The Ten Ships
One of the reasons the Navy opposed a Southwest Pacific campaign during the Pacific War was the shrewd appreciation that once bureaucracy started on a task it would grow with it like a cancer whatever its original purpose. Admiral King wasn’t against an action in the Solomons. He was just afraid that it would take on a life of its own. The passage of time has not changed this this tendency. The campaign in Afghanistan began in 2002 with a specific purpose. But by the time Barack Obama was running for President its chief attraction was the fact that it was an alternative to the campaign in Iraq. A 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal covering his speech before the VWF captured his thinking: Afghanistan was a “war of necessity”, unlike Iraq, which was a “war of choice”. Of all the “false choices” the President was fond of rhetorically raising, this was perhaps the falsest choice of all. By asserting that Afghanistan, not oil or the Middle East or radical Islam was the center of gravity of the enemy, President Obama completely misframed the strategic choices.
President Barack Obama told military service members Monday that the war in Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” and that the U.S. would adhere to its timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. … “But we must never forget. This is not a war of choice,” he told the VFW crowd. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.”
To jump from the correct idea that defeating the forces which ‘attacked American on 9/11″ were an existential threat to the idea that ergo Afghanistan was a war of necessity was a huge non sequitur. Afghanistan happened to be the place from which Osama Bin launched his attack on September 11. Admiral Nagumo launched his infamous attack on Pearl Harbor from a nameless patch of ocean 200 miles North of Oahu. But Admiral King had the sense to understand that the location itself had little significance. It was the Kido Butai, the ten carriers which made up the Japanese Fast Carrier force which momentarily occupied that ocean waste that he had to destroy. While the Kido Butai existed it could move across the vast spaces and attack at a point of its choosing. While it survived every patch of ocean was dangerous. Once it had been neutralized all the oceans of the world were potentially safe. As John Adams in his book If Mahan Ran the Great Pacific War wrote: “sink ten ships and win the naval war”. Both the Nihon Kaigun and the CINCPAC understood this. The entire purpose of subsequent American naval operations was to find and sink these ten ships; and the Nihon Kaigun’s subsequent efforts revolved around their attempt to preserve them.
But today only one side — the forces behind al-Qaeda – have a clear strategic conception of the war they are waging. The President seems determined to misunderstand it. He is waging existential war against tribesmen at the end of the world while denying that the Kido Butai even exists. He may succeed on narrow terms, but al-Qaeda, the modern Kido Butai, will simply move elsewhere: to Yemen, Birmingham or Detroit and the menace will remain unabated. Ralph Peters writing in the NY Post, catches the disconnection between the strategic significance of Afghanistan and the means being applied to mis-attain it. Peters complained that America isn’t fighting the forces which attacked it. It is trying to Westernize the piece of land from which the attack was launched. One is not obviously related to the other, but never mind. Like the Southwest Pacific campaign of long ago, it has taken on a political life of its own. Peters writes:
Then there’s the continuing denial that Islam has anything to do with the Taliban’s persistence or Afghan resistance to our goodwill gestures: This mullah’s corrupt; that suicide bomber wasn’t very religious(!); that local uprising’s just a neighborhood feud. Religion has nothing to do with it.
As a kid, I built model ships. What was the most important component? The glue. Which, if I had done a good job, was invisible. That HMS Victory kit had hundreds of parts large and small — but without the glue they wouldn’t have held together. Islam’s the glue binding our enemies. Even when it isn’t visible.
For all of its defects the campaign in Iraq was at least in the right place: at the locus of oil, ideology and brutal regimes that are the Middle East. Ideally the campaign in Iraq would have a sent a wave of democratization through the area, undermined the attraction of radical Islam, provided a base from which to physically control oil if necessary. That the campaign failed to attain many of objectives should not obscure the fact that its objectives were valid. It made far more strategic sense than fighting tribesmen in Afghanistan. Ideology, rogue regimes, energy are the three entities which have replaced the “ten ships” of 70 years ago. The means through which these three entities should be engaged ought to be the subject of reasoned debate, whether by military, economic or technological means. But the vital nature of these objectives ought not to be. Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.
Bill Kristof of the New York Times does his best to talk up the magnificence of President Obama’s strategy but only succeeds in exposing its bankruptcy. His argues that America must ‘help’ Pakistan, to invest in more schools but uses an example so unfortunate that it undermines his entire argument.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is on visits to rural Pakistan to see fundamentalist Wahabi-funded madrassas as the only game in town. They offer free meals, and the best students are given further scholarships to study abroad at fundamentalist institutions so that they come back as respected “scholars.”
We don’t even compete. Medieval misogynist fundamentalists display greater faith in the power of education than Americans do.
Let’s hope this is changing under the Obama administration. It’s promising that the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid package provides billions of dollars for long-term civilian programs in Pakistan, although it’s still unclear how it will be implemented. One useful signal would be for Washington to encourage Islamabad to send not only troops to North Waziristan but also teachers.
Who funds the madrassas? The Wahabis. And where are the Wahabis? They are not based in Afghanistan. There is an almost a willful desire not to recognize the problem, as if denial would make tasks too politically distasteful to be contemplated unnecessary. The problem is avoided at all cost. And yet it is not avoided, because the war goes on and will spread in time past Times Square. The campaign in Afghanistan almost looks like an act of misdirection by a President determined not to engage the enemy’s real center of gravity: ideology, state sponsors of terrorism, money from oil. Oil funds the maddrassas. Wahabism provides the preachers. Various authoritarian states gain proxies thereby to pursue their noxious ends. The triangle has three legs. All of them were wiggling in Times Square and yet policymakers are determined not to see any of them.
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The War on Terror, if one may use the term, will be won or lost in Washington DC. Although the valor and competence of the Armed Forces will play a large part, the major factor will be whether the political elite can muster the will name its enemy and recognize its foes strategic center of gravity. Killing tribesmen, creating a network of robotic killers in the skies, and surveilling everything that uses a cell phone or moves has no meaning outside of a strategic context. They are not ends in themselves. They only have meaning insofar as they advance the cause of undermining the enemy’s center of gravity. Sink those ten ships, King knew, and you win the Pacific war. Fail and no patch of ocean is safe. The calculus still applies. If you can’t see Hezbollah, can’t see the regime in Iran, can’t see Syria, can’t see the Wahabis and can only see Afghanistan, then you are in a world of pain.
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The untraceable internet campaign contributions named for cartoon characters and such that were made to the Obama campaign are always attributed, in the center/right blogosphere, to the Chinese.
I wonder, though, if the Magic Kingdom was the real origin?
It has been and continues to be about “will” or lackk thereof. There is only one aspect of the DIME instruments that has the ability to be effective, and we are currently misapplying it.
Beautifully said. Although I disagree with the premise that defeating the ideology is equally important. Arabia in the early 20th century was just as brutal and intolerant as it is now – probably more so. And to the West, that didn’t matter a damn. Why? Because the Arabs of that era were dirt-poor, had no power outside their own area, were living in mostly Stone Age conditions and were therefore completely irrelevant.
And then oil was discovered in Saudi. Make oil irrelevant – and there are many ways to do it – and the tribesmen will once again be irrelevant. Especially if we confiscate all their ill-gotten gains and expel all of them from the West. The confiscation could easily be justified as reparations for 1300+ years of war.
Or to put it another way; get off the oil teat, and once that’s done blow up all the pipelines leading out of the area, destroy their airports, mine the Gulf and let them find out whether oil is edible.
“That the campaign failed to attain many of objectives should not obscure the fact that its objectives were valid.”
That the campaign failed to attain many of the objectives is attributable to those in the West who were determined to prevent it from doing so.
Patton got to the Meuse and rather than pouring most of the resources into his drive, the elites not only failed to do so as they did in 1944 but told old Blood and Guts to return to Omaha Beach, load his forces back onto the ships and return to the USA. It seems that there had been a tornado in Kansas and the governor there said the loss of so many trained men and 4X4 vehicles to the wrong war at the wrong time was hurting the relief efforts there.
1. no mo uro; “I wonder, though, if the Magic Kingdom was the real origin?”
Don’t forget about the Pali brothers that raised money for Obama, where do you think they were getting their money? Certainly not from the feckless indigents around them.
I know I’m not the first one to ask this; If you wanted to wreck America what (if anything) would you be doing different from Obama?
OTOH, the lack of strategic focus runs all the way back to the end of the Cold War; the days of wine and roses when the pols lost track of the fact that the world is a big, ugly, mean-spirited place and that, if you are Number One, there is alwys going to be somebody out there gunning for you. Even if you aren’t aware of them. Those “ten ships” disappeared over the horizon as we spent money on social programs and expanding the govenment while running down our military.
This is a disappointing essay. The ultimate reason for the incoherence is because the only appropriate remedy is the Roman solution: punish the population that hosts the threat to the extent that the population fears the reprisal more than it loves/fears the parasite. But we cannot do that. Therefore the “Westernization,” a fancy term for establishing reliable clients. Except the South Asian Muslim barbarians are not reliable – this we also cannot say. In fact, they’re basically scumbags, with some morally meaningful but politically meaningless exceptions. We cannot force the issue on the Arabian Peninsula without disrupting the world economy – and because the Fifth Column will go berserk even faster than the stock market and oil prices. Islam is not a viable target because it is effectively a non-target. What do people on this blog think the USA could possibly do, even under the best of circumstances, to attack and “reform” “Islam”? Please: stop thinking. You’re wrong. There is nothing meaningfully to be done that would not rouse the rest of them closer to militant orthodoxy or at least sympathy (if that’s possible).
The problem is the correlation of forces is against us, the Western conservatives, the unapologetic liberals: we are being isolated. The Tea Parties cannot change that; all the Tea Parties can do is possibly move us, the USA, from a 50/50 nation to a 60/40 nation.
The only solution at present is to maintain forward operating bases in loot-&-pederasty-religion shit-holes under the guise of Westernization so that we can pilot predators out of Baluchistan and watch the GRU/Taliban heroin/arms exchanges from nearby.
Consider also the solution at home. Did Bush ever propose 4th Amendment protections limitations on the level of search and seizure? The electronic surveillance (phone companies, etc.) aspect of 4th Amendment jurisprudence is much more of a grey area despite the ACLU’s wailing. Do you want Obama/Holder – either Ivy League useful idiots or prominent parts of a socialist conspiracy – to make these changes? I don’t.
We are being forced back into the Secret War, no matter how much the Church Committee idiots tried to extract us from it. And of course, since they did so, isn’t it natural that The Enemy should decide to amass its forces precisely where we are weakest? It may have taken them 25 years to develop the resources and position their forces, but they have clearly done so. The problem is we have to go to war with the assets we have. That is the ultimate reason we appear to be in a mess. But I have no doubt we also are working, and the Will has been forced into secrecy. Make no mistake that it is happening, however. Patience.
When the Japanese government decided on war with the United States, the first order of business was the destruction of the United States Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was hoped the destruction of the US fleet would prevent the United States from interfering with Japanese expansion into the south, to Indo-China, to the Philippines, Borneo and the Dutch East Indies, all areas Japan would need to conquer and control if Japan was to continue the war. Oil, rice and raw materials were for the taking, but first they would have to eliminate the United States Pacific Fleet.
On 26 November 1941, the Pearl Harbor Striking Force of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers and destroyers, sailed from Tankan Bay (Hittokappu Wan) in the Kuriles, and headed for Pearl Harbor under strict radio silence. The Japanese ships had deceptively innocent names. The names of destroyers Kasumi, Shiranuhi and Tanikaze meant, respectively, Mist of Flowers, Phosphorescent Foam, and Valley Wind. The six aircraft carriers were Kaga (Increased Joy), Akagi (Red Castle), Hiryu (Flying Dragon), Soryu (Green Dragon), Shokaku (Soaring Crane) and Zuikaku (Happy Crane).
On 1 December the Japanese Cabinet Council ratified the decision to go to war, and the next day Admiral Yamamoto broadcast the phrase, “Climb Mount Niitaka” (Niitaka Yama Nobore), the prearranged code telling Nagumo to proceed with the attack. At 2100 hours, 6 December 1941, just hours from the launching point, crews were assembled on the carrier decks to witness the hoisting, on Akagi, of the Z flag used by Admiral Togo in the victorious battle of Tsushima against the Russians in 1905.
0600 hours, Sunday, 7 December 1941
Dawn in the Pacific can be inexpressibly beautiful, but this dawn wasn’t. Overcast, a fresh northeast trade wind, moderate sea. But it was beautiful indeed to Admiral Nagumo. His Pearl Harbor Striking Force had sailed for ten days, through waters where at any moment he might chance upon a ship, and had reached the launching point, miraculously unseen and unheard, 275 miles north of Pearl Harbor. The weather was overcast, with a fresh northeast tradewind and a moderate sea. If Admiral Nagumo gave thought to Admiral Yamamoto’s warning that they would run wild for six months, but after that he could guarantee nothing, he didn’t show it.
Gray dawn lights the darkened ships
Gray-green seas dash ‘gainst the bows
Bugles rise to moistened lips
Sailors think on sacred vows
On Akagi Nagumo waits
And then it comes, a distant speck
The signal flag to tempt the fates
And airplanes roll the sea-stained deck
Into the air as one by one
Into the wind they wag their wings
Rising, they begin their run
Living, breathing, deadly things
Shipmates cheer Banzai! Banzai!
As noise filled decks come quiet strange
Kates and Zeros fill the sky
And Vals bring Pearl in bomber range
The Afghan hills stand silent, still
No carriers, no Vals, no Zekes
The Taliban knows every hill
The valleys, trails and mountain peaks
There’s nothing there worth dying for
The enemy is in Teheran
Who still insist on trying for
The weapon that will make Iran
The center of the world wide fight
As Islam storms our very gates
While we sleep soundly through the night
Unseeing Islam’s Zekes and Kates
And what if the Ten Ships are virtually invulnerable?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3888893,00.html
“I know I’m not the first one to ask this; If you wanted to wreck America what (if anything) would you be doing different from Obama?”
