants of Persia and Syria it was the dawn of a new world order.
The Mongols made first for the Elburz Mountains where the Assassins lay in wait behind what they believed to be their impregnable fortresses. With extraordinary ingenuity the Mongol generals and their Chinese engineers manoeuvred their artillery up the mountain slopes and set them up around the walls of the fortress of Alamut. But before the order was given to commence firing the Assassins’ Grand Master, Rukn ad_Din signaled that he wanted to negotiate. Hulegu countered that he must immediately order the destruction of his own fortifications; when Rukn ad_Din prevaricated; the bombardment commenced. Under the most devastatingly accurate fire, the walls quickly tumbled and Rukn ad_Din surrendered. Hulegu took him prisoner, transported him to every Assassin castle they confronted, and paraded him before each garrison with the demand for an immediate surrender. Some obliged, as at Alamut; while others, like Gerdkuh, had to be taken by force. Today the spherical stone missiles fired by the artillery teams at the walls still litter the perimeter of the ruins. Whether each ‘eagle’s nest’ surrendered or taken, the Mongols put all the inhabitants to the swords – even the women in their homes and the babies in their cradles.
As the slaughter continued, Rukn ad_Din begged Hulegu to allow him to go to Qaraqorum where he would pay homage to the great Khan and plead for clemency. Hulegu agreed, but when he got to Qaraqorum Mongke Khan refused to see him. It was effectively a sentence of death. On the journey back his Mongol escorts turned on the Grand Master and his attendants, who were ‘kicked to a pulp’. The Persian historian Juvaini commented that ‘the world had been cleansed’. Five hundred years later Edward Gibbon echoed those sentiments, claiming that the Mongols’ campaign ‘may be considered as a service to mankind’. It took two years for the Mongols to dislodge over 200 ‘eagle’s nests’, but in the process they virtually expunged the Assassins from Persia.
On different note. Don’t you just love how the successes in the War on Terror (or whatever we in the USA are calling it these days) have become Obama’s success, even though he had absolutely nothing to do with laying the foundations that allowed for the current suceesses. In fact, he actively opposed laying those foundations. And now he embraces the credit for all the sacrifices and hard work of others before him. Remember too that our clueless wonder of a Vice President once claim during the early Afghan campaign that we (the US) were cowards ‘hiding’ behind our technology and that if we truly wanted to earn the respect and fear of the Isalmic world that we would have to go mano e mano. Rememeber that? Hey Joe, maybe you ought to lecture your boss about that very thing. Not very mano e mano sending in remote UAVs to do the dirty deed.
Lifeothemind @ 2 said:
“Maybe the days of armies, navies and air forces are over.
Don’t believe it.”
What happens when I can build a predator drone the equal of those now built by the US?
What happens when my small network can gather data equal to the NSA?
The super-empowerment of the individual is upon us.
There will always be soldiers and women who love them
Or is it the other way ‘round
A drone on the other hand flies high above them
While never contesting the ground
A drone has no wife nor a child nor a nation
No drone ever took a held hill
And while an armed drone can long loiter on station
It can’t liberate, never will
A man with a rifle or sword or an arrow
A man with the guts to go hard at the foe
Will walk a defended street darkling and narrow
Will carry the flag where a drone cannot go
Oh yes there are those who think soldiers not needed
That armies and navies and air are no more
But where that false doctrine of warfare is heeded
That country will find there is sorrow in store
What the drones, and a fortiori our developing indifference to lack of due process, allow is the ability to strike at the head, without consequences for us. No more foot soldiers in Gitmo, and no more activists full of love for ‘the other’ marching down main street. But lots of dead men in funny headgear – without whom suicide bombers would decline dramatically
And, despite Langley@6, developing drones to fly to the US and knock off POTUS seems impossible given the USAF.
Victory is on the way, and all it took was a change in attitude.
Now this is change I believe in.
ADE
Well, we have both forces. On the one hand, Islamists DO seem to be infiltrating, not with any real difficulty since most seem to be deeply ashamed in the West of both their cultural heritage and their race, most Western governments.
It was no accident, as the Marxists say, that Switzerland, the least centralized and most populist (for better and worse) nation, was the first to strike back by outlawing minarets and mosques by plebiscite. The ordinary people of Switzerland said no. Meanwhile, England is lost, essentially. Its only forlorn hope is the BNP, that being the only party offering any prospect whatsoever of NOT being a colony of Pakistan. Even that hope is a small one, as Britain rapidly surrenders to Islam aided by a centralized, deeply ashamed of its race and heritage, elite.
Meanwhile Dubai is stranger and stranger. The FT reports that expatriate nationals of Western nations are charged as public servants (while working for privately incorporated Nakeel) under corruption charges, while creditors are kept at bay with claims abroad that Dubai’s Nakeel is not a public corporation with claims on the treasury of Dubai, but privately incorporated.
Dubai is a joke — a clear indication that for all the gleaming towers, Arabs still act like Arabs, i.e. corrupt, crony-esque (the connected Dubai top level people have not been charged, only low level disposable Westerners), and without any real rule of law. The ruler of a neighboring Emirate had his brother acquitted of torture despite video evidence on the dubious theory that Doctors mind-controlled him with drugs.
Meanwhile the list of suspects in the Hamas killing is 26 and growing, clearly a joke.
Very likely Mossad went and grabbed him, and interviewed him before killing him. They wanted to know what he knew (likely via drugs).
What would justify this risk, and ticking off Western governments whose passports were cloned?
IMHO, knowing if Iran was transferring missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to Hamas, possibly with Chemical or Dirty Bomb warheads, or even nukes. Iran might even have nukes now, and wish to “finish off” Israel with a surprise strike unexpectedly coming from Gaza, which would be unstoppable. Pretty much any risk is justifiable by that.
Drones, of course, work two ways. If we can build them, Hamas and Hezbollah and AQ and Iran can all build them. A variation of “scud in a Bucket” or the plot-line to Eric Ambler’s “the Levanter.” Take a small cargo ship, anonymously plowing the seas, off the coast of Los Angeles or New York City, bound for port. Twenty five or fifty miles out, launch several UAVs. Armed with whatever you like, warheads filled with poison gas, explosives, napalm, or even machine guns. Be imaginative. Fly them into Times Square at noon, or Dodger or Angels Stadium during a baseball game, or Giants Stadium during a football game. Kill not thousands but tens of thousands.
The evidence crashes with the UAVs. Throw the controllers overboard, they’ll never be detected. Come into port as planned. There is no more contraband left. Nothing. You know your rights, if questioned demand an attorney.
Drones only work, if you are the ONLY ONE WHO HAS GOT THEM. Clearly, that is not even the case now (Hezbollah used a drone to nearly sink an Israeli corvette during the Lebanon War). UAVs are nothing but super-sized remote control model aircraft — it does not take super-genuises to build them. A moderately competent machine shop could probably produce workable models.
Drones from such an attack would not show up on radar well, would likely fly low and be hard to spot, maybe 200 feet off the ground, are perfect from launching from ships. It’s basically a guided buzz bomb on a budget, with greater capabilities. You can use cell-phone technology frequency hopping for control and encryption, off-the-shelf technology.
If we can vaporize a bad guy in Yemen, the bad guy can kill half of Dodger Stadium on Summer’s night.
Against this Obama has what, exactly? Calls for calm? His people half saying we deserved it? His old pals Wright and Farrakhan shouting in praise of it? Obama “standing with the Muslims?”
Against this sort of Drone attack, the US has no political or social response given the current leadership. Which means the current leadership either becomes a dictatorship or gets thrown out when not if these Drone attacks occur. [Note, you can also stage them from isolated places in the Continental US via land, call it the Tim McVeigh strategy.]
Given the current infiltration of Islamists in Britain, and likely the US (it would be extra-ordinary if did NOT happen here) we can expect much calls for submission to just such attacks. Perhaps even surrender wholesale.
@4. Tarnsman
“the Mongols’ campaign ‘may be considered as a service to mankind’.”
Excellent.
Although, there is no success in the “War on Terror’, Bush’s or Obama’s.
Bush went in there, beat the existing governments, and promptly…wait for it…enshrined Sharia law in both the Iraq and Afghanistan constitutions.
Yep… hard to believe I know.
Unbelievable in fact, but Islam is, to quote George W. Bush, a “religion of peace”(George said straight after he tongue kissed and held hands with Saudi male royalty), don’t you know.
But not to worry, Bush killed lots of “Bad Guys”, so everything is ok.
…
WTF!
What the hell is wrong with everybody?!?
Everything is not ok.
Bush went in there and killed a bunch of people.
What, you don’t think that the millions of people, surrounding those “bad guys” that were killed, and sharing the same ideology took any notice!?
WTF!
Of course they took notice.
The bints are breeding like crazy and the Imams are brainwashing MILLIONS more jihadis to replace the few that were killed.
IN-BLOODY-SANITY!
Bush went in there and whacked the nests of Islam with a big stick, then enshrined the law, inspiration and reason for existence of the very people he was fighting into the conquered people’s constitutions.
Hello, can anyone see anything wrong with this scenario?
Contrast that with the treatment of Japan and Germany, post WW2, where the ideologies behind the aggression were totally crushed.
If anyone thinks the war in Afghanistan or Iraq is “won”, you’ve got rocks in your head.
When the coalition can withdraw without all those Aghanis and Iraqis who helped the coalition, being slaughtered(as were the Vietnamese supporters of the U.S.A. when the U.S.A. pulled out of there), then maybe the war is a “success” or “won”.
Don’t hold your breath.
How many millions will be slaughtered this time in Iraq and Afghanistan when the coalition pulls out?
Josh, let’s repeat what’s already been posted -
” S.J.Res.23
One Hundred Seventh Congress
of the
United States of America
AT THE FIRST SESSION
Begun and held at the City of Washington on Wednesday,
the third day of January, two thousand and one
Joint Resolution
To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.
Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens; and
Whereas, such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad; and
Whereas, in light of the threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by these grave acts of violence; and
Whereas, such acts continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States; and
Whereas, the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This joint resolution may be cited as the `Authorization for Use of Military Force’.
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
(b) War Powers Resolution Requirements-
(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution.
(2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.
Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Vice President of the United States and
President of the Senate.”
N.B. para 2(b)(1) War Powers Act
Without a doubt if you want to rid the world of religiously-motivated enemies (in this case, Ismalii Assassins), the effective way is genocide. Now how is the EU to solve its Muslim problem? It’s not like the EU hasn’t practice with genocide before (Ukrainians, Jews, Albigensians, etc.)
When war is outlawed then all warfare will be by outlaws? Or at least will be fought by using the tactics of criminals.
Quantity has a quality of its own. And so does war using the Large Economy Size. B-52’s over Tora Bora or a wing of F-111’s over Tripoli not only kill people and break things but say very loudly “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.”
In WWII the RAF used an aircraft called the Mosquito. It was employed for a wide variety of missions but the ones that really drove the Nazi leadership to distraction were the pin point attacks on things like Goering’s speech, the parade for Hitler’s birthday in the Netherlands, the prison at Amiens or various Gestapo HQ’s. But the German people were no doubt far more bothered by the fleets of heavy bombers overhead, the fighter bombers shooting up trains, and the Shermans driving through their villages.
You can kill some enemy leaders and disrupt their operations with pin point attacks but to destroy a philosophy at its core takes the Large Economy Size.
The New Kind of warfare is a prescription for eternal warfare.
And what if a coup were taking place and no-one knew it (is it a coup if the government does it)?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/clowardpiven_government.html
“What the drones, and a fortiori our developing indifference to lack of due process, allow is the ability to strike at the head, without consequences for us”
While this is true the other thing that is needed to employ drones as Obama is doing is intelligence which comes from having troops on the ground in Iraq and afghanistan. A key insight of Wretchard since I started reading him 8 years ago is the way you get intelligence is grappling with the enemy.
BTW, cool post Wretchard. You are consistently so much better than anyone on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, etc. that I am aware of. I don’t watch ‘em anymore except if I am on a elliptical trainer so I am firing from the hip a little
I have grown really tired of this over wrought navel gazing of the intelligensia. Drones are not anything except pilotless bombers and bombers are just aerial artilary. So when did using artillery become some sort of moral crime in a war.
The only way to really win a war is to take a piece of property and change what ever is going on in that locality permenantly. Strategic bombing would not have won WW2 in Europe no matter what Curtis Lemay said.
All of this moralizing about war is just another chimera of the socialists. Wars are brutal, dirty, violent, horrible things. Since the dawn of time one species or another has used physical aggression to settle affairs when all other means fail. It doesn’t matter if it is chimps or ants. Some how man thinks he is special because he supposedly thinks and writes etc. He isn’t.
“The days of uniformed armies, navies and air forces may be numbered and in their place a world where disputes are settled by assassins, robotic or otherwise, cris-crossing the continents looking for a man with a problem.”
If this truly does become widespread, then we are back to Italy under the Medici’s, rewrit on a global stage. Democracies generally don’t survive long in such a world.
“What happens when I can build a predator drone the equal of those now built by the US? What happens when my small network can gather data equal to the NSA?”
Vernor Vinge has written a couple of novels based on that concept. Interesting thought. Of course, the real question is “what happens when my neighbor who I don’t like can build a predator drone?” How do we prevent the return of the ages old “war of all against all”???
ADE @ 8 said:
“And, despite Langley@6, developing drones to fly to the US and knock off POTUS seems impossible given the USAF.”
I do not assume that the drone will be coming from outside the US or that the POTUS will be the first target.
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/09/journal_uavs_fo.html
This nation has been at war since 1776 for it’s very survival against a wide range of evil wishers.
trade war, cold war, immigration war and the only wars that get attention Hot bloody wars.
This Nation has seen very little peace.
War in my view is about to change once again into something different than the mass Armies rushing into the battlefields with flags aflutter. How, I do not know but it will be conducted with remote operators and robot systems with remote control and possibly some sytems with full AI that can hunt and kill on it’s own.
“BOLO Tanks anyone?”
Patent Reform Is a Patent Giveaway
Americans should beware when members of Congress talk about “reform” and “comprehensive” because those words usually cover a lot of mischief. The latest example of this legerdemain is the so-called Patent Reform now aggressively pushed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
Other countries can produce things we invent more cheaply because of the pitiful wages they pay, but they have a dismal record of inventing anything. Lacking expertise in innovation, some foreign countries concentrate on stealing ours.
China has promulgated new anti-American trade rules that prohibit imports of our products unless they are based on intellectual property that is developed and/or owned in China, and associated trademarks are originally registered in China.
These rules mean that U.S. products cannot be sold in China unless the U.S. companies give China their current patents plus their research and development of new products. This targets our most innovative manufacturing and service industries, including computers, software and telecommunications.
The Chinese government has issued a catalog of products that are subject to this obnoxious rule, and the list is expected to be expanded soon to other industries. China’s “indigenous innovation” rule will exclude many major U.S. firms from the Chinese market or require them to give China their patents and advanced technology.
Yongshun Cheng, former senior judge and deputy director of the Intellectual Property Division of Beijing High People’s Court, stated bluntly that the proposed U.S. patent bill is bad news for American innovation and good news for foreign infringers. He pointed out that the bill “is friendlier to the infringers than to the patentees in general, as it will make the patent less reliable, easier to be challenged and cheaper to be infringed.”
Tarnsman @ 4: Thank you for the lovely story.
When the leftoids ask why we invaded Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia, I still have no good answer.
First we had Dubya, who was asshole buddies with the Sauds. Now we have our secret muslim and predator afficionado. Can we apply to China to have them perform another service for the world?
Patent Reform Is a Patent Giveaway
Our successful system is under attack not only by the foreigners who want to steal our innovations, but also by some big corporations. Most of our breakthrough inventions have come not from big corporations, but from independent inventors and small companies.
The big corporations, however, have the lobbyists and the lawyers, and they are breathing hard on Congress to change our patent law to make it easier to challenge the patents granted to small inventors. The big corporations want to challenge a patent after it is issued (known as post-grant review), thereby delaying for many years the inventor’s ability to use his own invention and forcing him to spend a fortune on litigation.
Congress should hold a new hearing to listen to the views of real inventors. We also want to hear what the Obama administration and Congress will do to protect U.S. innovation, inventors and small businesses from Chinese theft and arrogant attempts to force us to give away all our patents.
Mike W, individual successes doesn’t necessarily translate into ultimate victory, at least in the short term. Rommel was successful at Kasserine Pass but that one battle didn’t alter the outcome of the campaign in North Africa, ditto for Lee at Chancellorville and so on. So it is with the WoT. No one is saying the war has been won. At least here. There will be successes, and there will be failures and setbacks in this long war. We have won many battles and many campaigns, but the war continues.
By any objective measure the initial campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were/are successes. Hostile governments have been replaced by ones that are now allies. However tepid they are still allies. We now have forward bases from which project our power (though Obambi is hell-bent on throwing away that advantage). We have forced Iran, Syria and all the rest to confront the threat in their midst rather look to make mischief elsewhere. Yes, the Imams are using our presence there to recruit new blood into the Jihad. But they were doing that before we went in. What you are ignoring is that we now have two American-trained Islamic armies in the field fighting alongside of us. Yes, they still have a long way to go but nevertheless they are in field and are fighting a common enemy. Plus they (the soldiers) have been infused with the American way of battle, which by the way stresses the importance of individual initiative/responsibility. That in turn will act like a seed of change as those American-trained soldiers taught to think and act for themselves move back into civilian life. The foundations of democratic rule in two Islamic countries has been established. No, they are not perfect. Yes, they may ultimately fail. But where before there was none now the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have a chance to forge their own path. What they do with that chance is up to them. Not us. And yes, gasp, they have enacted laws that reflect their own culture/religion. Only a fool would think that somehow little mini-Americas would sprout up in cultures nearly the complete opposite of our own. They may even in the future become hostile to us, especially given the fact that Obambi is about to throw them to the wolves.
“How many millions will be slaughtered this time in Iraq and Afghanistan when the coalition pulls out?”
Which is why we should stay, why we need to see this through. Like it or not we are in the midst of our version of the Thirty Years and Hundred Years Wars. The sooner that we as nation wake up to that fact the better it will be for us in the long run.
The patent issue is – complex.
I suggest the following:
* Define a new category of defensive patents for which the novelty requirement is relaxed.
* All patent licenses must be public record.
* 99% of all software patents should be voided.
* Biological molecule patents should be severely limited.
Current system has become a terrible mess, favoring large companies with huge legal, not scientific, staffs.
Drones are simply miniturized ICBMs, cruise missles and guided munitions with enhanced loiter time. Ready! Fire! Aim! is no longer a pejorative; it’s SOP for time-over-target assets.
I have argued since 9/11 for ramping up of the use of the Large Economy Size treatment, exploiting the economies of scale for unmanned vehicles (land/sea/air), designed for long range assassinations anywhere necessary. Snipers in Nevada using a new smarter projectile. Anywhere, all the time, opportunistic.
If we are not to be forced to all Mongol on Islam, then targeted assassination of the cult leaders seems a good first step to begin discouraging l’autres. Since these targets can be acquired across the globe, essentially everywhere, boots on ground/invasion are impractical; besides which you get your security camera mugshots plastered across the Net, momentarily.
Let’s recall that for days prior to “shock & awe” the US specifically targeted a head of state using salvos of bunker-busting cruise missles. Decapitation was the clearly defined objective.
When we decide we must rid the world of the cult of Islam (ie, survive), we’ll focus on the scholars/preachers/organizers/financiers of “death to whomever” – imams and their supporters. Prince Ali-whatever should never feel safe. Crimes against humanity will rightly be the justification. As declared, it’s all infidels against the ummah.
Target rich environment. Publicize the termination list and the reasons for inclusion. Video at 6PM nightly. Replenish as needed. Make the Muslim congregations shun all of the rabid imams on the list, for fear of losing their mosque and surrounds.
I’d guess the US will be less compassionate going forward about targeting the meeting places of the Assassins. We’ve got GPS precision and whichever caliber is needed. When the Mogols withdrew there was a new ally in town, or no town. Taqqia was not tolerated.
Worldwide, Koran 2.0 is breathlessly awaited. Haven’t heard much from the moderate Muslim masses about rewrites.
Of course back in 2002, US appeared to have the money to prosecute this limited type of warfare on all fronts 24/7/365. However, I also thought we’d have named the enemy by now. And I think if we had done both, we’d be a lot more secure today. Faster please. Like before the Assassins mix a bomb + delivery + insane motivation.
#28,
“Worldwide, Koran 2.0 is breathlessly awaited. Haven’t heard much from the moderate Muslim masses about rewrites.”
The Koran CANNOT be rewritten. Muslims believe that the Koran is the LITERAL word of God dictated word for word by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed. The Koran is not Mohammed’s interpretation of what Gabriel said, or the “meeting minutes”. It is the actual word of God and therefore cannot be revised, rewritten or altered in any shape or form.
If the press doesn’t demand it and conservatives are content to watch the perps zapped then perhaps it is better not mentioning it at all.
There’s the rub. The press’s ability to “demand it” has given it autocratic powers far beyond reason. That would not be such a problem, were it not for the striking lack of diversity in the press. Really, it is its own political party, and does not accept members of other opinions than the left-liberal groupthink we see in the MSM.
The President and Congress we now suffer from are a direct result of the MSM’s eight-year negative campaign against the Bush administration. Had that admin applied drone attacks on suspected jihadis at the rate the Obama admin now does, it’s likely that the press would have “demanded it” of Bush to show beyond doubt that the drones were not slaughtering innocent, environmentally conscious non-WASPS wholesale.
Since Islam (the Koran) cannot be reformed from within because it is by defenition inviolate then it MUST be exterpated from the memory of man down to the last child. Islam is an mental infection that creates irrational madness. The world has gotten too small for us and them to live on the same planet. Faster please.
“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.
We have been fighting that war for over 50 years. In the NYTimes, in the alphabet news rooms, in our monthly periodicals, in Hollywood, in academia, in the Democratic Party, in the CIA, in every nook and cranny of every major metropolitan city in America.
Several thoughts regarding drone warfare:
“Anderson bemoans the Administration’s failure to put forward a legal doctrine under which it conducts this extraordinary program of targeted assassinations. But why should it? If the press doesn’t demand it and conservatives are content to watch the perps zapped then perhaps it is better not mentioning it at all.”