This also begs another question: “If you were an absolute fool who’s entire career was based on affirmative action and hustling guilty whites, would you – could you? – be doing anything different than Obama?”
In the first case you would expect him to at least hire competent men to help him perform his task. The second case, however, explains perfectly such moves as hiring an affirmative-action reject who can’t even bother to read the laws he’s criticizing as Attorney General.
I find it easily believable to think that Eric Holder has the functional literacy of an 8th grader and has had every position and test paper in his life – including while he was in law school – written for him while he provided the race-appropriate face and appropriately performed the modern shuck and jive liberal dance whenever he was called on to do so.
The people running this country may be evil, but they are also far more stupid than many of you think possible. Take Congress, for example – you could grab 500+ hobo’s off the streets of any major city and you would get better and more honest decision making than you would out of this current bunch.
And I doubt you could find a single one of them who really believed that islands like Guam floated on top of the ocean and would tip over if too many people landed on them.
Wars are fought on two levels, the tactical and the strategic. On the tactical level you have to fight the enemy where he is. Much of the fashionable intellectual attachment with avoiding that and running in circles or straining at sideshows can be traced back the Sir B. H. Liddell Hart’s espousal of the “indirect approach.” It never did rise to the coherence of a theory let alone a doctrine but as a catch phrase used and misused by the half educated it has persisted. In the mouths of amateurs it does almost as much harm as misusing Clausewitz’s quote on war and politics does to justify responding to real aggression with paper exercises. In happier days John Mearsheimer did a good job of discrediting Hart in “Liddell Hart and the Weight of History.”
On the strategic level we need plans to deal with energy and other resources. We need a plan to deal realistically with China and Islam. We can not ignore tactical issues in the name of Olympian disdain while studying larger issues. To do so quickly degenerates into a sterile dilettantism that masques cowardice for restraint. We also cannot allow our enemies, the term adversaries should be banned from public use, to control our actions by leading us into wasteful limited engagements.
In the Pacific War the Navy wanted to drive straight for Taiwan and use it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier to control both Japan and China. The Army insisted on first honoring Douglas MacArthur’s promise to return to the Philippines. In hindsight it is possible that costly as the sweep up the Solomons and the forgotten campaign in New Guinea were they may have been the surer path to victory. The direct lunge across to Taiwan, if attempted before the destruction of the Japanese forces in the Slot and the Philippine Sea, might have proven even more disastrous than Montgomery’s lunge to shorten the European conflict in the Market-Garden “A Bridge to Far” campaign.
For the long term would it have served American interests if we had ended the war with a base structure on Taiwan? Probably and post war efforts to create that infrastructure proved more transient and less effective than a stronger earlier presence might have. If we had conquered Taiwan and then used it to support our interests in China, rather than simply negotiating basing arrangements with the soon to be defeated KMT, we might still have a presence there and greater influence over China. My suggestion does not imply that we would have frustrated Chiang kai Shek’s ambitions and pretensions or used such bases to attack the mainland but only that we might have been able to secure a more permanent footing similar to that we hold over Gitmo.
I agree with Dan that the population that supports the threat needs to be punished.
I disagree with the concept of nation building for several reasons. First, it fosters dependents. Second it is expensive and most if the money used in this process is wasted. A short period of aid is necessary as is arming the citizens so that they at least have the opportunity to partially control their future government. If they choose to take this opportunity or to ignore it is not my concern.
Some things like opium growing and Heroin production need to be stopped. Give the farmers alternative crops and the equipment to produce those crops. Set up markets to distribute the crops then step back. If it works fine, if Opium returns salt the earth and walk away.
I think both Afghanistan and Mexico are both threats to our security and it is time for tough love in both cases. No more free money and since we are paying we don’t need to ask them what they want. We tell them what we will pay for and they can take it or leave it.
Fletcher Christian: Or to put it another way; get off the oil teat, and once that’s done blow up all the pipelines leading out of the area, destroy their airports, mine the Gulf and let them find out whether oil is edible.
Get off the oil teat?
America can do a lot of amazing things with the right leadership. In World War II the country changed into a temporary military dictatorship and became a war-making machine at every level of society. This went hand-in-hand with rationing, radically higher taxes, internment camps for potential Fifth Columnists, and a draft. Lately the markets have been in control. In the wake of 9-11 Americans were just told to keep consuming at pre-9-11 levels to keep the economy humming along. There was a tax cut and the only thing approaching a draft was a stop-loss order.
So are we going to get off the oil teat? No the markets always race to the bottom line, with tunnel vision, and that’s the path of least resistance. It would take something like the Apollo program to make energy independence happen.
OT,
Fighting in Thailand, Michael Yon is live-blogging on FaceBook and Twitter. Also he published a BOLO for a possible attack in Kabul, very bad possible compromise of security. I would be surprised if he gets any further cooperation from DoD or CIA, unless it was a deliberate leak.
To tie back to the thread, are the Thai “Red Shirts” among China’s ships? How do we respond? Do we render them ineffective by pressing for social and political reform in Thailand? Do we urge the Thai government to crush the threat and support an ally? Do we respond by attacking a Chinese interest elsewhere to get China to order their agents to pull back?
10 ships: What a brilliant metaphor.
Oil money, Wahhabi Islamism are clearly part of the 10 ships, but I’m not sure that “rogue regimes” are. The money comes primarily from the Saudis, although there is some deniability there. They are not a “rogue regime” they are our so called allies.
One could argue that one of the 10 ships is “human and political shields”. The ability of the enemy to find cover behind and within western institutions. Examples are
* money from the Saudis, who are politically invunerable,
* residing in Pakistan’s northern cities, which are safe from drone attacks
* Assylum in Iran, which harbors Al Qaeda fugitives
* Living “peacefully” in UK/Europe, while spreading money and intellectual aid to terrorists, protected by Western ideas of privacy, and freedom.
When our political leaders can articulate exact who and what the enemy is, we can turn to attacking it where it tries to hide.
T @12
The Apollo program required a lot more problem-solving than energy independence would. CS technology is ready enough to start converting hundreds of square miles of Southwestern desert into power producers. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power “On September 9, 2009; 7 months ago (2009-09-09), Bill Weihl, Google.org’s green energy czar said that the firm was conducting research on the heliostat mirrors and gas turbine technology, which he expects will drop the cost of solar thermal electric power to less than $0.05/kWh in 2 or 3 years[32].”
But it won’t get done with TCobb-type naysayers whining about non-competitive prices. Only a fool waits until the roof is actually leaking before repairing it.
No.12 and No 15.
An Apollo Program would not do it. Apollo was designed fit narrow political objectives. It was a stunt that left with good feelings and nothing really useful. The last flight of the Shuttle Atlantis today is testimony to that failing.
Do a 360 with you eyes open in any populated area and you will see more different energy sources in use than you can count. One Answer will not work. The capitalist marketplace must be allowed to work. Otherwise we will end up with people trying to replace gasoline engines with wind turbines, to give a purely hypothetical example.
If anything, our problem is that there are more answers to our energy requirements than there are needs. The problem is picking the best ones and preventing political aspects from picking the worst ones.
Follow the Apollo lead and we will have the equivalent of a wind turbine on the Moon with a nice big flag on it. Impressive – but useless.
And I do not think the problem would go away if we stopped using ME oil. I think it would get worse, at least for a while. The Al Queda type of warfare is born more out of personal desperation more than cultural triumph.
There *is* a way to get off the oil teat, but it’s hard and no one wants to pay the political and economic price for doing.
First off: recognize that all of the so-called “green energy” schemes are flops bordering on outright disasters.
Wind – in reality, only provides power 30% of the time and takes up a huge amount of land.
Solar – not ready for prime time, probably needs at least 30 more years of work to get solar conversion efficiency.
Geothermal – check out the results of the California test last year. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent – nothing but a couple abandoned and wrecked buildings left to show for it.
Hydrogen – most people don’t realize that this is just a Nat Gas play. Easier and cheaper to use the nat gas directly.
Ethanol from corn – total boondoggle that burns more energy than it creates, and jacks up food prices as a bonus.
But I said there is a plan; what WILL work?
3 pillars of any non-oil based economy:
1. Nuclear. This is the hardest yet most essential step; at least one major nuclear plant should be constructed for every city of over 250,000 population. This would take the pressure off the electric grid. Small size, maybe neighborhood sized reactors should be studied.
2. Coal. Where it occurs, “clean coal” technologies should be pursued to their full extent and used to keep the grid up. America has a 300 year supply of coal still underground.
3. Nat Gas – this is what needs to fuel transportation and other mobile needs. The shale-gas plays have shown that there is at leat a 100 year supply of nat gas underground, and all internal combustion engines could be converted to run on this fuel fairly easily. Many already do; and this does not require a total redesign of the American automobile fleet as an all-electric option does. Yes, there are some technical and safety issues – but they’re do-able.
Everyone can come up with reasons why they don’t like 1, 2 or 3. Nevertheless, IF we want to be energy independent, using all 3 of these sources is the ONLY strategy with any realistic chance of success.
BTW, there are 30 years supply of Nat Gas in Alaska that we alrady have explored and have never tapped because no one has yet bothered to build a pipeline to it. Dirty little secret of American energy policy. And it’s not just enviro’s that have opposed this; nat gas producers have opposed it as well because this pipeline would crash nat gas prices and make the commodity incredibly cheap for decades.
Who cares that this would be good for the country? No one that I can see.
Sometimes it seems Ralph Peters is the only American who can think straight; Afghanistan is a tar baby.
And #6 is correct: while our soldiers and Marines are forced to march around picking scabs, the real tale will be the knife fight in the shadows.
10. Lifeofthemind, a third level of warfare exists that is based in belief that is prior to strategy and tactics. It is in the arena of belief that wars are ultimately won and lost – to win one must put the other belief system into a “when prophecy fails” state. Our failure to take on the opposing belief system, Islam, guarantees our failure.
“Or to put it another way; get off the oil teat”
Actually you left a word or two out there. There is plenty of oil to be had without buying it from The Kingdom or Chavez or for that matter any place other than Canada, Mexico and ourselves.
Mexico of course has a problem in that they just don’t have the expertise to get oil out of the ground and export in any way akin to Canada’s or our abilities.
You think we will have much off shore drilling. Well, no of course not. Even without the recent disaster Obama was just talking through his hat and floating lies for political reasons.
Japan is the only place that is set up to build nuke containment vessels. Does that tell you what the state of nuke development is in our country? Where are all the nuke plants, not here of course. Where are all the nuke plants that utilize spent rods that we bury under the ground. Not here of course.
America has been sidetracked by the eco-terrorists and politicans who want to fill their pockets with our money and don’t really care to make America energy independent.
Want to turn around the unemployment? Put the solar, wind and other high minded ideas behind bringing the oil up, relagate building electric cars with batteries that cost too much and don’t last long enough to the back burner also. Start converting large transport vehicles to natural gases and of course, start building nuke plants, even if they are mostly built by other nations. I would like to see those things but I’m afraid I won’t live that long.
Why? Because none of what I listed is going to happen under this President’s Administration or even the current leadership that is killing the Republican Party.
I think I understand the “ten ships”, but most likely not the same way as most of you do.
The way I look at life, from the big picture to everyday problems is maybe a little different than some. My main thrust in solving problems is to first determine the base (basic – not causual) problem that is causing or behind the apparent problems. That my friends is not as simple as it sounds.
For example my daughter’s continual habit of screwing up her life (thus her children’s and mine) is not just that she likes to drink, do drugs, party and work only when she “is forced to” it is because she has never been able to take personal responsibility and she does not value herself. She can fool her mind (and her conscience) continually by finding or figuring out how to blame anything and/or anybody for her self caused problems.
Well, the Islamics have the same problem. And to a different degree so does the backward countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Not even to mention Yemen, some of the African countries or even those of the South American countries.
Think any of these including my daughter will ever change their thinking? Not hardly unless they come up to the hard spot and the no way out that we and the western world will never put them in. Why? Well because we are just too nice and it would be not PC to threaten them or kill them wholesale, embargo their trade totally, mine their harbors, shoot everything in the air down or even blockade their highways.
Forget about bouncing the rubble or even salting the earth.
Oh well, I’m just rambling now. I need to get on the chores that never seem to have an end. Kinda like the world’s problems…yes?
Papa Ray
I think the reason the Left doesn’t see Islam for what it is, is because they’ve created an intellectual blind spot. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” therefore not a meaningful factor within the human condition. And having thus dismissed it as a non-factor in our (Western) culture, they honestly don’t grasp it’s importance in the Islamic context. That’s why they view muslim rage in terms of post-colonial reaction or in economic terms. It’s a form of projection. And it’s a deadly blindness.
wretchard:
When we have a president who bows down to one of those ships (a.k.a. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), there is little chance to affect Obama’s strategic policy.
What we can do is make it evident to the public that Obama either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the strategic dangers in front of us.
Saudi Arabia has become an existential threat to the United States of America, especially given how it lavishly funds the ideological and bureaucratic networks that underpin al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda should be regarded as an international offshoot of the mutawwain.
Back in 2002, I wrote to the Bush administration proposing to liberate the Saudi Kingdom as a precursor to liberating Iraq. This proposal didn’t go anywhere. The reasons why I backed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were because (1) he celebrated the September 11 attacks thus creating a casus belli, (2) liberating Najaf would internationalize Shi’ism and undermine Iranian influence within Islam, and (3) we needed to show our willingness to fight somewhere and fighting in Iraq was better than either not fighting at all – or worse, throwing Israel under the bus to appease our enemies.
I am actually favorably surprised that the war in Iraq has turned out as well as it has. That said, we need to focus on our enemies – the Iranian government, the Sa’udi government, and factions within Pakistani intelligence services. Although any state that stands with these enemies must be opposed too, most Middle Eastern states will take the side of the United States when we show clear resolve.
We need to find a technological means to destroy the petroleum economies of the Persian Gulf. It is abundantly clear that we need political leadership with a killer instinct to accomplish this. We will necessarily need to get away from petroleum. Given that the petroleum industry itself has the technological expertise necessary to make this transition, it would be wise to work with the petroleum industry to promote a smooth transition rather than beat it over the head for ideological purposes.
In particular, the petroleum industry’s expertise with drilling holes could be profitably transferred to drilling for geothermal energy on an industrial scale. Also, I think wind and solar farms are beautiful. We can promote domestic wind and solar turbine production and use domestically produced machinery as foreign aid to reward warlords who take our side. Not only would they get cheap electricity, but they would gain a vested interest in defending wind and solar energy as opposed to Saudi-style energy.
To do this, of course, we need to defeat the Saudi Dogs – those entities in the United States that take Saudi money and whose loyalties follow their Saudi masters. These domestic lobbies on both sides of the aisle are increasingly formidable – and must be decisively defeated. Let’s roll.
wretchard
Well said. You have encapsulated the situation precisely, and with fewer words than Holder used to avoid saying Islam.
This is the mystery of our times. Either Obama, the other Western leaders and their cohorts intentionally want to weaken or lose the institutional framework of Western Civilization, or there is a Grand Game going on at some incomprehensible level that makes it irrelevant to them whether Western capitals are filled with Muslims or Englishmen.
If there is a history then GWB will never be faulted for Iraq. For the reasons you stated and because of its critical geographic location a neutral if not friendly Iraq was essential to stemming the Islamic tide after 911.
The initial campaign in Afghanistan was mete and just and executed brilliantly. That was then. Keeping 100,000 troops around to compete for prizes for not shooting the enemy is an absurdity. Afghanistan is a collection of warlords and tribal chieftains. It has never been a nation in the Western sense and it probably never will be. If we are not going to be killing jihadis in large numbers, or using Afghan bases to fly missions into Iran then we are just tying down valuable resources.
It is very difficult trying to imagine an end point when you cannot even imagine the real objectives of the people calling the shots.
Forgotten Man wrote “I agree with Dan that the population that supports the threat needs to be punished.” Of course, that would be us for putting this nincompoop in office in the first place, sigh.
I see the situation in the Middle East to be largely the creation of petroleum rent. Please note that the regime of Hugo Chavez isn’t Muslim but is dangerous. Why? Hugo Chavez can rely upon petroleum rent for his demagoguery.
If we completely relied upon North American sources of energy, that would not solve the problem we face. That’s because the Third World would still be dependent upon petroleum from the Persian Gulf. Third World economies simply cannot afford anything other than the cheapest fuel, and the cheapest fuel comes from the Persian Gulf. The key to destroying the economy of our enemy is to find a cheaper source of fuel than Saudi Sweet that can replace petroleum within the entire world economy.
There is a big difference between a technological solution and a boondoggle. A technological solution pours money into discovering new ways to undercut the vast advantage of Saudi crude on the energy market. DARPA should be studying this!! In contrast, a boondoggle pours money into masking the inefficiency of an existing industry. Examples include corn-based ethanol and nuclear energy. (The federal government subsidizes nuclear energy by taking responsibility for nuclear waste disposal.) It is important to create economic incentives for alternative energy R&D developers to reduce the costs of their technologies each year, so the subsidy will eventually be zero.
Above $50/barrel, many technological options (both renewable and nonrenewable) open up. The problem the keeps the world economy addicted to petroleum is the occasional dip in the price to under $20/barrel, which undercuts most other alternatives. The price volatility of petroleum means that the economic logic of any energy source with fixed costs will vary from year to year. At $130/barrel, wind turbines and batteries start making sense; at $13/barrel, they don’t.
The key is to find a technology that will undercut petroleum if or when it ever gets to $6/barrel.
W:
“…America isn’t fighting the forces which attacked it. It is trying to Westernize the piece of land from which the attack was launched. One is not obviously related to the other, but never mind…”
This is a result of forgetting 4000 years of western military history. If one wishes to deny territory to an enemy, traditionally only a couple effective ways to do it existed.
One was to kill or run off 60-80% of all military age males. Bring in other warlike, armed military age males who are cooperative and / or supportive of your cause and have them re-settle the area and remake the nation in a new image. The 20-40% of military age original males left can usually be convinced to assimilate to a lesser or greater extent, and get along in the new order once they are a substantial minority. This is especially true if they see genuine opportunities to build a new life for themselves, and a draconian security apparatus exists to punish those who would oppose the new order.
The term for these actions used to be “Victory”, now, bleeding heart, self-hating, socialists have taken to calling it ethnic cleansing and genocide, and they’ll whine and prance, and moan, and protest and generally caper about like adolescents on crack demonstrating to the entire world, but mostly to themselves and each other, how morally superior they are by standing up to “the man” by “speaking truth to authority”. Unless it happens to be China invading Tibet, or the Soviet Union starving Ukrainians, in which case they’re strangely silent…
The second way to deny territory traditionally was to wrest control of the territory from the bastard who opposed you by either armed invasion or espionage and assassination, and put a new bastard in his place. Your bastard, who would do anything necessary to oppress that portion of the population, which had been causing you, trouble. Today’s bleeding heart, self-hating, progressives are equally opposed to this kind of solution when the U.S. implements it in Columbia or Iran, but are strangely silent once again if it’s Cuba pulling puppet strings in Venezuela or Bolivia.
We could have avoided wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan if we had chosen to use the second route. We should have found a Kurdish alternative to Sadaam after Desert Storm, and backed him to the hilt with training, money and equipment on the condition that he give up on armed struggle against Turkey for the time being. I doubt much support for Iraq would have been forthcoming from Arab Gulf states in a prolonged fight against Sunni Kurds.
In retrospect, we should have backed Ahmad Shah Massoud when he led the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Serious backing, with the cooperation of Tajikistan and Russia, who have every reason to fight against Islamic militants, may have destroyed the Taliban, and certainly would have prevented them from seizing all of Afghanistan and providing an open base of operations for Al Qaeda. It also would have soaked up much of the money and effort of the Pakistani ISI, and may have prevented attacks against India. Oh well, hind sight is 20 / 20!
I guess that leaves the first alternative after we’ve learned our lesson and have become properly motivated.
I am reading a book called “Black Hearts” by NY Times reporter Jim Frederick. Considering the author’s ties to the Times, it is very even handed. It is the story of Stephen Green, Paul Cortez, James Barker and Jesse Spielman, four grunts from the 101st who raped a 14 year old girl in Iraq and murdered her and her family. The bigger picture was that their unit, Bravo Co. of the 1/502 Infantry was hung out to dry by their superiors. I guess it starts with Rumsfield, thinking he could fight a nation wide insurgency with 130000 troops. Bravo Company and her sister companies were stationed in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad , definitely Indian country. They guarded undermanned, ill-supplied outposts , suffered constant IED’s ,lost several of their best nco’s and junior officers in rapid succession. At the same time their battalion commander , Thomas Kunk was an arrogant, berating tactically foolish leader. The troops almost never got a break from combat and danger. Eventually many of them began to lose their bearings under constant stress. The four who committed the atrocity were not
surprisingly from very checkered backgrounds, growing up amidst drug abuse and broken dysfunctional homes.
This is the danger of wars mis-fought by political operatives and self serving senior officers. It’s always the troops who pay the price when they are pushed past the point of endurance and mental stability. If you’re going to fight wars, fight to win or get the hell out.
Mark this as my favorite wretchard posting in a long while!
I will only add that Dubya knew this well – but never said it. He seemed to assume that nudge nudge wink wink we all knew it too, but the Dems were and are willfully blind, including Obambus.
Now, they really are WILLFULLY blind, because they consider this a form of de-escalation, which they consider a good thing. It is as close as they come to Christianity, an attempt to make peace out of war even at some cost to themselves. Er, ourselves. Now, make what you will of the validity of these ideas, their motivations are noble … maybe. Anyway, road to hell, and all that.
My father, turned knee-jerk liberal in his last days, kept asking why we attacked Iraq rather than Saudi Arabia. Well, Dubya too tried to be noble and not turn on his Saudi buddies even if they had turned on us. Yet he did pull back from them, as they did pull back from us. Maybe they have made some efforts to clean up their tent, out of self-interest. Obambus and the Saudis? I’m sure they consider him barely a circus clown, and Hillary the circus clown’s wife. And how does Obambus see the Saudis? I shudder to think, since whatever it is, he bows to it.
trangbang68 @ 27: I guess it starts with Rumsfield, thinking he could fight a nation wide insurgency with 130000 troops.
Well. Maybe he could have, if (a) an insurgency was the real problem, (b) there was appropriate strategic management, and (c) the ROE were more aggressive.
The problem in Iraq was that the entire secular infrastructure evaporated, if it ever existed outside of the Baath party and all its violence. We could not stop a cultural predisposition to civil war and self-destruction, with 130,000 troops. Probably couldn’t have done much better with 800,000 troops under the same leadership and ROE, maybe not with 8,000,000 troops.
The Pentagon resistance to Rumsfeld was as big a reason for his failures, as the Iraqi resistance (sic).
To extend the WWII analogy a bit further:
The American public in 1942 didn’t understand or appreciate the apparent emphasis on fighting Germany as vigorously as Japan. The U.S. joining Britain’s N. Africa campaign made little sense to a large part of the American public. It was the the Japanese who had attacked us, and done so in dastardly fashion, not Germany. U.S. war leadership understood the need to go after the entire Axis, and followed up the N. Africa campaign with the Italian one. There was the additional urgency of needing to take pressure off of the Soviets in the East.
Ironically, the only ones enthusiastic about the European theater in 1942 were American leftists and Communists. They, of course, had their own agenda.
“Make oil irrelevant – and there are many ways to do it.”
It is telling that even conservatives entertain such energy fantasies. Oil is a fact of life and of physics. Right now, Saudi crude is the easiest and cheapest form of useful, industrial energy anywhere. Any governmentally pushed move to alternatives to oil, specifically for transportation fuels, would raise the cost to the US economy. There is just no cheaper subsitute at this time. Over a decades time scale, I can see alternate hydrocarbon production for transport such as nuclear gasoline (a prototype
reactor is being considered for Idaho.)
So maybe we could absorb those costs internally but we do business in a GLOBAL economy. Our competitors who would still use the cheaper Middle Eastern oil would then have a competitive edge over us. We would lose economic power and they would gain it relatively. We would weaken ourselves and empower our rivals.
Saudi Arabia has been using its windfall from the oil under its sands to spread their religion. The West did the same thing with our funding of Christian missionaries once. That religion intends to convert the world, including the US, to Islam. Hence, the Saudis are both our partner in the short run and our enemy in the longer run.
One can look at our failure to contain Iran’s nuclear program as a way to force the Saudis to refrain from undermining us. An aggressive Iran makes the Saudis more compliant with US interests, so long as we remain the domininant military power.
#19. mysterian1729
I think its all about models. A model can be a good thing. It can help you place things in perspective and may be a good tool of analysis. But a model is, by definition, a small imitation of a real thing. Unfortunately, most people tend to mistake the model for reality and when data comes in that does not fit the model the tendency is to either ignore the data or warp it to fit the container instead of revising or discarding it.
The problem with many in the West, including the current Dear Leader of the US, is that their world view simply can’t imagine any kind of religious view being a primary cause of behavior. After all to most of them religion is merely an affection that only people on the lunatic fringes take seriously.
To them all behavior is basically driven by economic circumstances or by “social grievances” perpetrated by colonial or capitalistic oppressors. I don’t think it is so much them refusing to name the enemy. Its just that its inconceivable to them that a religion COULD BE the enemy.
OK punish us as well. Make us stop flushing money down toilets like Afghanistan. And yes punish the politicians, all of the politicians that think nation building is our job. Clinton, Bush I and II and the big Kahuna of future nation building Obama. Cap and Tax, Carbon Credits and foreign aid are all being used for nation building and redistribution of wealth (read wasting money).
#21 fat baxter
Sorry–my comment #32 above is nothing more than a verbose restatement of what you said. I started on it before your posting and then got seriously distracted.
My apologies to everyone.
Here is an interesting viewpoint from someone who should know about the Arab and even possibly the Persian mind.
snip…
The lands of unbelief. That describes the PC Progressives to a T. They believe in nothing yet profess to care about everything as long as it is to their advantage. When advantage leaves – their care leaves with it.
Papa Ray
wws @ 17: “3 pillars of any non-oil based economy: 1. Nuclear. This is the hardest yet most essential step”
Right on! There are existing technological solutions to the human need for cheap energy. The problem is not technical, it is political.
Non-numerate politicians promote arrant stupidity like intermittent subsidized windmills or solar panels. Geeks throw around acronyms like “CS”, and wonder why they cannot get through to the 99% of the population who have never heard of Concentrating Solar, let alone CS. Nuclear fission in the only technology we have today capable of being scaled up sufficiently to replace a big part of the 90% of today’s power which comes from fossil fuels. With large scale nuclear (reusing nuclear “waste” as the valuable fuel it was before Jimmy Carter messed things up), we could manufacture hydrocarbon transportation fuels from inputs like coal, tar sands, and oil shales.
The big but — but this transformation to a post-fossil world is a task that will take decades of constant commitment to achieve. Even though we live in a world where politics trumps technology, and “A week in politics is a long time”, as a former British Prime Minister once said.
Pursuing nuclear power makes great sense in a world where fossil fuels are finite and the “Subsidy Sluts” of so-called renewable energy will never be able to stand on their own feet economically. But it would not guarantee independence. Robert Bryce wrote a so-so book on energy independence, “Gusher of Lies” (2008). He ends with a 5-page list of US imports of strategic commodities, ranked from highest percentage imports (Arsenic – 100%) to lowest (Copper – 43%). Oil is on the bottom of the 4th page, at 60%.