I have absolutely no doubt that if Darth Sidious Cheney and Chimpy McBushitler had authorized such unencumbered use of armed Predators / Reapers during their administration there would have been nonstop calls for congressional hearings, international criminal court cases, and floor votes in the U.N. general assembly condemning the collateral damage and ‘unlawful MURDER of innocent children!!1!1!!’, all breathlessly covered in large type above the fold headlines in the New York Slimes, Washington Post, and every other progressive propoganda outlet.
This administration knows the press is still covering for them, so they’re doing the obvious thing to prevent another large scale terrorist attack on U.S. home soil. Kudos to them, even if they get no points for originality. They’re afraid there will be calls for impeachment of President Obama if another successful large attack on the U.S. is planned or directed from the Af-Pak area on their watch.
We’ve had the necessary intel to target many of these scumbags and their predecessors for a long, long time. What we lacked was lawyers who didn’t give a damn about collateral damage or 98% plus certainty that we had the correct target and not a decoy operation to trick us into blowing up a uncooperative village elder’s house, into which Al Qaeda had packed all the villages children. A propoganda coup almost as good as the ‘wedding caper’, why guests would even have a loaded KPV heavy machine gun at a wedding, and then fire it up in the air when our aircraft were overhead, triggering an overwhelming counter-attack, is a mystery…
It’s beyond ironic that an administration that was elected partly with backing from pacifist activists has the political cover to engage in bloody but effective operations involving large numbers of civilian casualties when the previous administration of “warmongers” was so much more careful.
Effective use of drones in other than warfare conditions to make enemies disappear only works when fighting those who have no real airpower or surface to air missile capability. Even a battery of old SA-8 Gecko SAMs would be deadly to Predators, Reapers or most any other armed UAV. It’s not rocket science, or at least no longer cutting edge high tech rocket science to shoot down a slow moving prop plane flying at low or medium altitude using a RADAR guided SAM. Some of you may not respect old Russian / Soviet military gear, but so long as the equipment in question is three or four generations out of R & D, they made and continue to make simple, robust equipment that works. Maybe not as well as the latest from Raytheon or Thales, but still effective, and at a fraction of the cost.
One Super-Tucano armed with WW-II era guns can take out a whole fleet of UAVs.
With widespread adoption and manufacture of UAVs in multiple nations, it’s only a matter of time before terrorists and organized crime begin to use them. Targets in the U.S. and Mexico to give two examples are sitting ducks for UAVs. It’s a huge area to cover. In most of the U.S. and Mexico the 1950s-60s era air traffic control systems that paint a target with a high power RADAR beams have been retired in favor of transponder based systems that “ping” aircraft omni-directionally. The aircraft then responds with their own radio transmission. General aviation piper cubs and other light aircraft unequipped with transponders to work with the newer ATC equipment have become a problem in some crowded areas. The U.S. / Mexico border is almost wide open to cartel flights using light planes loaded with drugs. Needless to say, a terrorist or drug cartel UAV up to no good would not carry a transponder, and would literally be flying under the RADAR. Second tier targets would turn in for the night, and their bedroom would disappear sometime around 3:30 in the morning. Very bad news for judges, police chiefs, FBI & DEA agents, rival terrorists or cartel competitors, and perhaps even particularly difficult state governors or federal legislators who stick their heads up. Leaders of some nations won’t be at serious risk since their level of protection is already very high, but in many countries, leaders don’t routinely sleep in hardened underground bunkers. There hasn’t been a need to do so, until now…
The Obama administration is a slow-motion coup. Its aim is to transform our republic into a socialist state, and it is succceeding.
>Drones, of course, work two ways. If we can
>build them, Hamas and Hezbollah and AQ and
>Iran can all build them. A variation
>of “scud in a Bucket” or the plot-line to
>Eric Ambler’s “the Levanter.” Take a small
>cargo ship, anonymously plowing the seas,
>off the coast of Los Angeles or New York
>City, bound for port. Twenty five or fifty
>miles out, launch several UAVs. Armed with
>whatever you like, warheads filled with
>poison gas, explosives, napalm, or even
>machine guns. Be imaginative
Fighting symetrical warfare with the world’s formost military-technical power is a losing game.
Verticle launch GPS guided cruise missiles in ISO shipping containers or even small micro UAV ‘kill-bots’ to take out Secret Service protected people are a much better asymetric threat.
See:
http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=457411
April 22, 2009 Episode
John Ringo (New York Times best selling novelist with over two million books in print) is today’s featured guest.
Topics: Smart missiles smaller than insects; military tanks becoming robots; personal headup displays for soldiers; experiments with brain implants for soldiers; war going open-source; Chinese experiments with warfare in low earth orbit; the never-ending utility of bayonets; the bizarre fact that there is no such thing as a Chinese journalist; and the possibility that we will develop faster than light travel. He also describes his worry that a future teenager huddled in his mother’s basement may write a biological virus which will wipe out all of humanity.
#26.Tarnsman
“We have won many battles and many campaigns, but the war continues.”
We have not yet even defined the enemy. How can we make progress in this war when our own populations are polarized thanks to the culture war waged on us for many decades now by the communists. Heck, half of our own populations identify with the enemy.
Terror is not the enemy but a preferred tactic of the enemy and the enemy is: Islam.
Not radical Islam, not extremist Muslims, not terrorists: just plain Islam.
“Hostile governments have been replaced by ones that are now allies.”
So we had regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan and poured billions into those countries, building up infrastructure as well as training and equipping police and military.
Well, I believe the governments, as well as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan generally, are still secretly hostile to us.
It is a mandate within Islam that Muslims hate us.
They are taught to hate us from birth.
We infidels are “najis”, or unclean; on the same level as feces, dead bodies and urine.
Of course they will not openly show any hostility while the coalition is there and in control, building up their countries and military as well as providing billions in cash and other goodies.
Democracies are terrible at waging this kind of war – nation building.
A change of government halfway through such a war invariably leaves allies with their tails hanging in the breeze.
“We have forced Iran, Syria and all the rest to confront the threat in their midst rather look to make mischief elsewhere.”
No, the entire region is becoming unstable due to pressure from Russia, China and their proxies Iran and Syria.
Iran, Syria and the rest are quite capable of creating problems elsewhere. One does not preclude the other.
The Islamic Ummah is a global entity.
The idea that we are “fighting them over there so we do not have to fight them here” is absurd.
There are numerous cases of Islamic jihad in every Western country lately and it is becoming more frequent.
The Islamic Ummah is becoming MORE agitated and aggressive worldwide, not less so; and I believe this is largely the result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I still say it was like hitting wasp nests with a stick without destroying the nests.
Islam is like a gang with the motto “One in, all in”.
Here in Sydney, when a Muslim gets into a fight he is on the phone and a gang of Muslims will appear within minutes.
It is the same with the global Ummah.
War with one part of the Ummah means war with all the Ummah.
“What you are ignoring is that we now have two American-trained Islamic armies in the field fighting alongside of us.”
And how many of our troops have been shot in the back?
When the coalition leaves, those same splendidly equipped troops(supplied by the silly infidels) will be used to round up those who collaborated with the Crusaders and persecute the hated Christians.
The Christians are already fleeing the country.
“At least eight Christians have been killed in the past two weeks in the volatile northern city of Mosul.
The killings prompted an appeal by Pope Benedict on Sunday for Iraqi authorities to protect vulnerable religious minorities.
The UN says more than 680 Christian families have fled Mosul since the recent attacks.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8542326.stm
“The foundations of democratic rule in two Islamic countries has been established.”
Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.
“Which is why we should stay, why we need to see this through.”
Yes, we should; but that would mean we could never leave until those countries had largely abandoned Islam.
And why did we get into this knowing that there was a very high probability of a new government, such as Obama’s pulling the rug out from under the whole project.
That was grossly negligent in my view.
I S @ 30 said:
“The President and Congress we now suffer from are a direct result of the MSM’s eight-year negative campaign against the Bush administration.”
Bingo!
SOME MSM and other Lefty types thought that if Teh Won was elected all of the poison put into the world view of America and the West would suddenly be sterilized and the rest of the world would love us.
Wrong!
Others of course are just worshipers of the Cult of Death. They may have known all along what they were doing.
Well lookie here:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/234281
Who would have thunk.
Love this line: “Something that looks an awful lot like democracy is beginning to take hold in Iraq. It may not be ‘mission accomplished’—but it’s a start.”
’43 will be vindicated by history yet.
Mark Razak 29 said:
“The Koran CANNOT be rewritten. Muslims believe that the Koran is the LITERAL word of God dictated word for word by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed.”
Perhaps if Gabriel was asked very nicely through prayer, he would visit us again with the Quran Ver. 2.0. I could imagine this update appearing miraculously on a flash stick (courtesy of Gabriel) as a Microsoft Word document (surely Allah is on a first name basis with Bill Gates). If memory serves me correctly, something like that happened when Joseph Smith, Jr. got the Book of Mormon from the angel Moroni (Gabriel was busy that day). How did L. Ron Hubbard get the word about Scientology? Were any angels involved?
whiskey @ 9 said:
“Very likely Mossad went and grabbed him, and interviewed him before killing him. They wanted to know what he knew (likely via drugs).”
It occurs to me that the Hamas leadership must be going nuts with worry wondering what Mahmoud al-Mabhouh told the Mossad prior to going to his virgins in the afterlife.
Boots on the ground! Boots on the ground! Boots on the ground! — hat turned sideways — Boots on the ground!
There will always be boots, and in large numbers. Every few years when people get weary of large-scale military operations and its consequences, they go back to dreaming and scheming about clean wars from the air and on video screens, especially if they have no stomach for unleashing the real thing.
I think warfare is progressing more like a calculus algorithm, where it it gets closer and closer to a finite solution, but never quite gets to absolute. More robots and cyberwar, etc. will supplement smaller armies when the doo doo really hits the fan, but the armies will still be there.
>The U.S. / Mexico border is almost wide open
>to cartel flights using light planes loaded
>with drugs. Needless to say, a terrorist or
>drug cartel UAV up to no good would not
>carry a transponder, and would literally be
>flying under the RADAR.
No.
The USA has skin paint radar blimp coverage across the whole southern border from Florida to San Diego, CA.
This is why the druggies are now using disposable subs to move cocaine.
wretchard:
Not Keyser Soze again! The last time you brought up Keyser Soze, a second rate hack writer with his own blog made a special post comparing me to Nazis.
Seriously, the most dangerous weapons in modern times aren’t guns. They’re ideas.
Every weapon has an engineering design. Once one gets an accurate design for a gun, one can replicate it. CAD, or “computer aided design”, is simply a language for modern engineers and each design is an idea. And that idea can usually be turned into reality.
In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina’s aunt had a magical typewriter where anything she wrote down on it later came true. The internet can be like that.
”I’ve never killed anyone. I don’t need to kill anyone. I think it. I have it here [points to head].” – Charles Manson
The most important weapon in the world is imagination. And it is easier to foster one’s imagination within a culture of freedom than within a cultural straitjacket. Our enemies live within a cultural straitjacket but attempt to use our ideas as weapons against us. The real question is whether we can generate ideas at a faster clip than our enemies can use them against us.
I agree with you that drone assassinations are dangerous on many different levels. The physical technology is nowhere near as dangerous as the lack of federal bureaucratic architecture to control it. The question is whether the federal government or foreign governments decide to use robot drones to kill American citizens on American soil. Even members of Obama’s ruling coalition had better stop to consider the precedent these drone killings are setting. If they don’t, others will.