Iraq was a failed strategy for the same reason, with all due respect, Wretchard, your own prescription as I understand it is failed.
It failed to destroy the ten ships.
Kill about 40-50% of the military age men in Muslim countries (all the ones that are not DIRT poor and so isolated from the West) and you achieve victory. You would of course need to do the same to Muslim men of military age in other places as well. THAT is the only solution, proven throughout history, to work.
All attempts to reform Islam, like War, are doomed. It can never be changed. It can never move. Polygamy, tribalism, and so on make Islam set in amber. Unchanging. Powerful in its way. But also impossible to live around. Islam must always conquer, or fight within itself. So …
To have peace, the West generally will have to KILL about 40-50% of Muslim men of military age (14-45). The West may do so after the loss of many great cities (the most likely course) or might actually do so quickly, with less loss of life (very unlikely). The most likely course of events will be general slaughter of the great Western Cities and demands for submission. Most of the West will submit, because it wants to.
Most of the political leadership despises the West. A man like Holder, how can he love America? He is a Bahamanian elite, of the Black (and light skinned) aristocracy there, and has been fed hatred of America since birth. Moreover, America mewlingly courts non-Whites, such as Holder, with disgusting placating and supplicating measures, which only instill disgust in non-Whites for the very concept of America. Given the huge presence of non-Whites in the political leadership (along with gays, and women) and the mewling supplicating nature of the West … desperate for acceptance by the courted, is of course innately self-sabotaging.
Who could love a country or culture that fawningly begs your acceptance? The Nisei only volunteered in WWII, because it was that or be deemed the enemy, an eternal judgment. They had to PROVE they were worthy. And having done so, loved their prize, America.
My own view is that slowly, we are lurching to the charnel house. PC, Diversity, Multiculturalism makes the elite so weak, self-loathing, and filled with outright hatred for the West, its values, and culture, across the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond (to Japan even) that reasonable measures to make the killing swift and less bloody will not be taken.
Instead attack after attack will result in nuclear car bombs obliterating Western cities (perhaps not even NYC at first — Copenhagen or Geneva might be targets). Finally, in desperation, a Cromwell, or Napoleon, a truly terrible person, perhaps even a Stalin, will push away a decadent, and West-hating (Holder, Obama, Napolitano, Kagan — how could this crew love America being who and what they are?) leadership to simply kill half of Muslim men. In a general slaughterhouse, with the Wilderness and Cold Harbor visited not on isolated combatants but lots of kids and old people and women (who in general, are not the West’s enemies).
Old women don’t strap bombs onto their chests. Little girls don’t set off bombs in Times Square. Old men don’t hijack airplanes and fly them into skyscrapers. But in a struggle merely to preserve the few remaining Western cities, that is exactly the sort of folks who will also die, needlessly. Stupidly. Awfully.
And all because the West is structurally weak, from Affirmative Action, PC, and Multiculturalism, itself the measures of a West that does not believe itself worthy, and seeks affirmation by supplicatingly approaching those who are bound to hate it no matter what: Non-Whites (who have no real place in the West except as minor keys in the melody), gays, and empowered (feminist) women.
Take the same situation but a West that actually believed in itself, and after 9/11 we would have the Arabian peninsula invaded, the oil pumped dry as rapidly as possible, Pakistan pre-emptively nuked, along with much of Afghanistan (just as an example) and the overthrow of Saddam and the Mullahs, with oil there pumped out as payment for the US’s pain and suffering. The strong horse would have been shown, with Saddam, the Saudi Royal Family, the Mullahs, AQ leaders (including Osama and Zawahari) all made explicit examples. Instead we lurch to a charnel house horror of possibly, upwards of 400 million dead. Or more.
All because we as a civilization loathe ourselves.
Josh, No doubt numbers alone may not have been the cure for the Iraq insurgency, but in the account I read these 101st guys were pushed to the breaking point by a lack of manpower. I was under the impression that they were rotated from the field more frequently than we were in Viet Nam, but not so by this account and for this unit. They manned outposts on a very dangerous IED laced road with 3 or 4 troops per outpost. One of these was where the three GI’s were overrun and two kidnapped and found mutilated.Before they took over the AO, it was manned by a National Guard battalion that buttoned down at the FOB and avoided contact. After the 1/502 deployment, the 10th Mountain Division put two battalions in the AO, not one. Read the book if you get a chance. It’s very a sad and sobering look at what happens when brave men aren’t led and supported properly.
Long ago when the world was new, I found myself involved in some theoretical war games with some author friends and people from the Center for Naval Analysis. One of the subjects we were gaming involved a different history of the Pacific War as of Feb. 1, 1942. Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory for the Japanese, but a strategic defeat. Not just because they awoke the proverbial “sleeping giant” but because they hit the wrong targets. I had the role of Chief of Staff of Rengo Kantai [Combined Fleet] and we redressed the mistakes. We did well enough that I was told the game became one of what I assume are tens of thousands of scenarios that they have on file at the Naval War College to throw at people to test them. Another we did involved the Red Banner Northern Fleet. I was told by someone at CNA, that I had “the knack of being able to accurately put myself into the mindset of a foreign staff officer”.
Not to brag, but looking at it from another angle one of our previous comments hits it on the head:
#9 wws
“I know I’m not the first one to ask this; If you wanted to wreck America what (if anything) would you be doing different from Obama?”
I do not see this as flailing incompetence. I see, perhaps, a very different game than we are used to. Say that in WW-II in the Pacific, the Japanese had suborned as an agent a senior officer on the staff of the JCS. That agent, highly placed, argues and wins the argument that the Japanese thrust towards Midway and Hawaii was a diversion. Instead, he convinces everyone that the attack on US soil in the Aleutians was the main Japanese axis of attack, and the schwerpunkt was Dutch Harbor. And we deployed our forces accordingly.
Arguments, rational albeit very wrong ones, could be made for that case, including a very reasonable one of not yet trusting the then brand new ability of MAGIC to read IJN operational signals [previously we were only able to intermittently read their diplomatic code "Purple"]. And it could have lost us the war. The worst that would have happened to the agent would be that he would have been retired. Because the assumption would be that because he had risen to that high position, he was loyal but mistaken or incompetent.
This may be the first time in history that Kiska Island, Alaska has been compared to Kandahar, Afghanistan. But there may be some logical parallels.
Just to continue the discussion of the parallel between Al Quada and the Kido Butai‘s 10 ships; amateurs talk weapons and tactics. Professionals talk logistics. There are other ways than a metaphorical torpedo into the hull.
At #17 wws further lays out an plan for energy independence. I would very much agree that most alternative energy sources are wastes of time and resources, being economically and physically unfeasible. These two points do not register with the Left, because they are incapable of comprehending either real world economics or physics. Since neither accept wishful thinking as valid inputs, the Left cannot cope with them. However, for PEAK loads, there are relatively low tech/low expense uses of solar power that can be used. The barriers to that are not cost or technology, but rather regulation.
Our deserts are fairly perfect sites for solar generation of electricity. But the same Leftists who scream for alternate energy are the ones in court blocking ANY alternate energy project. In California, which is on the edge of brownouts constantly, a solar/electric generating project in the Mojave Desert was approved. However the project was made moot, because the evironmentalists who failed to block the project of building a large array of solar panels in the freaking desert far from anybody who could scream NIMBY; blocked the construction of the power lines to hook the power generation into the grid. Apparently they were worried about the habitat of the as-yet-to-be-discovered Mojave Desert Ghost Sand Snipe being disturbed. It worked.
There is no, repeat no, effort to generate power in this country that will not be opposed by the Democrats and those few farther on the Left and blocked in the permitting process. Until these people are neutered [careful choice of words, pun intended] we are not going to develop any alternate energies. They are the equivalent of a horde of the above mentioned JCS staff officers.
There are more cost effective ways of generating electricity from wind AND solar. I offer this:
http://www.sbp.de/en/html/solar/aufwindkraftwerk.html
which was successfully operated in Spain for 9 years, and I believe a larger one is under consideration in Australia. Simple technology: Greenhouses [big ones, but glass is cheap], chimneys, and turbines [just rotated 90 degrees from the normal orientation]. Does not need expensive solar cells. Does not do anything to harm migratory birds. Build them in the desert. Put solar mass [water in dark tanks] inside. It runs at full output during daylight hours, and for part of the night as the solar energy in the tanks continues to heat the air inside. Kind of matches peak load demand. That we could do quickly and have some real effect. All we have to do is lose the Democrats to do it.
As far as energy costs being too variable and sometimes too low to encourage the investment in domestic non-renewable resources long enough to change our energy use profile, if I was thinking nasty thoughts I would be pondering ways to a) restrict the supply just enough to keep the world price of oil to an average above $50 a barrel and below $100, and b) to simultaneously limit the oil export income of hostile states who support terrorists who attack us. I have some ideas, but then again I am not a nice person. I will leave the thought for others to flesh out.
Subotai Bahadur
whiske @ 37: Kill about 40-50% of the military age men in Muslim countries (all the ones that are not DIRT poor and so isolated from the West) and you achieve victory.
Nosir. You might achieve hudna, but hudna is not victory.
The Arab culture of desert scarcity counts on jihad to rid them of excess men, who in any case are not being allowed to reproduce and are not happy about it.
I suggest going after their key resources is a far better strategy, and you might have better effects with a 1% destruction of that than with a 50% destruction of their excess manpower.
This is a pretty different aesthetic of warfare, compared to the west.
The Arab/Islamic pattern is tribal. THEY know what counts. They see the West has made it a moral imperative to formalize war, from British Redcoats to American medals for heroic restraint, and they laugh. They are HUGE fools to laugh, but they do laugh. We wake up one day with a different mindset, and all of Islam is gone, poof, the evil jinn wipes them out to the last kitten. They are playing with fires they cannot even comprehend.
Punish the tribe for the sins of the individuals, tribe or nation, that’s what they are there for. Or you are just playing someone else’s game, with no way to win.
Whiskey (37): “…the mewling supplicating nature of the West…”
I like that word “mewling”, which means “to cry weakly or whimper”. The word is a very apt. I’m adding it to my vocabulary.
Leave it Col. Allen West to tell it like it is and have no apology:
He has my vote.
Papa Ray
dan @ 6 said:
“The ultimate reason for the incoherence is because the only appropriate remedy is the Roman solution: punish the population that hosts the threat to the extent that the population fears the reprisal more than it loves/fears the parasite. But we cannot do that. …. We cannot force the issue on the Arabian Peninsula without disrupting the world economy – and because the Fifth Column will go berserk even faster than the stock market and oil prices. Islam is not a viable target because it is effectively a non-target.”
Dan’s analysis is correct.
Whitehall @ 31 said:
“Oil is a fact of life and of physics. Right now, Saudi crude is the easiest and cheapest form of useful, industrial energy anywhere. Any governmentally pushed move to alternatives to oil, specifically for transportation fuels, would raise the cost to the US economy. There is just no cheaper substitute at this time. … Saudi Arabia has been using its windfall from the oil under its sands to spread their religion. The West did the same thing with our funding of Christian missionaries once. That religion intends to convert the world, including the US, to Islam. Hence, the Saudis are both our partner in the short run and our enemy in the longer run.”
Whitehall’s analysis is correct.
Our continued economic survival is currently dependent upon Persian Gulf crude oil (there is no substitute for it). Unfortunately a significant fraction of the money being spent on that oil is directed towards our destruction. A couple years ago there was much “happy talk” that deep sea crude oil would provide an alternative to Persian Gulf crude. However recent events off the coast of Louisiana have demonstrated the fallacy in that thinking. The benefit-divided-by-cost of these alternative petroleum sources is not there (Peak Oil is real!).
The Iraq War was the best we could do in terms of punishing Islamic Arabs for perpetrating 9/11. Unfortunately this was more like smacking a dog on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. A full blown response like invading Saudi Arabia and razing Mecca to the ground was never an option due to the economic consequences in disrupting our petroleum supply.
We have lost the initiative and are outside the OODA loop. Through incredible folly, Obama was elected President and the moonbats are in control (an unwanted side effect of the Iraq War).
Take a look at the EUR/USD exchange rates over the last two years and compare that to the DJIA. The sucker’s rally is almost over and the double dip is about to begin.
We need a Jefferson/Lincoln/Truman as President but instead we have Obama. The fraud in our economic system needs to be fully revealed and the moonbats swept from power. That is not going to happen soon. We probably will not hit bottom until after 2012.
#37. whiskey
I don’t think that we as a civilization loathe ourselves, it is the political class, and their groupies in academia, journalism, and government bureaucracy, that hates the average citizen and the values they have.
The political class doesn’t hate itself at all. They are like a bunch of preening ugly whores with delusions of grandeur and beauty.
They loathe the people that they claim to serve and are offended by the fact that the little grubby peasants can make life uncomfortable for them if their true attitudes come to light. That’s why so many of them are so fond and fawning towards dictatorships like Cuba. Its akin to traditional notions of penis envy.
The American “peasants” don’t hate themselves or their civilization. Look at the average person in our current military. Look at the average person in “flyover country.”
Its really all about the disconnect between the political class (and their groupies) and the average citizen. The political class hates the average citizen. The emerging dynamic is that, for the average citizen, the feeling is beginning to be mutual.
What are the Ten Ships this time around? Islam? Oil money? 10 million Islamnic young men anywhere in the world? How do you fight an ideology when the tools of war are DIY? Nazism was more easily defeated because it was powerless without the Wehrmacht. Even Communism is more easily defeated, because Communism needs a nation to implement its strategies, and that nation then becomes the target that must be destroyed. Radical Islam doesn’t need such a large and obvious carrier.
Ultimately all wars are about ideas and identities, but such ideas and identities are normally harmless until embodied in the power of a nation (such as the Japanese fleet). Islamic terror (well, all terror really) is different because it doesn’t present such a target. It’s like fighting the Smoke Monster.
There are several strong identities in the world today which resist Islamic identity. They are Chinese and Indian nationalism, Western Conservatism, Global Christianity, and Judaism. The last great identity, Western Leftism, poses no threat to Islam and is in a demographic death spiral anyway. We will only be safe from Islamic terror when the identity is destroyed, and no one in their right mind would want to associate with it.
That sort of talk doesn’t make for good political stump speeches though.
i also try to keep in mind that, unless we’re just out bombing shepherds, we have hit upon some method of collecting accurate enough intelligence to conduct drone strikes in indian country every few days. unfortunately it seems like too much of this info must be coming from ISI, but then again who knows? i recall Bob Woodward saying he’d heard what this new intelligence/interdiction method was but had been sworn to secrecy – “it’s as revolutionary as the invention of the tank!,” he squawked. i think marc reuel gerecht recently made the point, arguing against that dipshit paul pillar, that the best argument against evacuating “af-pak” is that without that “footprint” the intelligence would be even less reliable than it is at present. that just may be enough to justify the whole thing, given the circumstances. then again the whole thing could be a strategic deception operation. only thing i know for sure is the internet’s good for porno.
#45. Brock
You might want to look up the history of the Thugee cult in India and what the British did to destroy it. They did a very good job of destroying the “Smoke Monster.”
The saying is that the better the strategy the less the actual violence because only the relevant and critical objects are engaged. All the serious “what might have beens” of history revolve around the wrong choice of strategic objective. Italy and North Africa vs Cross Channel, area bombing vs oil targeting, chasing the Japanese battle fleet with subs versus the merchant shipping, Market Garden vs direct attack into Germany, etc. All these have been endlessly rehashed.
We know that much bad historical strategy arises from politics. That bad strategy goes on to ruin generations and leads to even greater historical catastrophes. But the historian has the comfort of knowing the past is past; and he views things through the detachment of growing distance.
Those who live in the present are in the sad situation of either making these errors or fixing them. They can’t be indifferent to these things in the way that historians can. That’s why it is so surprising to see so little attention paid to it. Why are we fighting in Afghanistan? Why in Iraq? Why in Yemen? What objectives does this vast intel system we are building intend to achieve? How does it contribute to sinking the ten ships? And BTW, what are the ten ships, notionally speaking?
Today, for all trillions of pixels spent on what used to be called the War on Terror, very little is said about what ought to be the key objectives of the fight. Instead we refine our methods, irrespective of possible strategic error, to which we pay little heed, as if refinement in the decimal points could somehow compensate for using the wrong formula. Maybe it would be useful to discuss which the key objectives are instead of greasing every Islamic chieftain in Southwest Asia. There is a great attachment to “Roman solutions”, but how about a return to the clear-sighted strategy of CINCPAC in 1941? The greater the strategic skill the less is the slaughter on both sides.
Oops. I forgot about politics.
Brock @ 45 said:
“There are several strong identities in the world today which resist Islamic identity. They are Chinese and Indian nationalism, Western Conservatism, Global Christianity, and Judaism. The last great identity, Western Leftism, poses no threat to Islam and is in a demographic death spiral anyway. We will only be safe from Islamic terror when the identity is destroyed, and no one in their right mind would want to associate with it. That sort of talk doesn’t make for good political stump speeches though.”
It will after 2012. WTSHTF it is probable that a handsome young man with a distinguished military record will be making highly effective speeches on this topic.
Heaven help me, I’ll probably vote for him while knowing he’s the devil.
39 Subotai Bahadur
Energy is not my area of specialty, but from what I understand, Petroleum accounts for 37.1% of our energy consumption, natural gas makes up 23.8%, coal 22.5%, renewable 7.3% and nuclear electric is 8.5%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
Of the 37.1% of our petroleum intake, 71% goes to transportation, and only 1% goes to electric power.
Correct me if I am wrong, but when we speak of solar panels or other renewable sources, are we not mainly talking about electricity production and not transportation? Until you can address transportation consumption, the impact on petroleum usage is still small. Thus, our appetite for oil along with the other industrial nations will keep demand high, and rogue countries wealthy.
There are several promising ways to address this – increasing our own production (and modernizing refining), switching more to natural gas, which we have a lot of, and the conversion of coal to synthetic fuels as the Air Force is doing: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004315533_coalpower30.html
As I said, this is not my area of expertise, so I wonder what folks think.
Maybe it would be useful to discuss which the key objectives are instead of greasing every Islamic chieftain in Southwest Asia. There is a great attachment to “Roman solutions”, but how about a return to the clear-sighted strategy of CINCPAC in 1941? The greater the strategic skill the less is the slaughter on both sides.
The objective is fairly clear–stop them from attacking us.
Once again, the British solutions may hold the key. I am reminded of the story about the traditions in India that when a man died his wife would be thrown alive on his funeral pyre to die with him. When a prominent man died and they were preparing to throw the wife into the fire a British officer intervened and told them to desist. He was told that this was their tradition, to which he responded that it was part of his tradition to hang any man who was responsible for burning a woman alive. The woman was not thrown onto the fire.
The leaders of most Muslim countries have pretty much absolute power within their realms. If you want to stop jihad the most elegant solution is to let the leaders know that letting people preach it or condone it within their jurisdictions will lead to very violent and very personal consequences to them. Qaddafi in Libya was very impressed by such an approach. And let it be known that we are only interested in results, not efforts or excuses.
It seems pretty clear to me that taking out the “Oil” would go a long way.
Its been talked up enough that there are a lot of people gunning for it. The Navy has its own project aimed at it.
All it takes is convincing the markets that future oil prices are going to be lower than today’s.
wretchard:
So, who do you think the Kido Butai of our time really is…?
Shiverme #50:
Exactly! The same point I made albeit in a rather more obtuse fashion than you.
With windmills and solar cells we are trying to fix what ain’t broke. We have no problem with producing electric power with coal and nukes and even natural gas. The windmills and solar cells will do nothing to reduce our use of petroleum. Even if we invented super dooper batteries that could run most cars and many airplanes we don’t have a problem with electricity.
T Boone is saying that we could use windmills for electric power and then use the natural gas to fuel vehicles instead of using oil. That works to some extent, especially for big trucks and local busses, but once again we really don’t have to use the natural gas for electric power anyway.
The drive for windmills and solar cells is being pushed because of Global Warming and the eco-nuts aversion to nukes. That, and simple marketing.
The success the Univ of Texas is having with making liquid fuel out of coal and similar successes by private firms using other feedstocks is the way to go at ending out oil problem.
I’m in the energy business so have some definite opinions and predictions based on both economics and physics.
The most pressing energy issue is transport fuel – gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel mostly. That’s is the prime used for petroleum – “rock oil.” It is critical for transport fuel due to its energy density, storagiblity, and ease of use – plus infrastructione.
We can indeed use coal to make liquid hydrocarbons. The downside is that we have to use a lot more coal to make the hydrogen part of hydrocarbons. Likewise, we can use natural gas to make liquids but the conversion efficiencies make it a push with just using natural gas directly, as compressed gas.
The best path, in my opinion, is use nuclear to make hydrogen the react the hydrogen with the carbon in coal to make liquid hydrocarbons. We could have a first commercial prototype in about 20 years (less if we got REALLY serious about it.) the basis would be the pebble bed reactor design which needs just a bit more development to adapt it to this application. Meltdown prof too!
All three methods can work but at some cost increment over current petroleum.
Henry Kissinger criticized Nixon/Carter’s US Synfuels Corp to do coal-to-liquids because he pointed out that the Saudis could bankrupt the project by increasing THEIR extraction rate and hence undercutting our big investments. Things are a bit different today but the basics still hold.
Likewise I’m somewhat sympathetic to locking up US petroleum reserves for now and draining the Middle East first. I think teddy Roosevelt would also see this as his vision of conservation.
Again, there is NO PLAUSIBLE SUBSTITUTE for the energy portfolio we have today (gas, oil, hydro, coal, and nuclear.) That is nothing but the PHYSICS of the matter.
RWE/54–exactly right, as described in “Power Hungry” by Robert Bryce. Both wind and solar fail completely on the 4 factors necessary for practical power–they’re well-described in the book.
Among other things, solar panels begin to fail rapidly if they get dirty and in the desert they collect lots of dust. Therefore, they have to be cleaned regularly, adding to their expense and using lots of water.
Wretchard:
A key question is: What are we up against? I refer you to Sam Huntington’s magnificent book, The Clash of Civilizations, because that is what I think this is. It is most certainly not a war between countries, or nationalisms. It is a cultural and religious war. Why else would people from Pakistan (a country the USA never attacked and provides aid to every year) try to set off car bombs in NYC?
So, how do you fight such a war? There are several examples from history, but clearly the most successful were the Romans and Mongols, who matched the enemy atrocity for atrocity and then some. Eventually, the need to maintain the world ecomony and US energy dependence will become irrelevant. Eventually, Iran or someone else will plant nuclear car bombs in Washington DC, or NY, or Houston, or Las Vegas, or all of the above.
And then, for the sake of survival, we will either submit to Islam or wage a war of extermination. I see no third path. What do you think?
TCobb@51,
What sort of consequences, within the realm of political reality? The Syrians and Iranians seem pretty confident we’re not going to invade them any time soon.
Could we just start nuking places? Sure, in theory, but I don’t see the American public going along with that. Remember the three conjectures?
i’m pretty much full of crap, but i’ll give it – critical objectives – a hip-shot.
i really do believe this is not simply a network of fanatics half-spun off the ISI/Chinese/USA/Saudi efforts of the 1980s and now funded by lordly oil barbarians from the UAE. for one thing i have a hard time believing there really is a Pakistani security so divided into distinct satrapies that the left hand shelters Osama/Omar while the right pursues US-Islamabad friendly objectives. that is absurd; Pakistan’s only coherent institution is the military. either Pakistan is at war with us or it isn’t. i happen to believe it isn’t, primarily because i don’t believe that some Pakistani clique woke up in 1998 or 1999 and thought to themselves “hey why don’t we just sucker punch the United States of America today? they’re pissed off about our A-bomb eh?” i do not believe they could possibly believe they could remain invulnerable to attack, or that they would be somehow politically protected. because that is the fundamental premise behind any version of the “ISI is attacking!” theme. i’m sorry, i just don’t buy that – and if it is the case, our cowards in the White House should have just f_cking unapologetically and without comment multiple-air-bursted Islamabad and explained themselves afterward. governments do their peoples a great disservice by failing to act in the heat of anger (see Archduke, Assassination of) since anger rationalized after the fact has so much explanatory power in a world full of assh_les.
now, you might raise the Indian Parliament suicide attack or the Mumbai attacks, not to mention the Kashmiri campaign. true. in my version of things, the first was obviously a deception operation, a provocation. 5 guys attacking New Delhi? I don’t even think they killed anyone. it was totally symbolic, half-assed, cartoonish – but it was what they could do in the interim maybe. who knows.
Mumbai is just a terror attack: it firms up the “ISI IS ATTACKING!” theme.
I personally think this is all bullshit for public consumption. Pakistan? Pakistan, the Military-with-a-feudal-state, is going to suddenly break down the political force-field protecting all people from aggression? Really? Why – because they thought they could get away with it? For how long? a year?
The whole concept that people would expose themselves to military attack because it leads to PROFIT are blithering subverted Marxist-Leninists, whether they know or believe or not. Speaking of which, who decided that people get to control how they are described? What a stupid conceit. Pakistan lives in abject fear of India rolling over it in a few months, but it would quasi-nuke the same United States of America that destroyed Saddam’s “fourth largest army in the world” in 130 days ten years previously? I understand a lot of people are committed to the idea that Pakistanis are racially stupid, and they may be, but they cannot be that stupid.
Maybe this is the answer to why we keep giving them a crapload of money and weapons and all this stuff: because they are not really at war with us, and they are not really behind al Qaeda. Yes they talk jihad, but guess what? Muslims who reach or are born into exalted positions have to talk about jihad, with robot reliability, because they rule illegitimately and brutally and badly over nations of minds governed by (1) ethnic and tribal hatreds, and (2) islam. and islam is jihad – islam is, in a sense, basically military discipline for the 8th century. considering the time-honored asiatic tradition of lying to the face of your interlocutor, i’m sure it works the other way: the rulers pretend to be holy, and then go back to drinking chivas regal and screwing teenage Russian blondes in the dar al Harb.
I really think this is Kremlin or Sino-Soviet Strategic Terror – or “International Terrorism 2.0″ if you like. JR Nyquist is good on this subject mainly because he’s the only person who really talks about it at all. But the concept is completely credible. You guys should read the books i mention occasionally – try Red Horizon, by Ion Mihai Pacepa. it’s not like i’m so smart or know something inside: if you read about defector testimony about the soviet use of terrorism and then the soviet use of islamic terrorism and keep in mind the fact that no one really thought the USSR was behind that terror, you might ask yourself – gee, how did they do that? Which is the beginning of wisdom. Islam is in its own way the most gullible and pathetic of “religions” – it’s all basically, “Allah says so.” if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
So the question is how do you attack an entrenched death star Russia whose spies are still being discovered in NATO and executing Polish governments “by accident” and so on PLUS the Chinese Communists whose Deng Xiao Ping strategy has caused a gigantic flow of capital into their country and OUT of the USA – which incidentally makes wealth distribution look, on a strategic scale, ultimately a lot more like a zero-sum game than not. How do you attack your enemy when you cannot yourself attack him?
And with that, I must go to dinner.
We are clever but clueless.
Waging this type war on any of “them” makes no sense,
M. Yon blog give perspective of attempt to connect afghan tribes into the matrix
technology and the amass of data, like a bog in the system.
I see a move to disconnect from the grid, decentralize, home grown,
Wonder Why has hizbolla has taken root?
a sense of powerlessness, taking charge of ones self,
Listen, listen a little,
Why are mexican cartels raging? Listen, you can here the cries from the graves.
we are all the same, one human race.