Here’s a question for the Club. Is it better to write scenarios or science fiction stories that terrorist may use to attack us with, or is it better to keep quiet about these things so the terrorists don’t use these ideas against us? In other words, how far should we engage in self-censorship when we know our enemies are using our ideas against us?
Tarnsman
Just re-read your #4. I read Harold Lamb’s account of Timujin’s life and times many, many years ago, and can’t remember if he described the events you so well portrayed, but if he did he didn’t tell the story any better than you just did. Excellent piece of writing.
Langley @ 37
“Others of course are just worshipers of the Cult of Death. They may have known all along what they were doing.”
Hyperbolic and not constructive. Sounds like every lefty criticism of Bush during his presidency. How far did that get us? It whipped up an emotional response and a landslide for Obama. This is the sort of thing that will lead, again, to the election of the supremely incapable–Sarah P (don’t worry, I can feel the daggers now, no need to send the verbal barbs).
We’ve all got to stop acting like teenage conspiracy theorists.
The Koran CANNOT be rewritten.
Actually, it has been. Many times over. The Koran had many early versions, but early Caliphs systematically destroyed heterodox Korans. Most Muslims don’t realize that.
For that matter, the early Shahada of Mohammed and his companions was NOT the present Shahada. The original version was “There is no god but Allah, and He has no Companions.” It was later turned into “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.” Must Muslims don’t realize that either.
Islam presently exists in fossilized form. What we see is a shell. It may so happen that Islam outgrows its shell and emerges in a metamorphosis into something we would see as new yet Muslims would see as a new incarnation of Islam. One should not assume that the Koran or Mohammed define Islam; Islam may actually be something more or even utterly different from that. Perhaps Islam is defined by Allah and Allah alone, and it may so happen that Islam doesn’t need a Prophet or a Koran or a Kaaba or a Hajj or any of the other religious clutter we commonly call Islam.
Let’s not assume that anybody, even Muslims themselves, know what Islam really is.
So you take out number one.
There is always a number two waiting to step up, assuming that he’ll be smarter, more careful or just luckier then the late number one.
How many of the Hamas leadership have the Israelis killed?
Would taking out Hitler have stopped WW2 – or simply have put Himmler in charge?
There is something to be said for large numbers of heavily armed men, showing up on your doorstep.
Alexis @ 42 said:
“Here’s a question for the Club. Is it better to write scenarios or science fiction stories that terrorist may use to attack us with, or is it better to keep quiet about these things so the terrorists don’t use these ideas against us? In other words, how far should we engage in self-censorship when we know our enemies are using our ideas against us?”
The ideas that are being turned into actions are much further developed than those shared here. I would like to live in the past, my childhood was pleasant. I can only live in the present.
Mary J @ 44 said:
“Langley @ 37
“Others of course are just worshipers of the Cult of Death. They may have known all along what they were doing.”
Hyperbolic and not constructive.”
How about this then? Abortion is the sacrament of the Religious Left. They worship Death.
As to whether we are in WW-III? I tend to count the Cold War as WW-III, with tactics ranging from the clandestine to the strategic engagement of combined arms.
I view what we are doing now as WW-IV. Once again by a variety of tactics covering the gamut. We are facing 3 intertwined enemies, mutually supporting and sometimes in coordination. First, there are the forces of militant Islam who are continuing the war that started in the 600′s; and are finally pushing back to recapture the ground they have lost since 1492, 1571, and 1683. The distinction between militant Islam and “moderate” Islam is purely rhetorical. Moderates still support the attacks of those who strike us. There is no detectable opposition to those attacks in the Ummah. Second, there are the forces of what I call Trans-National Socialism; the parties of the Left, the UN, the EU, and the like. Indicators of belonging in that group are those persons and organizations who are desirous of suppressing national sovereignty in favor of unaccountable supra-national organizations, and most tellingly a belief that rights are not inherent in the individual, but rather are grants from a controlling state subject to modification and revocation at will; q.v. the UN and the EU. The third enemy force we face are what I call “Failed Communist States”. Some states have made the transition from Marxism-Leninism to economic and political freedom. Some did not. Russia, North Korea, and China are the primary members of this group. They are hostile to us, act in concert against our interests in combination with the other two, and are not by any definition friends, allies, or even benignly neutral.
We were in bad enough shape before the Advent of the Lightworker. Right now, what few allies that remained in Europe are gone and our own defenses are being eroded from within.
As to the use of drones; they are a tool with particular strategic and tactical advantages and disadvantages. Nothing more and nothing less. I will note that just as the invention of new weapons eventually spread, and the first user frequently finds itself at a disadvantage; the use of drones will spread and be used against us. The modified “SCUD in a bucket” scenario is one distinct danger. However, as has been noted, domestic use of such for targeted attacks is inevitable. While the site is now gone, shortly after 9/11 there were reports of a college student who was able to design and build a functional cruise missile with a range of a couple of hundred miles purely with off the shelf commercial components and a garage sized machine shop. The availability of even more efficient technology makes such an attack, either domestic cruise missile or remote controlled UAV [think about the uses of a relatively cheap cell phone with modified apps] attack inevitable. There are plenty of cells of Muslim extremists in the country.
#9 Whiskey
Just to nit-pick slightly, and with no disagreement at all with your main points; I believe if we are thinking of the same incident during the Lebanon War, it was not a UAV or drone. The incident I am thinking of involved a Chinese made, Iranian manned CSS-C-3 “Seersucker” missile; the Chinese upgraded copy of the Russian SS-N-2 “STYX”. [see cooperation between our enemies noted above] The missile was fired at the Israeli corvette, but a nearby merchant ship [Egyptian I think] presented a better radar return and was locked on by the missile. The merchant ship did not survive, I think. Its presence was fortunate for the Israeli, in that the corvette did not have its EW/ECM suite turned on, nor its defenses operational.
Subotai Bahadur
Alexis, since the successful use of a UAV by Hezbollah, a non-State organization, to nearly sink an Israeli corvette, I assume that the enemy is well aware of the possibility of this instrument. Seeing as how effective it has been against them.
The Levanter dates from the 1960′s I believe, making it about fifty years old.
Might as well hold back the tide.
Forgot something in #49.
#42 Alexis
Here’s a question for the Club. Is it better to write scenarios or science fiction stories that terrorist may use to attack us with, or is it better to keep quiet about these things so the terrorists don’t use these ideas against us? In other words, how far should we engage in self-censorship when we know our enemies are using our ideas against us?
I don’t know about you, but except for the most blatantly obvious scenarios, most writers and ponderers of such things that I know [including myself] do, at least in public forums. These are strange and dangerous times, with a 360 by 360 threat axis. Tactical ideas may come in handy in a wide variety of scenarios and it would not be good if the wrong persons picked up on them for either offensive or defensive purposes.
#48 Langley
How about this then? Abortion is the sacrament of the Religious Left.
Speaking purely in a sociological sense, much of the belief system of the Left is in fact analogous to a religion. Where would Marxism be without a faith [and that is what it is] that at the bottom the Material Dialectic guides history inevitably. Or the belief in the perfectability of mankind that underlies their belief in the superiority of central planning. And for the extreme feminist Left, abortion is a sacrament; a declaration of independence from and hostility to men. That is why for some, the idea of “choice” only means the choice of abortion, and never the choice of giving birth and either keeping the child or putting it up for adoption. Just as any religious belief comes down to faith in certain verities particular to the faith, Secular Humanism and the various forms of totalitarian collectivism come down to faith in other verities. And at bottom, matters of faith cannot be rationally argued. Either a modus vivendi is worked out, or one will destroy the other. YMMV of course.
Subotai Bahadur
Bugger. Forgot to close the html tag after “Religious Left”
Subotai Bahadur
Alexis @ 42 said:
“Here’s a question for the Club. Is it better to write scenarios or science fiction stories that terrorist may use to attack us with, or is it better to keep quiet about these things so the terrorists don’t use these ideas against us? In other words, how far should we engage in self-censorship when we know our enemies are using our ideas against us?”
I’ve long wondered whether Osama bin Ladin or one of his henchmen used the 1996 science fiction film “Independence Day (ID4)” as a prototype for the 9/11 terrorist attack. I find it interesting that some Palestinian protesters painted themselves blue in order to connect themselves with that stupid “Avatar” movie.
It’s clear that American movies do have an impact upon the Middle Eastern thought process. Obviously we must not engage in self censorship out of fear that an Islamic terrorist would use our ideas for acts of violence. However we should be aware that the bad guys are watching (and also reading this website) and using what they observe for planning terrorist actions.
Subotai Bahadur @ 51 said:
“Speaking purely in a sociological sense, much of the belief system of the Left is in fact analogous to a religion.”
Yes. And it is a religion that wants to immanentize the eschaton.
http://mises.org/story/3769
“his party has been infiltrated by a secret cell of Islamists who are slowly but surely taking parts of it over”.
Not news, though it is interesting that he has chosen to say it now, when a General Election may be near.
Labour is already the Party of Islam.
Just want to point out that the increase in drone use actually started in Aug 2008 (before the election). Another example of Obama using a Bush process, and getting credit for it where Bush got none.
1) Grey Fox
“Seems to me that if warfare really does take that turn, it is only a matter of time before somebody realizes that the best way to deal with a foe sending out assassins is to inavde his country and wipe out the infrastructure that trains and supplies said assassins. At which point we will have come in a full circle.”
For all intents and purposes, that arleady happened when we invaded Afghanistan.
Mil-Tech Bard @41:
The Tethered Aerostat RADAR System has been effective in some locations, particularly rural areas with flat terrain, few landing areas, and little general aviation traffic.
They’re much less effective near Laredo Texas, for example, which has its own international airport with a fair amount of general aviation traffic. There is another international airport with general aviation traffic just across the border in Nuevo Laredo. A plane with a legitimate flight plan can skip across the border at 150 mph, touch down on some dirt road or even a suburban street 10 or 15 miles from the border, offload 500 lbs of something, and be off and gone back across the border in less than 20 minutes. The ICE and DEA folks can handle one or two such flights, the others in the area accomplish their drops, repeatedly. I understand the situation near El Paso,TX / Jaurez is similar but not quite as bad.
Just from anecdotes, it sounds like ICE spends a lot of time chasing distractions, knowing that they are missing something else, but not knowing what. The distraction planes aren’t loaded with anything illegal. They just had instrument problems, map problems, engine problems, bad hair days, and ended up crossing the border accidentally, ‘So sorry to forgive me Mr. Migra, but I wasn’t doing nothing illegal, now don’t hassle me or my lawyer in San Antonio will rip your balls off…
What makes you believe the system is effective besides some Tijuana cartel folks getting creative and trying a new shipping method? Just because they’re trying new methods doesn’t mean the old methods no longer work.
Re discussion above, Ted Dalrymple has a term for unconscious death cult accidental conspirators: the Miserablists.
“…a ‘miserablist’ view of…history…alternates between indifference and outright contempt of the past. (To) …no longer believe in anything but personal economic security….”
(i may have butchered-by-ellipse, but no harm intended)
Eggplant,
How did L. Ron Hubbard get the word about Scientology?
The evidence seems good enough for me that Hubbard came up with the idea of starting a religion for profit and advertised it several times. Leading candidates for where include a bar bet with Robert Heinlein, a cocktail party with L Sprague de Camp, and a lunch with John Campbell.