The saying is that the better the strategy the less the actual violence …
Very Sun-Tzu.
Of course the Obamanauts say it backwards, the less actual violence, the better the strategy. As-if.
But what *is* the less violence, an seven hour artillery barage wiping out 10,000 men, women, and children,* or a seven year war killing 100,000 jihadis? Note that the first incurs almost no casualties on our side, the later incurs likely hundreds. Not to mention the cash cost difference between the two strategies, the later is probably 1000x more expensive. Which is the moral choice, which the pragmatic choice?
*or a seven-second carpet bombing.
Great essay, Wretchard.
Allow me to re-phrase what I saw as one of your most powerful points: While the American military is both brave and extremely competent, the war between radical Islam and the West will indeed be won or lost in Washington DC. The courage, tenacity and sacrifice of our troops will be wasted if our political “leaders” lack the will and insight to name the enemy and to recognize its strategic center.
So, who do you think the Kido Butai of our time really is…? Alexis
I hope that you mean to ask what the Western “ten ships” are which if sunk, constitutes enemy victory. It is the mirror question and a very interesting one. The West may be discovering, like the British in 1941 Singapore, just how vulnerable their political system is. It is nowhere near the fortress it was assumed to be.
The structural weakness of the West is that it has striven for a near balance of political opinion, such that every major decision depends on a relatively swing margin. Relatively small amounts of money applied to advocacy groups, political candidates, academic institutions and the selective granting of access to the press can create the swing or at least induce paralysis. Thus, for say $20 billion a year in corruption money, the enemy can effectively paralyze, and in certain instances, actually install their own puppets within the bloodstream of the Western elitist system.
This has been made immeasurably easier by the fact that the radical left was inclined to do what the radical Islamists wished to do anyway. It was easy for radical Islam to enter into a tactical alliance with the “near enemy” of the Left, which happened to be the “far enemy” of radical Islam. Consider the PC ban on “radical Islam”. If you were asked to start a PR campaign to ingrain it, how much would you cost the campaign at? How much to ingrain it in academic teaching? How much to get it on the agenda of the UN? Or on the radar of the biggest ‘advocacy’ groups? Half a billion max. Some university chairs, a little campaign money for the right people, some placed articles, some money to “human rights” groups, some money to advocacy groups, etc over five years and you’ll have it.
The enemy knows what the West’s “ten ships” are and they are proceeding to sink them one by one. It’s not that they are stronger, but they are smarter. In the meantime, the Leaders of the Free World think that by deploying the bulk of their Armies to Southwest Asia and blasting bearded elder after bearded elder, rotten though these elders might actually be, that they are sinking something. And the press, as if almost to emphasize the nature of Western weakness, just regurgitates the talking points. Why? For the small potatoes rewards of invitations to cocktail parties, cheap book deals, talk show fees, access. I forget who said that the reason academic politics was so bitter was that so little, monetarily speaking, was at stake. Corruption in the Third World is so staggeringly huge that foreign despots cannot believe how little is required to buy influence in the West. All they needed was advice on how to package it so that it didn’t seem a bribe, or if a bribe, how to channel it. If they hired someone from the modern day Tammany Hall to advise them, they would get the right answers, and even a list of names.
But the unintended consequence of promoting this dysfunctional, PC elite to its level of manifest incompetence is what I’d call the Last King of Egypt problem. When Washington, Brussels and London are finally staffed by complete idiots they start generating a reaction from the Western grassroots. Once upon a time Egypt was ruled by a very “pro Western” monarch called Farouk. He was remarkable for embodying the complete reverse of the traditional virtues of the society from which he sprang. He never met a babe, bottle, or bauble he didn’t like. Eventually he became an alien object and overthrown: the result was Nasser.
The problem for the radical Islamists is that when they get their complaisant, PC-parroting politicians into every nook of power the next turn of the screw will bring a blowback. It always happens when you interpose alien rule over a society. Every intellectual in the West is familiar with the dangers of inflicting “pro Western” leaders on Muslim countries. Yet few of them will acknowledge that a symmetric danger attends putting a PC elite in Western national and multinational capitals. But this is mere vanity; the enlightened never think that what can happen to the darkies can happen to them. They are above it all. They’ll soon discover this isn’t true. And then as the British found in Singapore, the first step on the road to parity and then victory is not to imagine yourself as being different from your enemy. They aren’t “little men” to be routinely shoved off. They are smart. But they are also vulnerable and the laws of physics are impartial.
So back to your quesion, what are the “ten ships” of the enemy. Well one of the “ten ships” is the existence of a constituency for political correctness in the West. It is their vulnerability as well as the West’s. If the coming years did nothing more than discredit the dominant memes of Western Leftism, then even if not a single missile struck another van in Afghanistan it would be a tremendous strategic defeat for the enemy. As for the second, the current financial crisis is in part the consequence of the decay of Western politics. The resolution of this financial problem will have a far greater scrambling effect on the elites — and by extension the agents of influence of the enemy — than anything else. As the incentive to preserve the existing systems declines there will be a greater openness to examining things from first principles. The shibboleths will fall, at least to some extent. To return to the Kido Butai metaphor, one of the unforseen consequences of the attack was that it brought Nimitz to the head of the Pacific Fleet. The revolution in leadership which occurs in the wake of a real disaster is the most unforseen consequence of all.
And then, for the sake of survival, we will either submit to Islam or wage a war of extermination. I see no third path. What do you think?
I think there are many intermediate steps. Should we, say, have a nuke go off in New York, and decide to respond by wiping out half of Iran, well, that’s not nearly extermination, is it. And if it turns out they were not involved, oopsie, we wipe out half of Pakistan next, wipe out Riyadh, and occupy the oil territories, … we’re bound to hit the right target *eventually*! And it still doesn’t come close to extermination.
We (that’s the royal “we”, the West) might at some point want to extirpate Islam, but that would certainly require the cooperation of Russia and China, not to mention Britain and France. I mean, allow conversion, “allow” being rather the weak term for it. It’s just the karma that Islam has been inviting for a thousand years.
Of course this is gross cultural imperialism, but as the prophet Groucho said, “outside of the improvement, she’ll never notice the difference.”
Gordon #56:
Two friends of mine use solar power as their primary power source. One has a cabin so far back in the woods of Vermont that there is no other power source. But he also has a back-up propane-powered generator and back-up back-up gasoline powered generator and is not crazy enough to try to live there in the winter.
The other friend spent $50K to put solar cells on the roof of his house. He sells power back to the electric company during the day but runs on the grid at night. He basically pays nothing for electricity, but do the math and you will conclude that even if the solar cells last the guaranteed 20 years it’s not a good deal – and he still needs the power company just as badly as he did before. I think he was counting on Cap and Trade driving the cost of power way up and giving him better payback on the power he sells.
I have another friend that works as a meteorologist for a major wind turbine company, siting the windmills. I think he had a good idea, making some money before the truth about the scam comes out. I still would like to know what the plan is for restoring the system after a major tornado outbreak and have no doubt that we still would need as many regular power plants anyway.
Whitehall #55:
You are exactly right! I read a very encouraging report that the Univ of Texas had developed some new technology for converting coal to petroleum fuel at an equivalent cost of about $30 a barrel. And another report that a US company is able to produce aviation gasoline at about $4.00 a gallon (100LL is about $4.50 now) using plant feedstocks.
54. RWE
“The success the Univ of Texas is having with making liquid fuel out of coal and similar successes by private firms using other feedstocks is the way to go at ending out oil problem.”
True statement.
Here is only one of many links about one of the most promising new tech to help us get away from the world’s oil. From the biggest user of fuel in the world:
“Cost Competitive Algae Jet Fuel just months away.”
One other thing. Trucks and even cars fueled by various forms of natural gas are common in Texas. I even had a P/U for a couple of years long ago that ran on propane.
If an engine is designed for it, it does much better than just putting a “kit” on it.
—————
Sorry but I’m not sure if I left this link here, excuse me if it is a duplicate.
“Counterinsurgency – Can it be something other than population centric?”
—————-
BTW a sometime ago I wrote a long post on Afghanistan here with a lot of links. I searched for it but can’t find it. I did say that W could delete it if he thought it too long. Maybe he did or the gremlins got it because of the links.
I thought I could link to it rather than post it again. But since it is a small pamphlet, most likely nobody would read it anyway.
Papa Ray
Big persistent trade deficits go hand hand in hand with big persistent budget deficits.
Becoming energy independent is not just a national security issue. Its also a monetary issue.
T Boone Pickens advocates converting all american trucks and busses to natural gas.
India first did this some time ago. Shifting American trucks and busses to natural gas would collapse US demand for foreign oil. The effect of this would be amazing. 1.)US government coffers increase.2)The price of oil would decrease 3.) The US balance of trade would decrease. 4.) the value of the dollar in foreign banks would increase–thereby enriching countries worldwide with dollar denominated assets. 5.)Cheaper gas would mean that Americans and people the world over — would receive a huge tax cut that would go straight to their productivity.
Basically the worldwide economy would be reset for future growth.
#58 Brock
What sort of consequences, within the realm of political reality? The Syrians and Iranians seem pretty confident we’re not going to invade them any time soon.
Perhaps I didn’t make my point clear. The retribution would only be toward the actual leaders, and it should be on the order of “so and so was assassinated today by a person or persons unknown.” Let their heirs, and everyone else, speculate as to whether we had a hand in it. Hell, they would blame us whether we did or not.
Fred Kleindenst @ 14
I would state this a little differently: “They are not our so-called allies. They are a rogue regime.”
The Saudi royal family would be nothing without its oil money. It has used that money to export Wahhabi Islam and its poisonous ideology all over the world. It is not our friend.
Unfortunately it has bought off a substantial portion of our government, including the Bushes, the Clintons, large portions of the State Department and large portions of the CIA. There will be no action against it.
Wretchard @ 63: “The enemy knows what the West’s “ten ships” are and they are proceeding to sink them one by one.”
Maybe. Or maybe the enemy is just standing back and letting the West scuttle its own fleet. An F-22 here, a Trident nuclear deterrent there. Pretty soon the West will be dependent entirely on the good graces of enemy.
Is it possible that the problem is the enemy has no center of gravity? What if the enemy is truly distributed? Not 10 ships in the Pacific, but 10,000 ships in every ocean of the world, some of them even tied up in the Thames and the Potomac. No need for communication between those 10,000 ships. The distributed enemy can rely on the the West to tell them what is going on, and the West is telling the enemy: Time is on Your Side.
If you were the strategist for the enemy (however defined), Wretchard, what would your advice to your own side be?
Is it possible that the enemy’s best strategy is simply to keep moving assets into the West, and otherwise hang back until the West destroys itself. The enemy strategist’s bigger concern might be what steps to take now to be ready to deal with China, India, Russia in the aftermath of the West’s inevitable collapse.
#50 shivermetimbers
Correct me if I am wrong, but when we speak of solar panels or other renewable sources, are we not mainly talking about electricity production and not transportation? Until you can address transportation consumption, the impact on petroleum usage is still small. Thus, our appetite for oil along with the other industrial nations will keep demand high, and rogue countries wealthy.
No argument from me. I said that I was agreeing with wws’s program:
I would very much agree that most alternative energy sources are wastes of time and resources, being economically and physically unfeasible.
My exception was a specialized use, taking advantage of all that nice empty desert with all of that wonderful solar flux, using low tech solar that does NOT require any fancy solar cells. It turns a simple turbine which generates electricity that can help with urban peak loads a lot more cheaply and easily than building conventional power plants and a lot faster than the nuclear plants we should have been building all along; with no ongoing fuel costs. And I noted that the problem is regulatory.
Right now, California uses primarily natural gas to generate electricity. The brownouts of a few years back were primarily due to a shortage of natural gas and a refusal to allow the market to pay the premium necessary to search for more.
Any use of this type of solar would primarily be a substitute for natural gas which would free up that much more for use. Natural gas, coal, and our own oil are going to be needed for feed stocks as transport fuel, and the petrochemical industry.
One problem is that we need a stable market price for oil, at a high enough level to spur the coal liquifaction and plant feedstock fuels development for a long enough period for it to achieve economic critical mass; yet at a low enough level to not crash the economy.
But absolutely: develop our own oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear resources; with the goal of being able to tell OPEC and especially their Arab overlords about the virtues of impacts on small grains of silicate. And to return them to their previous occupation of breeding camels. We will not be able to replace all imports, but we can reduce the demand to the point where we become either a valued customer who they do not want to lose rather than a hostage to be abused; or we become someone they really don’t want to irritate because it would not hurt us a bit if they were knocked back a couple of centuries … or millenia.
Drill Here, Drill Now. Mine Here, Mine Now. And a whole lot of CONTROLLED fission Here, and Now. And if any of TWANLOC’s allies overseas set off uncontrolled fission here, then by tomorrow at the latest they should find out what uncontrolled fission is like, up close and personal. None of these is the policy of any part of either the US government, or of our political class. Which is why we are in the hole and still digging.
Oh, just to throw this thought out before I have to go do people and see some things, if anyone here is familiar with the electrical infrastructure in the West; does anyone know where Metro Los Angeles gets its electrical supply, broken down by source?
Subotai Bahadur
mariner @ 69
I think we agree, but I didn’t get my point across very well. One of the “Ten Ships” is our willingness to let our enemies hide inside/behind protected institutions — in this case the Saudi Gov’t.
I thought GW Bush doctrine was on the right track:
On November 21, 2001, for example, Bush declared:
We fight the terrorists and we fight all of those who give them aid. America has a message for the nations of the world: If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you’re a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200608310005
Has the US followed through with this enough? A few of us would argue no, no we have not. Obama’s drone strikes are a move in this direction, but we won’t know if this and other actions are mere Doolittle raids or Midway engagements until history renders its verdict.