See http://tinyurl.com/5mlpv
While both Scientology and Islam may encourage their followers to view the bulk of humanity as sheep to be sheered or marks to be bilked in Muhammad’s day the Prophet for a Profit could not sustain himself by extracting fees from the wealthy but unhappy. He had to target his impoverished followers outwards in a campaign of conquest that makes the efforts of Scientology’s lawyers seem reticent and defensive by comparison. Smith’s Mormons, who with a couple of early exceptions have generally played well with others, spent their first two generations seeking a safe place to escape to.
To be blogged under the title “Prophets for Profit.”
Asymmetric warfare can take different forms. What if someone in the West developed a (biological) virus that could only be deterred by eating pork and spread it all over the world? Then we’d get rid of the Muslims and the vegetarians all in one go! I’m assuming the orthodox Jews would suddenly become very practical eaters.
Pirata est hostis humani generis – A pirate is an enemy of the human race
My understanding is that this phrase of international admiralty law was originally intended to convey the agreed sense among all sea-faring nations that since the mariners of all nations faced abundant natural perils from the oceans, piracy constitutes outlaw behavior against all humanity. The pirates’ attack on any specific ship or port of any nation defines them as outlaws against all humanity.
This doctrine with conspicuous justification and logic extends to terrorists. In fact, the Geneva Convention uses essentially the same logic in defining as war criminals any individuals or groups who conduct military actions without clear uniforms and unit markings identifying them as military combatants, whether against civilians or against clearly identified military forces. An “irregular” is NOT by definition a terrorist. But a terrorist is by definition, an irregular. Where pirates may be said to be motivated by greed, that really is insufficient. They also murdered and enslaved victims, especially the ISLAMIC pirates of the Barbary Coast, against whom Thomas Jefferson sent US forces over 200 years ago.
Funny how some things never change. (Are you listening, Liberals?)
Use of drones against terrorists is justified as action against the enemies of all humanity, just as the Mongols reduction of the Assassins’ 200 Eagles’ Nests in Persia.
L/54; “…it is a religion that wants to immanentize the eschaton.”
JR Nyquist has an eponymous essay here. It opens:
In 1969 a sixteen-year-old boy wrote to conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., “to discover just what, in God’s name, the phrase ‘to immanentize the eschaton’ means.” Buckley replied: “Eschaton means, roughly, the final things in the order of time; immanentize means, roughly, to cause to inhere in time. So that to immanentize the eschaton is to cause to inhere in the worldly experience and subject to human dominion that which is beyond time and therefore extraworldly. To attempt such a thing is to deny the transcendence of God; to assume that Utopia is for this world.”
Buckley’s answer strikes me as humorous because “to immanentize the eschaton’ basically means to bring about the end of the world (i.e., “the final things in the order of time).”
UAV’s only work against an enemy without the means to shoot them out of the sky. They fly low and slow and make easy targets for even a moderately advanced military.
I certainly try not to describe various possible terrorist acts that real terrorists could use. Why give them ideas?
That would be stupid.
Langley @54
“Yes. And it is a religion that wants to immanentize the eschaton.”
As opposed to Neo-conservative gnostics of course.
Hark, I hear Reagan and the “city upon the hill” echoing across time and through the conservative canon
63. buddy larsen:
I don’t believe in the utopean visions built on technology of the 20th century.They might as well have been cargo cults. All technological solutions are temporary–as will be the technological solutions of the coming years.
However, there is this.
<> KJV
He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus
Subotai #49:
Several years back, around early 2001, I believe, the company I work for was looking into a small (i.e, fit on the back of a pickup truck) UAV that literally had intercontinetal range. One had flown all the way across the Atlantic.
An Australian company had developed the UAV and controlled them by satellite from its base down under. It did not have a large payload but it was cheap to build.
GPS and modern electronics mean that you don’t even need a control center, any more than the Germans did with the V-1 or the Japanese did with the 14,000 balloon bombs they launched at the USA in WWII.
True, with my 64 year old airplane and my Mini-14 I could shoot them down all day for $200 worth of gas and ammo (I’ll work for free). But first you have to find them, and that ain’t gonna be easy at all.
It is interesting to note that all model aircraft flying was forbidden during the Winter Olympics.
Already happened;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column
This is a time honored Socialist tactic.
I can make an argument that the Eastern Roman Empire used similar tactics.
Outnumbered, surrounded and alone, the Greeks (Byzantine) as the Muslims called them, held out for centuries using a combination of High Tech military and astute politics.
Bribery and 5th column tactics were their cheif weapon. The Greek Army was small, but very powerful. So they could ill afford to lose any good sized chunks of it ( which happened in 1071 at Manzikert). After Manzikert, the practice of bribing the enemy and working behind the scene to undermine them was the principal weapon of defense. Considering that the Empire fell for the last time (so far) in 1358, One can make up their own mind about how well the 5th column tactics works as a defense. As an offense, it has a major flaw. Once discovered, it is finished. Sort of like bacteria when the UV hits them.
5th Column types grow best in the dark in dirt and filth. Put some light on them and clean out the filth and they are not a threat.
“I suggest none of these carry any legal weight, when there has been no declaration of who we are fighting.”
Congress only declares War. War can only be against a sovereign power. Terrorists are not sovereign powers. So we CANNOT declare war against them.
Fighting is a decision for the President. Any military usage short of war is. So Like Clinton, Bush can choose to fight anyone he wanted to. Bomb anyone he wanted to. Obama has the same authority.
So what the question is is ‘What Happens when fighting terrorists leads to a war?
I assume that any President would do as Bush did and ask Congress to declare war, as Congress did against Iraq.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/bliraqreshouse.htm
In this declaration of war, WMD is almost a side issue. 1 of 23 reasons for war. Reason #5, IIRC, WMD was reason # 9 or 10.
Reason #1 was Iraq’s violation of the truce conditions set after Operation Desert Storm.
Before this declaration of war both Bush the Elder and Clinton ordered military action against Iraq. WITHOUT a formal declaration of war.
So we keep on bagging terrs. When some nations tries to stop us, we get Congress to declare war and expand the target list. Nothing illegal about any of that.
War IS NOT illegal. The Kellogg-Briand was repealled in 1933.
Was is stooooopid and costly, but not illegal.
The UN is often seen as outlawing war, but that is not a fact. The UN Charter allows defensive war and then allows each member to define what defense is.
Sorry, but I’m not interested in limiting ideas.
Ideas are nothing. Nearly every single idea has been had already. Having an idea, even an honest actual original one is meaningless.
What matters is action. For every action taken, every innovation born, exploration undertaken, patent created, etc. the idea had been had hundreds of times. The difference was in the execution.
It doesn’t matter if we give the terrorists ideas. What matters is that we give ourselves the best possible means as a society to take action on the best possible ideas, and that we destroy the enemy’s ability to take action. Let them dream all the want. Destroy their ability to execute. Destroy their bank accounts, their storage facilities, their comunications and comsec, their intel, their ability to maneuver. Destroy their belief that they can act.
Invigorate and encourage our own. Create a society where innovation and entrepreneurship are rewarded, where Judeo-Christian values and morals are rewarded and instilled. Create a society that chooses to turn boys into men, and rewards the family. Ideas are dust without such men anyway.
#12 tehag
“Now how is the EU to solve its Muslim problem? It’s not like the EU hasn’t practice with genocide before (Ukrainians, Jews, Albigensians, etc.)”
The Muslim problem isn’t the muslim population that live in our countries, it is the proselitysm, the propaganda, the recruitment, that the islamists make through the NET, the NET is their real battlefield now !
uh, about genocide, it remind me that the first “eugenism” ideology was first invented in California in the eartly twenty th century, that inspired the Nazis
me: “I suggest none of these carry any legal weight, when there has been no declaration of who we are fighting.”
Just to clarify, it is not that these are not good things to do, I believe that overall our use of Prediators and other actions in Afghanistan and Pokiston are entirely justified, but I cannot imagine a legal regime where such arguments could be advanced or adjudicated. It is the idea that there are *legal* arguments, as opposed to moral, ethical, or pragmatic arguments, that I find absurd. But I find most “international law” to be an absurdity, especially when it involves the UN, The Hague, or anyone wearing judicial robes, pounding their little gavels, and pronouncing on just who can fire what major weapons at whom.
Small payloads are not a problem if you’re releasing the right stuff. Antrhax spores aren’t particularly heavy, and several kilos of them are plenty if released in the right spot. They’ll be detected at some point, and anthrax isn’t particularly communicable. There are some worse things that could be used instead.
A low-observable carbon-fiber UAV launched from a ship offshore with an internal combustion motor and a secondary approach electric motor could fly at 10,000′ to target, glide down to 500 feet or so, and then quietly dust Central Park or the National Mall with a biological payload one night, and I doubt anyone would be the wiser. Crash the UAV into the middle of the largest adjacent body of water and it may never be found. If the jihadis were smart, they would hit Boston instead of New York, and Baltimore instead of DC. Or if they had the range, Richmond and Harrisburg. I think most people know cities are targets now. What they’re not expecting is for the enemy to jump 50 or 100 spots down the target list and do something nasty.
Drones aren’t a strategy, they’re a tactic, and I agree that eventually everyone will have them because the technology is so available and reliable, unlike specific isotopes of uranium and the products of fission. You don’t need Oak Ridge or its equivalent at all. The biologics are pretty easy to come by and we know from Army experiments in the 1990s that any moderate-sized metal building can be a production site with COTS equipment. There has already been one chemical weapon terror event (Tokyo) that only managed to kill and maim a few dozen because of a poor delivery system, and one biological attack that was limited only by the scope of the attacker’s anger. I don’t think it’s a matter of if, but when.
Would the hit squad action of dubious success in Dubai be considered a legal act against a known terrorist, consistent with treatment of illegal combatants? Or is it to be tarred as an act of terror for shaking up Hamas?
Would a missile causing property and collateral damage been preferable to the hit squad?
One more thing about the Ummah, Jihadis and the concept of Hostis Humani Generis — Jihadis and their supporters can not claim that the religious aspect of Jihad gives any right to protection from censure, prosecution, or response-in-kind for Jihadi violence. That also covers any actual Jihadi violence inflicted on any person of any religion whatsoever, including Islamic co-religionists.
To do so would merely confirm that their religion - and any Muslim who confesses the faith – exactly fulfills the definition of Hostis Humani Generis, “The Enemy of All Humanity.”
Another words, you can’t have it both ways. You can NOT have your right to have your beliefs treated as a spiritual faith, with all the accommodations and allowances accorded to all other religions around the world AND at the same time reserve the exclusive right to murder anyone who crosses you.
This is so obvious, the insanity is that it needs to be constantly reiterated.
The Left (including the current administration) insists on denying that Islam has any institutionalized doctrine of violence, when any simpleton can see that there have been tens of thousands of murderous acts of Islamic Jihad around the world in just the last few decades, applauded exuberantly by the commonalty of the Muslim community.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
To Langley, #54 : “… to immanentize the eschaton.”
The horrifying thing is that after all the study and talk about Islam over the last few decades, I understand that phrase!
Darren,
Doh! Next will you have the nerve to reveal how vulnerable we would be if every jihadi in America gathered at 7 AM next Monday morning in the big parking lot opposite the entrance to the biggest airbase in Texas? Damn now I did it. You should be subjected to The Terrible Secret of Space, but it has been done already around here.