Who funds the madrassas? The Wahabis. And where are the Wahabis? They are not based in Afghanistan. There is an almost a willful desire not to recognize the problem, as if denial would make tasks too politically distasteful to be contemplated unnecessary. The problem is avoided at all cost. And yet it is not avoided, because the war goes on and will spread in time past Times Square.
Time magazine opened a window on the Saudi Wahabi-madrassas link in the week following the attack of 9/11/01. Since then I don’t recall reading or hearing much about it in the mainstream news.
Similarly, the fact that Iran aids and abets ongoing attacks against us seems to go under the ‘old news is no news’ rubric.
This week the AP reports that Iran is easing detention of al Qaeda operatives in country, and that “terrorists may actually be working for Iran…” Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer and a senior fellow at Center for Security Policy, says with admirable understatement that it’s not a good sign.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jZ-5-3Ifvv72jUDj3i7adCd8XAYgD9FLQ9EG0
Now that they’ve got that bit out of the way, the relationship can be safely ignored and no longer reported–at least until something bad happens, at which point everyone and his brother will be demanding to know: Why weren’t we told? Why didn’t somebody connect the dots? Why didn’t somebody do something?
Kinuachdrach @ 70
If you were the strategist for the enemy (however defined), Wretchard, what would your advice to your own side be?
Is it possible that the enemy’s best strategy is simply to keep moving assets into the West, and otherwise hang back until the West destroys itself.
A: As you suggest, move assets into areas that the West is unwilling to attack. However, despite some of our missteps, the West isn’t likely to “destroy itself”. The US has survived Nixonian Price Controls, Carter-munism economic and foreign policies, and other notable huge mistakes.
This can allow the enemy to survive, but can it accomplish its goals?
I suppose I must be the incredible cynic, but I just can’t get myself motivated to think about the Islamic war. That’s incredible to say, given the fact that, one, I’ve been waging it on our behalf since 9/11 and, two, I happened to marry into a Muslim family beforehand. So much of my life has been consumed by the conflict since that fateful day.
My gut suspicion tells me that the Islamic problem is a sideshow; we’re up against far worse. So I’ve had to force myself to concentrate on the Islamic problem ever since October, 2008. This has been increasingly hard to do.
If the things I’m concerned about materialize, the jihadist war would become a luxury, both for them and for us.
And that’s a strange realization to come to: war, as a luxury good, for even the morons in a cave.
Kinuachdrach : ” Is it possible the enemy has no center of gravity?
The center of gravity of those funding and spreading Jihad is Oil. Take away their oil and I mean take it now ( along with their military capabilities) and the Gulf States and Iran go back to being eighth century backwaters who will be far easier to control.
No Oil. No funding. and then No terrorist camps. No Madrassas. No Western World Mosques spreading Jihad.
And a diminished AQ, Hamas and Hizbullah.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law) says “Sayre’s Law states, in a formulation quoted by Charles Philip Issawi: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.” By way of corollary, it adds: “That is why academic politics are so bitter.” Sayre’s law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905-1972), U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University.”
#50 shivermetimbers Correct me if I am wrong, but when we speak of solar panels or other renewable sources, are we not mainly talking about electricity production and not transportation? Until you can address transportation consumption, the impact on petroleum usage is still small. Thus, our appetite for oil along with the other industrial nations will keep demand high, and rogue countries wealthy.
Different forms of energy are somewhat interchangeable, fungible, if any one were really cheap, we could switch to it 90% without huge effort. Remember that maybe 1/4 of our petroleum is domestic production and relatively cheap, compared to domestic and expensive, or foreign at any price. And the long term answer (100+ years) is either fusion, or space-based solar (fusion, but done at the sun!). These are the widest parameters of the problem.
Wretchard,
I know this is not the point of your post, but in my (limited) knowledge
of the war in the Pacific, I thought Admiral King had planned to take
“Tulagi and adjacent positions” (i.e., Guadalcanal in the SW Pacific)
since early in 1942…something like March or April. This was to be done
after securing the supply lines to Australia. Coral Sea was a result of this policy. Midway was a lucky break (codebreaking). Can one really say
that the USN was hunting down IJN carriers as the major strategy?
On the other hand, the IJN was most certainly hunting for Enterprise,
Hornet, etc. from 12/7/41.
#71. Subotai Bahadur
One problem is that we need a stable market price for oil, at a high enough level to spur the coal liquifaction and plant feedstock fuels development for a long enough period for it to achieve economic critical mass; yet at a low enough level to not crash the economy.
Yes. The major problem is that outside forces can (and have) dropped the price of oil to send shocks through domestic energy production efforts. I am normally against such things, but I think that we should impose a time period where there should be a tariff on imported oil to the extent that the price per barrel should never dip below a certain price. If the going rate is higher, no tariff. If its under that price the tariff will be exactly that needed to bring it to that price.
In the meantime, during this period, we should exempt any new energy sources and their investors from having to pay any taxes on the income they produce whether it be from new oil wells, nuclear, solar, or whatever. And any regulatory agencies shall have no more than 30 days to decide whether what someone proposes to do is in violation of the byzantine maze of federal regulations, and any private party that files lawsuits to stop or hinder such activities must post assets sufficient to pay the costs of the delay should they lose the suit.
I think we’d be self-sufficient in energy within ten years.
This seems like so much bullshit, and a distraction to the topic. Gasoline is the most efficient form for delivering stored energy to the consumer. Period. In the foreseeable future, only natural gas challenges that, and it will take a lot of investment and time to ramp up a distribution system competitive with gasoline, and that has to be in place before you see a serious move in consumption patterns. For massive distributed energy networks, nothing beats nukes.
Yes, we could be in a lot better shape regarding energy than we are now. That we’re not now in better shape, and that we will be in the same exact shape one year from now, and two years from now, and three years from now, is this: the Democrat Party.
Nothing will change until the chokehold on sanity the Democrats insist upon breaks down. Until that time we will continue not to have “Energy Bills” passed every year, but rather “Anti-Energy Bills.”
Their policies simply serve them today, despite the longer term peril it spells for our country. They don’t give a rat’s.
It’s that simple.
Re: outside forces. Only if you’re referring to market forces – competition. No Dr. Evil to be seen (even with OPEC’s self-interest dialed high).
Remember that any energy source that wants to displace an incumbent has to start out matching or bettering the current marginal cost of production (given markets that work). Remember that marginal costs are what the price of the last empty seat on an airplane is priced at just before the plane leaves. For energy today this is $2 a barrel of oil and less than a penny a kilowatt-hour for electricity. These are the lowest prices that generate a return. And if they ever get squeezed by an alternative, they will sell for a loss until they go out of business. Oil will never be cheaper than the day it has serious competition (see buggywhips). Ditto Coal and NG.
Means we should be serious about nuclear, and be willing to bear loss-of-life costs similar to what we bear for traditional sources, perhaps including some of these wars. Want to see innovation? Write a law that grants an exemption from all regulation and lawsuits for powerplants where the owners and operators (and leading shareholders) live or work in the immediate neighborhood of the facilities. Provide military escorts for convoys of waste to some desolate area. Encourage nuclear furnace innovations where residual waste is harmless in 300 years (breeders, thorium fuel cycle). etc.
There was a day when France (EDF) was building powerplants for little more than twice the cost of the turbines (similar to hydropower). Now it costs 20-40x. Mostly due to a regulatory regime where there’s no reward for saying “Yes,” and the fact one of the byproducts of this industry was nuclear weapons (that need not be so, but that’s the history of the fuel cycle we chose, and had to choose given our adversaries’ choices. Plutonium on-hand was one of that era’s 10 ships).
Good news is China doesn’t have our sensibilities. They may just embarrass us into giving up our horse & buggy. Granted, just because China is willing to create an opportunity for $200M neutron burners doesn’t mean we won’t leave the regulations & taxes & litigation in place that causes us to spend 10-40x when we import one.
Michael Yon reports the US embassy in Thailand has closed. Once more America is being caught flatfooted and navel gazing while others move their fleets. In this case the fleet is the Red Shirts.
Fantastic essay and riveting comments. We’re approaching the point where necessity – brought about by hard times – will allow us to again do sensible things.
One issue highlighted here is energy. In some respects, North America – and the USA – are amazingly well-endowed with energy resources: coal, natural gas, oil (notwithstanding this embarrassing event off Louisiana, for which BP should be skinned), and nuclear resources and know-how. We just have to put them to use. And there are high-tech ways to make our electrical grid far more energy-efficient (a vast amount of energy is lost in transmission). Wind, solar, etc. are no more than very localized resources with at best minimal impact on the nation.
In fact, looking at the projections that we’re going to have 10%+ unemployment forever, one has to see that one of the USA’s major competitive advantages is in fact its energy endowment. Putting that into production and distributing it would provide jobs for great numbers of people. Using it in ways that are strongly benefitted by cheap energy (steel, anyone? Aluminum? Other heavy manufacturing?) could take away most or all the advantage the Chinese and others have stemming from cheap labor in those industries.
Further, it would put a torpedo in the SS Wahhabi: every barrel of their oil displaced by our own resources lowers the price they can charge others for their product. (One wonders, too, what modern seismic exploration in Iraq, Iran and area would turn up. So far they’ve only produced what our oil patch people call “sheepherder anticlines” – things that most of us could recognize as potential oil traps.) Peak oil is a ways down the path.
But it requires that our rabid environmentalists and socialist unionists be put out to pasture. The first milestone on this worthwhile path is to expose “catastrophic man made global warming” for the false, trendy and ultimately deadly fetish that it actually is, so that we can get on with creating wealth – wealth defined in the terms of Adam Smith. We can harvest our energy resources without destroying the planet. James Cameron can go to hell!
77. jWarrior
I always enjoyed the study of history but didn’t take it up professionally because in my 20′s I read that law. It made perfect sense to me too at the time. Still does.
“Its really all about the disconnect between the political class (and their groupies) and the average citizen. The political class hates the average citizen. The emerging dynamic is that, for the average citizen, the feeling is beginning to be mutual.”
Exactly. There probably aren’t 50 of the 435 plus 9 plus 1 (Obastard) whose hand I’d even give the slightest consideration to shaking. I despise most of them with a passion and would pay a large sum to have the opportunity to sit in judgment of people like Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Leahy, Waters, Rangel, Stark, Grayson, Whitehouse, Boxer and Feinstein. I’d like to see all of them tried for treason, fairly convicted, and shot. I’d consider myself privileged to be on the firing squad carrying out the sentence. They all deeply deserve that and worse.
Non are so blind as those, who refuse to see.
With Obama it is all about forced or censored perception. He is not that into reality.
Three more years of this and we may be living in a world of chaos.
Hell no, LOTM. We were not caught unawares regarding Thailand. The brewing storm was covered all over the place, including such obvious sources as the Drudgereport. Granted, MSNBC might not have been covering it. It seems they’ve been busy trying to pin the April 20, 2010 British Petroleum explosion on Dick Cheney because of his Halliburton connections.
Hell, just the other day on a liberal website an eruption happened where they compared the “loving” Buddhist Thais to the “hateful” Islamic Malays. I weighed in saying, “do you stupid pukes know the first thing about what you’re talking about?” Yes, apparently they did, on account of backpacking thru Asia on account of the Grand Tour every kid has coming to him now after college. Nice, nice Buddhists! There’s some advance peopleage there!
Meanwhile, if you’ve got 2cents in your head and you know a damn thing about Southeast Asia, you’d have been worried about Thailand’s stability for quite a while.
If Foggy Bottom missed it, I’d say that’s par for the course. They’re naval gazers these days, absorbed in the psychological tensions undergirding our own policies (i.e. bullshit) instead of considering the ground truth in the field.
Tcobb @ 80: Agree with you 100%
And if I blame Dubya for anything, it’s that he did not initiate exactly those kinds of programs in 2002, 2003, or 2004.
Alongside Peak Oil we’re looking straight at Peak Government and Peeking Obama.
—–
Fusion power as currently researched is a pipe dream. Too much energy release in the form of ultra-fast neutrons. That’s a TERRIBLE trait that no amount of engineering can wrap itself around.
Solar energy is very practical as a power source when it is intermediated by falling rain and snow. The Peruvian Andes has enough untapped hydro-potential to make fusion schemes moot, forever.
Carbon dioxide levels in the air are TOO LOW for optimal plant growth. Without massive injections of carbon dioxide algae conversion to diesel fuel can’t work: carbon starvation!
Peak Wahhabism is right around the corner because the magic kingdom subsidizes all manner of domestic population growth with energy exports destined to tapper off, come what may.
This math is already well underway in Mexico; which is staring straight at plunging oil exports for the very same reasons.
Because OPEC production levels are linked to claimed reserves — no one should trust ANY OPEC player to have correct figures.
The Japanese missed a number of changes to exploit there temporary qualitative and quantitative superiority. The first was after Pearl Harbor. They could have taken an outer island and developed it as a base to operate against Oahu. That would have forced a fleet action around Hawaii in mid-1942 as the USN tried to relieve Oahu. But they were distracted and let the opportunity lapse. The USN did not.
What Nimitz and Spruance were looking for was an opportunity to meet a divided Japanese fleet with the whole of the USN. They found their chance at Midway. Yamamoto divided his fleet. It was just a sliver of a window and the great ones grasped the opportunity with both hands. Instead of the Japanese eventually taking Hawaii and forcing a campaign based on the West Coast, Nimitz and Spruance by their audacity nearly evened the score on that glorious 4th of June.
Nagumo and Ozawa, no shrinking violets themselves, lost their nerve on several occasions in this tremendous, high stakes game of poker. That Nimitz and Spruance could carry off what was the greatest single military gamble in the US history means they deserve a place in the pantheon of immortal admirals, never to be dimmed. But Midway was not the end. The qualitative superiority of the Japanese carrier forces continued to calculus of hide and seek into the Solomons, where the US would only risk combat on superior terms. Only in late 1943 was it widely realized that USN could go looking for the Kido Butai because of the effects of the pilot training, Essex and Hellcat revolutions. From that point on until 1944 it was the Japanese which would hide.