There are real vulnerabilities I am very concerned about but here I discuss systems and processes. It pleases me to know that much effort has been expended to detect biological or radiological intrusions at key points, and more will always need to be done. Weaponized anthrax remains hard to effectively deliver. Saddam and many others worked on it and while it seems obvious the good news is that so far it is not something that you can do with a pair of subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Popular Psychotics and The Idiot’s Guide to Being an Idiot.
The one thing the 2001 anthrax attacks did achieve was a disruption in mail service and that remains a place where more hardening is needed. Of course Obama is solving that problem by reducing the service offered at a small cost savings. Typical of the Democrats to support starting expensive new programs while cutting back the delivery of service in one of the few parts of government essential to the economy. They are doing so while preserving that shrinking entities legal monopoly on First Class mail and keeping its high labor costs.
To be blogged under the title “Anthrax.”
following #72
“The Nazis’ Murder of Jews, Communists and Gypsies In Gas Chambers Was an AMERICAN Idea”
http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-nazis-murder-of-jews-communists-and-gypsies-in-gas-chambers-was-an-american-idea.html
uh even Golda Meir:
“Golda Meir told Poland: Don’t send sick or disabled Jews to Israel”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1133751.html
quand je pense qu’on nous a accusés de tous les maux !
LotM, wonder what this means?
Boomers were considered to be (and may yet be) capable of independent action, if certain conditions were in effect.
For centuries before that, individual ship’s masters were expected to act in the best interests of their King or Nation, because their remoteness meant no time for consultation.
Look, UAVs, unless they become utterly independent robots with artificial intelligence giving them the mechanical equivalent of the Wisdom of Solomon, need to have some communications link to a remote controller. That linkage represents an opportunity for
(1) hijacking,
(2) interference
(3) eavesdropping, and
(4) detection.
That’s true for UAVs attacking US targets, too. Sigint is tricky, and likely targets on our side need to be wary and hardened. We have to be prepared for lapses in our defenses, and losses, because we present such a target-rich environment to a ruthless enemy.
We are in a war, and bad things are going to happen. The only alternative is to just surrender, and THAT is death.
Buddy L: Any drone capable of threatening actual damage to a U.S. aircraft carrier would likely show up on defensive radar. We have had radar systems for decades that can detect mortars in flight and calculate the launch point in time to control counter-battery fire. Maybe that can be deployed on carriers. U.S. naval ships patrolling in the Persian Gulf are likely to be in range of all sorts of nasty weapons anyhow. I don’t see what an observation drone can do, except possibly target individual sailors or aircraft on the deck.
Comments?
Marie Claude,
Giving you allowance for not always seeing how things appear in translation you must be made realize how deeply offensive it is to many of us to use a disreputable source on that issue in that manner. It does what we call “jumping the shark” and impedes our ability to evaluate your contributions. If you want to make the point that part of the horror of what the Nazis did was to extend logically, but unbound by moral restraints, some of the intellectual currents of the 19th and early 20th centuries, then there are better ways to make that point. It is certainly true that Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood and is considered a saint by the Left, was a racist and a eugenicist.
It is possible that the practice of extending a theoretical construct to its logical conclusion, without the interference of irregular moral restraints, is a legacy of the same Cartesian concepts that gave rise to the excesses of the French Revolution and subsequently to Socialism. It is more in keeping with illogical Anglo-saxon prejudices to admire the technical virtuosity involved and still reject the act as morally repugnant. There are no absolutes in either case and each event of possible questionable moral conduct must be considered as unique. The evidence seems to be that the sloppier and more diffuse approach prevalent in Britain or America relies on individual moral integrity and over time is a surer protector of Liberty against abuse.
To be blogged under the title “The Logic of Dr Guillotine.”
buddy larsen,
That was old news. They keep tugging Superman’s cape.
Mad Fiddler,
Concur, we are far to vulnerable to satellite interference. That is why I blogged about the Signalmen the other day and regret the loss of LORAN. The next big war may prove very low tech, after the nukes go off.
LOTM sorry if I crashed the legend of the “always good” people being on your side, but these links are priced in conservative american blogs (I must say these infos weren’t exposed on blogs though) it’s where I got t’em
MC,
sorry if I crashed the legend of the “always good” people being on your side
That isn’t the point and you have no grounds to think that I assume all the “always good” people are on a side. The point is that some arguments are “over the top” but tolerable, like idiomatic expressions, within a setting where everyone knows that it is done for dramatic effect. Some in fact are considered offensive even within a narrow context. My point was that the flaw of Eugenics within the West, including America, was known but was outside of the mainstream of our dominant culture. When you take it and offer it as a “proof” of a controversial point all the reason behind the argument is lost and only the polemics remain. It should be possible to find examples from European writers who make points in a manner that you would hate to see quoted by an American.
There is no reason to draw this out. Just please be aware of the issue and do us all a courtesy by acknowledging that you have found what seems to be a deliberately challenging or possibly offensive comment when you link to it. There is no intent on my part to censor you, only to encourage you to approach these sources in a skeptical manner and elicit our opinion rather than provoke our outrage.
Life of the mind @ 2: Just bang on analysis. On point. The current pResident does think that this is true:
and therefore an effective way to fight the current conflicts because they cannot see beyond their own wishes and prejudices. They are fools that will get many killed.
Tarnsman:
Den Beste gave it up because he was tired of hearing people tell him what should matter to him ….. and correcting his thoughts for him. Ironic, isn’t it?
As for your comment @ 5, yes. It is striking but I suspect that most in this country do not even notice. Personally, I do question whether it is worth saving the ingrates like Couric, Sawyer and their ilk from themselves. I hope they like the taste of their own shite.
Whiskey @ 9:
See: “December 7, 2008″ There is your template.
Alexis @ 42:
No, we cannot self censor that way. Besides, the others are not stupid and have infinitely more creative ways of killing people than those in the West can come up with. Take it on authority, they are MUCH more savage than you can believe. The depths of mans debasement are hard to plumb for the common person.
And it is more than a rumor, I think. There is also a coup internally that has yet to be resolved fully.
Marie Claude @ 78:
There you are my little Fascist Flower! Got any good blood libels you want to spread?
Alex Jones @ Prison Planet is an unhinged moron. You are in like company in your own little space in the world. Why don’t you get frakkin’ flipped?
LOTM – You are much nicer than I. MC can get bent and disappear up her own fundament as far as I am concerned. She is a closet antisemite and it shows.
Looks like Rick Perry got the 50% majority to defuse KB Hutchinson (RINO) and Medina (truther idiot).
LOTM
my “response” was to “It’s not like the EU hasn’t practice with genocide before (Ukrainians, Jews, Albigensians, etc.)”
now, it doesn’t disturb anyone to bring on the scene these european writers as valuable referrences when needed too
But I’m not politically corrected, that’s also a Habu disqualification for “smart” debates.
Might be that we are cousins somewhere !
Mad Fiddler @ 80 said:
“Look, UAVs, unless they become utterly independent robots with artificial intelligence giving them the mechanical equivalent of the Wisdom of Solomon, need to have some communications link to a remote controller. That linkage represents an opportunity for
(1) hijacking,
(2) interference
(3) eavesdropping, and
(4) detection.”
Yes – US drones have been hacked by the Islamists.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=taliban+hacking+drones&aq=2m&aqi=g2g-m2&aql=&oq=hacking+dron
And it was done with cheap off the shelf teck.
Super-empowerment of the individual coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
“She is a closet antisemite and it shows”
again it is interesting how quickly you jump to conclusions when you don’t appreciate what doesn’t fit your vew
kind of like of the Godwin argument there
I wonder who is the very fashist, you or me ?
I’m glad you don’t find me nice, cuz I have nothing in common with your appreciation of the persons, I don’t catalogue them as black or white. I tend to be a bit more sophisticated, I have nuances on my pallet.
MC,
When offered the comment on Europe’s bloody history why challenge the “other” by saying “you are one to?” That gains nothing. You would do your own position and this Club more good if you had said “Yes we have a very bloody history. We know what war is so do not think that we are all weak.” The pacifism and bureaucratization and politics of Europe are very frustrating to Americans, because we give a damn about what is being lost as Europe decays. Most Americans do not understand the legacy of violence behind the restraints that Europeans have imposed on themselves. If you can bear witness for what happened at the Somme and Verdun then you are being useful. The constant response to every comment that could be seen as a criticism of something over there is unproductive. If someone tried to provoke me by saying that we had slavery in America I would not try to tear them down by doing a survey of slavery to prove that everybody did it. I would point out that 600,000 Americans, proportionate to almost 6 million today, died to free those slaves. Honestly acknowledging a true statement or responding to the issue by putting it in context is not a sign of weakness. Not everything needs to be defended. The best thing you have said is to express your own contempt for Villepen.
Langley,
We had a thread on that in the Club. As I recall, they never hijacked the Drone in the sense of gaining control over it. All they did was intercept the unencrypted video feed. A foolish error but not the disaster implied.
LOTM
When offered the comment on Europe’s bloody history why challenge the “other” by saying “you are one to?” That gains nothing. You would do your own position and this Club more good if you had said “Yes we have a very bloody history.
I’m sure that then I would be the “good olfrench servant” in the office, but it wouldn’t help for the searching of “objective truths”, thus my contributions with historical arguments aren’t ment to make some “friends”, but to retablish our honnor. I know that I contribute very little, France is and will remain your ever “evil” obsession, but for just a few that can acknowledge my good faith, it’s still worth of it
Marie Claude -
There’s nothing sophisticated about your cheap shot or your meanspirited defense of it. What’s your point anyway? People in glass houses should never throw stones. Do you really want to play who-inspired-the-Nazis? OK, how about Georges Vacher de Lapouge? Or Henri de Boulainvilliers? Your typical left-wing hack never heard of them but you can be damn sure Hitler did.
marymcl
someone blew the quarry
then you arrived, with your erudition, uh you should have gotten until Charlemagne, I’m sure that some monks wrote something that could have inspired Hitler too.
ol right, I understand more aznd more Habu
Really? “How special!”
sorry, I don’t understand your “special” intelligence
and WTF anyway ?
LotM/89; Not just to break the chains, but to institutionalize universal equality before the law, did one soldier die for every four and a half slaves enfranchised.
In an era of sparse safety net to replace so many young plowmen always rather desperately needed to feed the family, a powerful demonstration of exceptionalism.
And on both sides, as of the one in five military age southern males who fell, all but a very few were hand-to-mouth farm boys who (as their letters attest, and regardless of the grand politics and issues ante-bellum) went to war to defend home & hearth from a hostile military invasion.
Yes the driving ideal has been imperfectly realized, but has remained the ideal nevertheless, and held as such, and slowly and fitfully worked toward these 150 years since Appomattox, steady on.
time for some humor?
buddy larsen,
the driving ideal has been imperfectly realized, but has remained
Exactly, we were a smaller nation then than Poland is now and we sacrificed not just to survive but for an ideal. No foreign savage, Tartar from the East or Teuton from the West invaded us; we choose to fight over what we deemed worth it. Men on both sides shared the dream, very few of those from the South had any slaves. Indeed the poor southern farm boys were economically suffering from the presence of unfree labor.
My hope is that we can grasp the sacrifices that Europe went through and with that knowledge learn to communicate with them in a way that might remind them of “the better angels” of their nature. “Honor” to me is a sterile concept that is redolent of 3rd World shame cultures. More useful is self respect and the esteem of a free community. All that the focus on the forms of honor leads to is a demand for the show of obeisance from those you do not respect. Better to me is the mutual respect of free people whose fount of honor is not embodied in an anointed monarch or the submission of a rabble of subjects. Those are like the common soldiers who stood in a circle, like members of a street gang, to watch the heroes Achilles and Hector fight before the walls of Troy. Better than that is the sense of respect, a truer form of honor, found in a free person’s own values and the approval of fellow citizens.
To be blogged under the title “On Honor.”
Penguins, now that is sophisticated, nuanced even. I see you and raise you, Señor Wences?
LOL –
s’all right?
S’ALL RIGHT!
When civils talk about respect, military talk about honor:
“honor is the effort of man to keep intact the view that others have of him and he has of himself. Without the work of shame and infamy, the honor would be an abstraction.
Because it is the power of action and denial of what is low and vulgar
because it is primarily a concern for self and the ideal image that a man has, because it is imperious in its rules, sense of honor will be without doubt probably one of the enzymes that will bring the new morality of our democratic and individualist societies”
Pierre Messmer, former general of the Légion Etrangère
http://www.asmp.fr/fiches_academiciens/textacad/messmer/pm-honneur.pdf
(sorry in french, we might be the only one left who still dare that word, uh no, Japanese and Chinese too !)
of course honor definition has changed from its beginnings, it isn’t anymore tied to a class, but to a moral behaviour, where only one’s individuality is concerned.
As noted above, biological agents are hard to weaponize. Explosions and fires tend to kill them. Chemical agents ARE effective, and about a century old, but are relatively bulky. They are also vulnerable to wind shifts, in terms of killing power.
Their main drawback, from a Jihadi perspective, is that they are unforgiving for non-technical people. You’ll lose quite a lot of people perfecting the process of delivery, and relatively poor manufacturing processes mean you will see leakage, which is both deadly to the delivering crew and an opportunity for detection.
My main guess is that if UAVs were to be used as a weapon, that some sort of Napalm would be used. The technology is relatively crude and simple, forgiving of poor containment and manufacture, and potent in killing, without issues of wind shifts or dangers of leaks killing the attacking crew or arousing detection. Use on soft targets is horrifically effective.
For the moment, Jihadis seem to have focused on airliners (various bomb plots discovered at the very last minute, on NWA at the near fatal second). A big bang and aircraft dropping death from the sky. UAVs with napalm is the next logical progression, particularly as they decide to avoid the Maginot Line of airport screening for more tempting soft targets that do not require suicide attackers.
THIS is the most dangerous part — the supply even in the Muslim world seething over polygamy and men without families, even among the wealthy, who are willing to kill themselves is not infinite and is in fact limited. Particularly as we’ve killed many in Iraq. But there are very, very many men who will kill thousands and more of innocents for combinations of money, status, power, fame, and religion as well as sexual frustration, if they think they have a good chance of survival.
I don’t think anyone here has really thought about that. What if Jihad did not run much of a risk of people engaging in it dying? At the worst, Miranda rights, a trial, a fifty-fifty chance of acquital and world-wide celebrity?
How much jihad would we have THEN folks?
There is no Marie Claire
It is a French organisation designed to counter the anti-France opinions raised by the Anglospheric Blogosphere following the lack of French support post 9/11. Raised, of course, when we discovered the contempt to which we were held by the French for actually rescuing La Gloire de La France twice in the last century.
It’s a troll.
ADE
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 3/3/2010, at The Unreligious Right
ADE
you’re a conspiracy maker
I’m not going to counter your scenario, you’ll have to live with it until you get bored
la gloire de la France te dit merde
Words are important; I agree with ADE that there is no “Marie Claire”;
but there is certainly a Marie Claude.
as far as the inspirations of genocide, Margaret Sanger certainly was a great source of evil in the world. But the Germans had experience with that kind of thing long before Sanger began theorizing; Luther von Trotha in German Southwest Africa (present day Namibia) carried out one of the first great genocides of the modern era from 1904 – 1907, complete with concentration camps and the intentional poisoning of women and children simply to be rid of them. Thomas Packenham, in The Scramble for Africa, has documented how the Germans in Tanzania hired free lance “hunters” to track down blacks and shoot them down like dogs, because they had decided they were a plague on the land and were interfering with the wild game. (in this, they seem to be an early militant version of the modern environmental movemont) These men were paid a bounty for every black they could eliminate, no restrictions on sex or age.
Himmler and the other architects of the Nazi system were only following the path that von Trotha had laid out for them 40 years previously. They merely expanded the range of victims.
And don’t forget that Hitler famously asked, when asked about world reaction to his planned genocide, “who remembers the Armenians?” The Turks conducted a vast genocide without any need for inspiration from the west, and in Hitler’s own words this act inspired him as much as anything.
Lifeofthemind #77:
A customer of the company I work for purchased a computer program from us that enabled a detailed analysis of the effects of explosions. Rather useful for any potential terrorist target, wouldn’t you think? Although that particular customer was not interested in that kind of analysis, we figured that every US military base could benefit from that kind of a tool and anticipated a suitable marketing campaign, and I was going to be the focal point.
But that customer used that program to critique an anti-terrorism exercise that the security people were performing at his installation, basically showing how their planned perimeters were totally inadequate. The reaction for the security types was not “Oh boy! This is great! A new tool that will help us do our job better!” but rather was to confiscate every single example of that program from our customer, along with the associated computers. Their reasoning was that such knowledge was too dangerous to be allowed out of their control – and of course that policy had the useful side benefit of preventing analyses that could point up the errors in their plans. We abandoned our marketing plans.
So there is an official, bureaucratic attitude out there to the effect that knowledge is too dangerous to be allowed to exist. In the words of MASH’s Col Flagg, “The only way you can be sure that you are not revealing information of value to the enemy is to go around totally confused yourself.”
for my next life I have decided to reborn as a texan cowgirl
For those of you that think a UAV is hard to detect, think again. SO far there are no ‘stealthy’ UAV’s. If the USA cannot build one, nobody can. Just a fact, ma’ma. America OWNS stealth. Nobody else is even close.
Most are clueless about what stealth even is.
Any UAV using an ICE has a prop. There is no such thing as a stealthy prop. Nor Rotor, for that matter. Any device that cuts the air to generate lift has to have an edge. The edge is what reflects the radar beam.
When a radar beam hits an airfoil, it travels along the skin then radiates away at the edge.
So the prop on a UAV shows up like a neon sign.
Then there is IR. If you ever have a chance to borrow a good set of IR binoculars, go somewhere open where you can lay back and look up. See all those sparks? Those are airplanes.
I’m probably not ‘splainin this right. Stealth means controlling the EM signature thru ALL frequencies of the EM spectrum. Visible, Radar, UV, IR, microwaves, what ever. Ever seen a B-2 landing? In profile from any side, it is almost impossible to see. What you do see is deceptive. No IR, since the engines are shielded and the exhaust is blended with cold air.
No ra_head in a cave with a Craftsman tool set is going to build an UAV.
Rosinante,
There is no such thing as “stealth” – anything is detectable by radar, by IR sensors, etc., including ALL our stealth aircraft. Technology just makes them harder to detect. That technology can be incorporated into props and rotors, to make them less detectable.
“No ra_head in a cave with a Craftsman tool set is going to build an UAV.”
You can buy UAVs in toy stores. Ever see the type of work the gunsmiths in Afghanistan do? Or what they have done with IEDs? Or what some of those caves are like? They certainly can build UAVs that have enough capability to cause problems for us.
MC/116; y’all come, for your reincarnation (or as we say rat cheer in Austin, “reintarnation”) –there’s lots of froggies around here (most seem to be still in their first incarnation but OTOH if not it wouldn’t likely show). The central hill country soil, when you can find some, is alkaline and friable –similar to the soil of your wine country –ergo many of the French around here come to start or run wineries (some try to get truffles propagating –lots of oak hereabouts). And some come to University of Texas –i guess it’s the kids who can’t get into the Ecole Normale Superieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines or the Sore Bone.
Whiskey said:
>Alexis, since the successful use of a UAV by
>Hezbollah, a non-State organization, to
>nearly sink an Israeli corvette, I assume
>that the enemy is well aware of the
>possibility of this instrument.
Hezbollah’s armed wing is no more a “non-state actor” than the Flying Tigers were for the Nationalist Chinese government in WW2.
The are mercenaries working for the Iranian state.
Armageddon Rex #58.
>A plane with a legitimate flight plan can
>skip across the border at 150 mph, touch
>down on some dirt road or even a suburban
>street 10 or 15 miles from the border,
>offload 500 lbs of something, and be off and
>gone back across the border in less than 20
>minutes. The ICE and DEA folks can handle
>one or two such flights, the others in the
>area accomplish their drops, repeatedly. I
>understand the situation near El Paso,TX /
>Jaurez is similar but not quite as bad.
The issue is not one of detection or tracking.
It is one of law enforcement reaction forces getting to the site and classifying it as crime in progress or fake.
This is a money solvable problem and Americans like technological solutions where government contractors can share taxpayer money with deserving Congressmen.
The US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan has developed technology it has placed on towers that can track 24/7 all vehicle and most foot traffic in line of site of the tower.
Advancing computer technology will make it afforable by ICE in a few years, and by big city police departments in 10 years.
The implications of this development are very large.
Langley #87
Hacking into unsecure drone video feed is not the same as highjacking control of a drone.
See:
http://www.strategypage.com/militaryforums/6-66847.aspx
>A low-observable carbon-fiber UAV launched
>from a ship offshore with an internal
>combustion motor and a secondary approach
>electric motor could fly at 10,000′ to
>target, glide down to 500 feet or so, and
>then quietly dust Central Park or the
>National Mall with a biological payload one
>night, and I doubt anyone would be the
>wiser. Crash the UAV into the middle of the
>largest adjacent body of water and it may
>never be found. If the jihadis were smart,
>they would hit Boston instead of New York,
>and Baltimore instead of DC.
First, stealth is not that easy, nor in the case of the first time this is tried, even necessary.
You might see that kind of drone toy in an American civil war, or the Chinese, not from the Islamist death cult.
Suicide-murder is a religious sacrament for them and unmanned drone strikes lack the audiovisuals they need for fund raising and recruitment.
Whiskey said:
>My main guess is that if UAVs were to be
>used as a weapon, that some sort of Napalm
>would be used. The technology is relatively
>crude and simple, forgiving of poor
>containment and manufacture, and potent in
>killing, without issues of wind shifts or
>dangers of leaks killing the attacking crew
>or arousing detection. Use on soft targets
>is horrifically effective.
UAV testing for Jihadis is far to easily detected before use.
Please see Sadam’s pre-1991 Gulf War UAV programs.
Both the most deadly and most likely threat profile is that of western educated, 13-35 year old, Muslim male who is suffering from “The Qutb Syndrome.”
See:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-homegrown-terrorist-threat-15345?page=all
While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.