But from the outset King and his subordinates understood what the game was all about. They knew how to keep score. They knew what was important: the enemy fleet, the enemy fleet, the enemy fleet. Marshall and King understood exactly where the enemy centers of gravity were. It will be interesting to see how future historians will regard the current national leadership. My prediction, in case any future historians read this post after my demise, is that the current leadership will not fare well in the judgment of posterity. They were full of soundbites and bereft of common sense.
62/sf: “the war between radical Islam and the West will indeed be won or lost in Washington DC.”
I’ve said for some time that we’re currently fighting two wars: a War Against the West, and a War Within the West. We cannot prevail in the former unless we win the latter.
Wretchard (91): “They were full of soundbites and bereft of common sense.”
Gosh, I can see this being written as the epitaph on the grave of Western Civilization. Wretchard, you have a marvelous knack for turning out a pithy phrase that packs a wallop.
#71 Subotai Bahadur: Hear Hear! One wrinkle I would add is that the reaction the enemy should see up close and personal should not be entirely based on uncontrolled fission.
I would vote for uncontrolled fusion as a response. Big, nasty, dirty and ugly – 1.5MT groundburst at the position 21:29 N, 39:45 E would be about right. For added effect, clad the device in cobalt and wait until the wind is WSW.
81. Cowboy
This seems like so much bullshit, and a distraction to the topic. Gasoline is the most efficient form for delivering stored energy to the consumer. Period. In the foreseeable future, only natural gas challenges that, and it will take a lot of investment and time to ramp up a distribution system competitive with gasoline, and that has to be in place before you see a serious move in consumption patterns.
……..
It would be simple to implement. You just start with natural gas stations on the interstates. You wouldn’t need new stations. Just an extra pump. Trucks and busses can converted over to natural gas for +-1000.
The whole thing could be done in a crunch in 3 years. Say the whole thing was grossly obese expensive. Fat Tuesday for all kinds of bad actors and it cost 100 billion to accomplish in three years.
So what?
The USA is shipping +-400 billion dollars annually overseas to pay for foreign oil.
The effort pays for itself instantly.
It is extremely nauseating to watch Eric Holder squirm and wheedle when ask about Radical Islam. This empty suit of a man then compounds the error by stating he was looking for “root causes” which drive sploders to explode.
Fourteen days, a wealth of information and the full might of the FBI, CIA, and Homeland security have only brought three accomplices of Faisal Shahzad into custody. One can only shake one’s head at Eric Holder’s idiotic statements. Either Eric Holder is a blithering Idiot or he is trying to cover for his boss who clearly is aligned with radical and/or Muslim thinking.
The problem is not only Radical Islam but also a corrupt Administration that is bent on entrenching and enriching itself.
Charles @ 95 re fueling vehicles with gas: “It would be simple to implement. You just start with natural gas stations on the interstates. You wouldn’t need new stations. Just an extra pump.”
Charles, adoption of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) as a vehicle fuel is feasible, but there is no point in pretending that it would be easy. The record of places like New Zealand and Italy which have used CNG is that they migrate off of it to gasoline as soon as they can afford it, even though CNG is cheaper.
Simple to implement? How many filling stations on interstates are currently tied into large capacity gas trunk lines? Since the typical range of a gasoline vehicle converted to CNG is about 100 miles, this is not an academic question. How long does it take to fill the high pressure tank on a CNG vehicle? How happy would you be taking your chances at the filling station next to that ditzy blonde with a cell phone in one hand and an extremely high pressure gas line in her other hand?
The issue that most enthusiasts forget about when it comes to energy is – Scale! The scale of our energy demand is huge. The time to make significant switches in energy sources is measured in decades, once the technology is available. When the technology is not already available (such as with fusion or orbiting solar cells transmitting power to Earth through some undefined mechanism), then the time scale will be much longer than decades, possibly even infinite.
With the technology we have today, the only large-scale alternative to depleting fossil fuels is good old-fashioned nuclear fission. Lots & lots of it. And the clock on those decades has already been ticking for years.
“It would be simple to implement. You just start with natural gas stations on the interstates. You wouldn’t need new stations. Just an extra pump. Trucks and busses can converted over to natural gas for +-1000.”
You need to get your thinking up on a “Kit” conversion. It currently is over $1500.00, mainly because of the updated regulations for the tank.
Kits are OK, they work, but engines designed from scratch for LPG have more power and generally are better. BI-fuel engines are a different story, in that they can use gasoline when LPG is not available. This is what I owned back in the late eighties.
LPG fueling stations at existing truck stops are becoming more common place in Texas. LPG is not some kind of new technology even if there have been numerous improvements in the last few years, it is an old tech, proven fuel alternative.
Government regulations have become more stringent in the design and placement of LPG fuel tanks. Which industry experts say is good but that the danger of LPG accidents is and has been always less than fire or explosions from gasoline tanks.
America has an almost unlimited supply of natural gas. In fact it is not even a consideration when experts talk about running out of energy sources in America. We vent off enough on wells in Texas to run thousands of cars per month.
T-Bone knows what he is talking about. His big effort for wind was killed when the U.S. decided that China was going to make all of the wind turbines, and that pissed him off big time. His second roadblock was in the land rights, construction and other legal considerations for the massive electrical infrastructure needed to transport the power from these “farms” to the national power grid.
The Eco-Terrorists just have too much power and money.
If there is a big push to make LPG the primary power source for transportation fleets including long haul trucking and such, you can be sure that the ECO-Terrorists will try to find someway to block it and/or the government will tax it to death. Even if it is a much cleaner energy source than gasoline.
“Sometimes it seems you can’t win for losing”, or so the song goes…
Papa Ray
Regarding the red shirts in Thailand – I think everyone watching realizes this thing is getting ready to break out into wholesale slaughter, maybe 1965 Indonesia. 22 dead is just the start, but the red shirts are forgetting that the Thai military always has the Tianenmen option, and may use it if pushed enough.
The dissident general Seh Dang was clearly taken out by a military sniper, and the fact that it was done *while* he was giving an interview to a reporter meant that this was meant to be a clear message that the old rules were no longer going to be followed. It would be logical in a campaign like this to first dedicate some time to wiping out the leadership of the rebellion, which is how the Iranians neutralized the so-called green revolution. That may be enough, and no reason to use more force than is necessary. But if that is *not* enough – never forget that the ultimate option is always a massacre, followed by massacres of any who gather to protest, followed by assassination of any who dare to write criticisms. Sadly, that almost always works – look at Burma, or China, or any other repressive government in the world today. All it requires is the will on the part of the military to do it.
The only real question that matters – is the military united, or is the military split? Unless a significant portion of the military joins the rebel cause, the rebels will ultimately be slaughtered. And perhaps that explains why it was so important to assassinate Gen. Seh Dang.
97. Kinuachdrach
“Since the typical range of a gasoline vehicle converted to CNG is about 100 miles, this is not an academic question. How long does it take to fill the high pressure tank on a CNG vehicle? How happy would you be taking your chances at the filling station next to that ditzy blonde with a cell phone in one hand and an extremely high pressure gas line in her other hand?”
I have to call BS on this. Over twenty years ago I could drive about 250 miles on my tank in my pickup, and it wasn’t a really high pressure tank like they have today.
It took me a little longer to fill up back then but nowadays it is not a consideration. And as far as ditzy blondes, the hook up and fueling procedures are not over their heads then or now, but they are a lot safer now, since you mention it.
You need to get out more.
Papa Ray
Depends on who the historians are as Obama and company are not fighting the same war as we are. Their enemy is not ours. Their objectives need to be cloaked and so their actions are being judged based on the achievement of results they are not attempting to achieve and so appear as failure.
Nice piece Wretchard! Haven’t read the comments and look forward to that. You are absolutely correct about the “Sunni” center of gravity in the KSA. The “Shia” center of gravity is the Khomeinists in Iran.
Salaam eleikum Y’all!
“The “Shia” center of gravity is the Khomeinists in Iran”
Yep, and it is spreading…
Papa Ray
“The War on Terror, if one may use the term, will be won or lost in Washington DC.”
The surge forces are still arriving, withdraw will begin sometime in 2011, The summer season has not yet begun. For all the failure to read the bill, or name that enemy, I think the actions US forces in Af-pakistan are engaging in will ultimately overthrow the influence of the madrasa. By turning a country that had large ties to the KSA during the cold war over to the loving hands of Pakistan and KSA post Russian occupation, the US hoped to allow the Islamic republic that is supposed to be Pakistan to partner with the KSA in building of a nation in Afghanistan. Thus the export of the Madrasa by Wahabbi dominated Arab religions and the creation and support of the Taliban by Pakistan began in the wake of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. The mistake the Taliban made was to allow the supplicant Al Queda to set up in Afghanistan. With the NW Provinces becoming radicalized the ISI lost competent controlling authority over the Taliban. The Radical’s threat to the government of Pakistan was witnessed in the Red Mosque and punctuated by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. No one outside of the Border region of Afpakistan wants the Taliban. No one in Pakistan no one in Afghanistan no one anywhere.
Our ability to moderate the Wahabbi effort is directly linked to out success against their radical offspring as well as the radical offspring of the IIRG. Both Hamas and the Taliban are the failed attempt of Wahhabi philosophy in action, just as of Hezbollah is the tested and defeated but not yet beat down and shamed offspring of Iranian (and Syrian) adventurism. Al Queda is a fly in the Radical Islamic ointment. We are slowly winning in Af-Pakistan. We are loosing in Lebanon, and we are trying desperately to save defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.
The failure of the Attorney General of the United States to recognize the enemy may be explained as being due to a blind eye developed dealing as council to the one eyed Shiek. That does not excuse it.
Nor does excusing the PLO for their failure to actually lead the Palestinians to some productive level of existence mitigate their circumstance. The enabling support of Arab regimes from Iran’s IRG to Saddam’s monetary reward for suicide and KSA’s hammas have all shown that the radical path is the quickest path to death and dishonor. But the spin in the news tells every story line but.
Papa Ray at 100 rather churlishly wrote: “I have to call BS on this. … You need to get out more.”
Mr. Ray, with all due respect, you should get your facts straight before you start insulting other people.
From your comment at 98, it looks like you failed to distinguish between the low pressure Liquified Propane (or Petroleum) Gas (LPG) that you used years ago and the very high pressure Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) — mainly methane — that Charles suggested as a vehicle fuel at 95.
LPG and CNG are different fuels, with completely different physical characteristics. Both are viable transportation fuels, by the way, and have been used as such. The economic difference is that the available supply of propane & similar hydrocarbons for LPG is only a very small fraction of the supply of methane for CNG. There is approximately zero chance of ever fueling most vehicles in the US using LPG.
You see, Mr. Ray, it is possible to point out that someone is wrong without being crude & insulting. That’s the kind of civilized discourse which is the mark of the Belmont Club.
104. w,
Exellent assessment. After less than 10 years DC/Pentagon have developed tactics that are gaining results. And… it will take more time, two to three generations. We (the West) must understand the long view/Long War.
Recently it was reported a new military medal for “Couragious Restraint” is being considered. It reflects the tactics now in practice. It also reflects the morals the US Military wants to present. It also requires brave camerapeople to record battles and showing the enemy human shield tactic of firing from behind “innocent women and children”. I hesitate putting the term “innocent women and children” in quotes because I can not determine if they are willing or unwilling accomplices. This is what makes assymetric warfare so difficult. Troops today have to behave like cops instead of soldiers. As I have said for over a decade, US Army and USMC are now “Armed Peace Corps”.
Totally agree about the counterproductive MSM spin.
Papa Ray,
Aint that some sh!t? Especially after that Iranian sub sunk Hugo’s gas platform! Heh heh.
Salaam eleikum Y’all!
I certainly apologize if your feelings were hurt. It was not meant to hurt just clarify what I feel is a common misconception about using compressed gas (of any form) for or in internal combustion engines.
It appears I failed and I’m sorry to have upset you. Maybe I’m crude and rude but you will just have to get used to it.
Yes, I know of the differences in gases. I lived right in the middle of one of the largest oil and gas areas in the U.S. for almost fifty years.
And even with the refinery costs of separating gases propane and other LPG combinations are economical and plentiful for massive (nationwide) use in vehicles.
CNG (methane) would and does work well, I don’t know about the experiences in europe but I know that that is not a yardstick I would call either dependable or needed.
Sorry but we will have to agree to disagree.
“There is approximately zero chance of ever fueling most vehicles in the US using LPG.”
Again, an untrue and very ignorant statement. (sorry if that offends you)
Papa Ray
re. 17. wws:
All this is well known for decades, but powers to be dance around so stubbornly that one is left with impression that their goal is NOT country’s energy independence.
http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/scan/MARCHETTI-015.pdf
O’take me to George, O’narcissist.
O’s “war crimes”.
“In some respects this is worse than Bush,”.
“*This is his [O's] sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.”
…-
“US actors, intellectuals protest Obama ‘crimes’
NEW YORK — US actors and liberal intellectuals joined a list to be published Friday of nearly 2,000 people accusing President Barack Obama of allowing human rights violations and war crimes.
“Crimes are crimes, no matter who does them,” the statement reads over pictures of Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush due to appear in the New York Review of Books.
The statement, published as a paid advertisement, accuses Obama, who was elected in 2008 with the enthusiastic support of US liberals, of continuing Bush’s controversial approach to human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in domestic security.
It takes aim especially at Obama’s decision — reported by US officials — to authorize the killing of a radical Islamic cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who is accused of ties to Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
“In some respects this is worse than Bush,” the statement says. “First, because Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of ‘terrorism,’ merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly.”
Among the signatories are linguist Noam Chomsky, “L.A. Confidential” actor James Cromwell, actor Mark Ruffalo and prominent Bush-era anti-war protestor Cindy Sheehan.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jrOdTcMOyNk3WdFPdJVcjtAX_UTg
*O’narcissist:
http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014005.html
You just start with