In this sense, America’s homegrown terrorists resemble Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian-born cleric widely credited as the leading intellectual founder of contemporary political Islam and a prominent figure in the Muslim Brotherhood. Qutb, who gained prominence in the 1950s and was executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in 1966, was radicalized not by his childhood experiences or encounters with American imperialism but rather by a two-year visit to the United States that commenced in 1948. It was there that he developed a hatred for what he considered to be the unparalleled materialism and licentiousness of American culture; he was particularly scandalized by a church dance in Greeley, Colorado. “Jazz,” Qutb wrote of the prototypical American, “is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires.”
and
Ultimately, there is little more that the United States can do to prevent homegrown terrorism, other than maintain the counter-terrorism policies enacted by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, policies that proved so successful in preventing another terrorist attack on American soil. Given the rhetoric and actions of the present administration, which wants to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, prosecute CIA officers for using interrogation techniques disfavored by the American Civil Liberties Union, and generally approach the war on Islamic supremacism as a legalistic exercise, it is hardly certain that such a course will be followed. But the least we can ask of our nation’s political and intellectual elite is that they stop wailing about the phantom menace of “right-wing” terrorism and start paying more attention to the genuine article.
These people cannot cooperate in large numbers over time in the west without attracting both official and unofficial attention.
That means we will see more loners doing suicide attacks with guns and bombs.
Great stuff, MTB -
Mil-tech Bard @111:
I agree, a solution to illegal cross border excursions by Mexican drug cartels using light aircraft can certainly be accomplished.
No need to wait a few years for ICE to obtain the necessary technology, the US Army has had it for over a decade. A dozen or so Patriot batteries along the border in proper locations could shut down all unauthorized cross border flights.
It’s just like illegal ground entry across the U.S. / Mexico border. There’s no need to wait. We could have secured our border decades ago if the political will existed. The “new” (basic idea has only been around for several centuries), double wall border fence design has been completely successful at stopping unauthorized crossborder incurssions everywhere it has been built. Human trafficking and drug smuggling activity across uncontrolled areas have fallen to nearly zero in areas with the new wall. If such a wall were built along the entire length of the border, with dozens of suitable controlled access points for legitimate cross border traffic, illegal border crossings would become extremely rare.
Like so many other problems with our society, it’s not a matter of ability, but of will, and of widespread dereliction of duty on the part of elected officials.
Buddy, we have many youngs that have graduated in wine degustation andwine breeding, too many for our market, so they immigrate to California or whatever other place where they can earn their life, idem for truffes, my region has such oaks too, and there is some formation for people who want to learn about this “culture”
As for university, I guess they rather look for some business or commercial degrees, the label of “american business school” looks good in their office
If I was still young I would try the truffes culture in Texas
“That means we will see more loners doing suicide attacks with guns and bombs.”
there are so many unemployed muslims around the world, if blowing up can feed their family, they will make it !
The ‘human mules’ of Ceuta – http://bit.ly/a1iCkp (video)
you should watch this video how women in Marroco are making the hard work to feed the whole family
MC/117; and if i was still young, and hadn’t yet wed Hecate, i would try the French Foreign Legion
Whiskey,
Anthrax is not difficult to weaponize, it was weaponized in World War II, with far less effort than needed to generate a nuclear weapon. You can mess around with B. cereus or another harmless variety to get your drying and milling processes down, and enough has been published about aerosolization to make that jump none too difficult (hint: something anti-static). Once you have B. cereus in an aerosolized form, switch out your cultures for the weapon strain, do the same thing you just did and you’re in the biolgoical terror business. You can even work around live anthrax cultures and spores with some basic precautions and a committment to 90 days of oral doxycycline afterward. The spores are some of the hardiest things known. All of this has actually already been done, and the FBI is not even sure by whom, or with what equipment.
Before you dismiss the jihadis as a bunch of unsophisticated back-country bumpkins who decided to give up goat raping and get into the big game, remember the typical resume of an Islamist terrorist in the West — a bunch of them have had master’s degrees in engineering. These are not under-educated people, they are not going into terrorism out of a lack of job opportunities in the pick & shovel business. Ayman Al-Zawahiri is a physician. Don’t underestimate their patience, commitment or technical capabilities. Building a nuke requires a long industrial tail they are not capable of hiding easily. Chemical and biological weapons have been made in apartments by graduate student devotees of Aum Shinryko, it’s not only possible it’s been done before.
As far as dispersion goes, back in the 1950s the US Army was driving around dumping simulant bacteria into the air from a fake car tailpipe. You don’t have to explode anything if you’re dispensing a powder into the air, from a sufficient height the fall from a drone will dispense the spores just fine on their own, the way they were dispensed accidentally from a Soviet plant in Sverdlosk in 1979. If they care to get sophisticated they can have a bottle of compressed gas or even engine exhaust blow the payload out.
Winds, etc. don’t really matter if you’re aiming for something as big as a city and don’t have to worry about dusting your own soldiers. Some randomness in the process is actually helpful if the goal is societal terror — “OMG, I walked through that place last week! Did I track in anthrax spores on my shoes? What if my kid gets sick?” That is the kind of thing that will really freak people out. To be honest, though, MTB has a point about visuals. Luckily for the rest of us in flyover country the Jihadis are primarily concerned with visuals and not really terrifying the hell out of people. This means they go where the cameras are, and that means one of the other taxes people in NYC, DC and LA pay is a security tax.
As far as napalm goes, I agree (and especially after reading Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Mueller) that gasoline is a pretty devastating and largely overlooked weapon. Gasoline is the most powerful portable chemical energy source we have. Mueller’s argument is that jihadis were asking about crop dusters pre-9/11 not for biological or chemical reasons. The reason was that the wing tanks represent a huge payload of fuel for the size of the plane, and a flying incendiary weapon that, in terms of energy, matches military hardware.
LOTM,
Could have been worse. I could have written a book about crashing a plane into the US Capitol and sold a few million copies. Oh, wait, Tom Clancy already did that.
I could have posted something about a jihadi mall shooting in a moderate-sized city in Virginia. Oh wait, Tom Clancy did that, too.
I could have posted about a jihadi cell targeting a bus, a school and a federal building in New York, or better yet, made a movie with Denzel Washington and put up posters all over the country. That was The Seige, it came out 12 years ago.
There is nothing I can write that hasn’t been thought of or exploited for commercial purposes already. OpSec is not my concern when I post here.
MTB,
Non-metal construction alone and the lack of a transponder would get most things through our mainly-civilian radar net, especially if the target is Bangor or Marco Island, where there doesn’t happen to be a major military airbase or any “valuable” targets. The civilian radar operators couldn’t even find a 757 with the transponder turned off on 9/11. If they can make surfboards, they can lay down fiber, it doesn’t need to be pretty it just needs to fly for a couple of hours.
Here’s hoping that the saying “Haji don’t surf” is true.
Rosinate,
You are correct that military-level stealth is difficult to create. But I think you badly overestimate the capabilities of our current border protection schemes. Hot engine exhaust and the engine itself has to be looked for in order to be detected, how many National Guardsmen are currently staring skyward looking for engine exhaust with thermal imagers? Not many, I would wager. Back when we had the Nike-series of anti-aircraft missiles we might have actually had search-and-track radars operational at some points along the coast, but those have all been dismantled. Pretty much now, it’s skin-paint and transponder or get dismissed as noise until you’re so close it doesn’t matter.
There’s a huge difference between spoofing a civilian radar system and a modern military air-defense system. It’s doubtful anyone could get even a small plane through a Cold War-era anti-aircraft and anti-missile system and into a valuable target zone.
Oh, wait.
Oh, wait again. This guy was picked up by Reagan National Airport operators when he was 6.5 miles north of the White House.
Just use your imagination about how UAVs could be used to draw resources from more significant uses, or used to invite attacks, with subsequent PR repercussions. They don’t have to have anywhere near the capability of the Predator to have an impact on our activity.
Oops. Mistaken post.
Darren @121:
R.R. National Airport Radar equipment is far from normal for civilian airports in the U.S. I won’t say anything more specific than that, or you can choose to believe the story they put out about it being equiped with obsolete Honywell equipment circa 1971.
Also, Andrews AFB is about 8 miles South of D.C. with several military Radar’s, and F-16s.
Go check out Google maps. You’ll notice a couple of the 16s have 400Hz generators and ready trucks pulled up next to them. The overhead imagery resolution isn’t good enough to reveal the umbilicle cables running to the jets to keep the electronics, nav, etc. up and running 24/7 and to allow a real quick engine start. A mobile CO2 fire extinguisher cart sits in front. Another 16 sits nearby but not hooked up to a cart, with the canopy open… Hmmmmm, I wonder why?
Also on Google maps, check out the Washington Naval Yard. There is a multilevel parking garage on base. The top level provides a great unobstructed view of the D.C. skyline, such as it is, and a couple of these parked on the roof:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TWQ-1_Avenger
There’s a lot more out there protecting D.C. that doesn’t show up on Google. I’ll leave it at that, except to say, that with all the overlapping, often competing, organizations involved and the surprising amount of hardware, and typical govenment tendency to muck things up when multiple organizations are involved, I’m amazed there haven’t been several accidental shootdowns before now.
wed Hecate ? ça veut dire quoi ?
Armageddon,
It was a different world when that guy put his Cessna down forcefully on the South Lawn, that little trick is unlikely to happen again. I have little doubt that DC airspace is much more highly guarded now, it makes me a little nervous flying into and out of that airport simply because an accidental deviation from a flight plan is unlikely to be treated benignly. Washington is a much harder target than it was in the Clinton years — but the PVO Strany was let down in Rust’s flight by exactly the same multiple-organization headaches that you allude to. I knew there were Avengers on the Mall shortly after 9/11, I’m not surprised that they kept them around.
But there’s also a problem with spending on defense. You harden some targets and say in effect, “Don’t come here!” So smart people with evil motives don’t go there. They go somewhere else, rack up an equivalent body count and make all of your preparation money look silly just sitting there. I can understand the visuals of protecting the Capitol Dome, the White House, the Pentagon. They have symbolic value beyond the lives they hold. But losing the Citibank building in NYC, the Library Tower in LA, or “Gumby”, the Bank of America Plaza building in Dallas would fill cemetaries for miles around. Politically, you can’t do nothing. Fiscally, you can’t do everything. Whatever you do, it can always be circumvented, and there will always be recriminations.
A Rex,
It’s not just Stinger/Avenger launchers.
See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_launched_AMRAAM_-_NASAMS
White House defense
In 2006 the Norwegian magazine Økonomisk Rapport (Economic Report) revealed that several NASAMS were used to guard air space over Washington, D.C. during the 2005 presidential inauguration.[6] According to the report, the same NASAMS units has since been used to protect air space around the White House. The magazine received access to the deal which mentioned specifically that the equipment be used for protection of the President in Washington. Director Tore Sannes of Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace refused to comment, other than acknowledging that they had made a weapon systems deal with U.S. military contractor Raytheon and the United States Air Force.
Although Økonomisk Rapport claimed to have revealed this in March 2006, the official webpages of the Royal Norwegian Air Force gave very clear hints about the event one year earlier, giving specific mention to the fact that the NASAMS had been used to protect Washington, D.C. during the recent presidential inauguration.[7]
Three NASAMS launchers can be clearly seen at Andrews Air Force Base, Fort Belvoir, and at the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center on Google Earth.[8]
There will be no repeat of 9/11, as far as air liners hitting the White House is concerned.
>Non-metal construction alone and the lack of
>a transponder would get most things through
>our mainly-civilian radar net, especially if
>the target is Bangor or Marco Island, where
>there doesn’t happen to be a major military
>airbase or any “valuable” targets.
Suicide truck bombs are easier to build, are even harder to show up on civilian radars, and cause more damage.
Please see Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh.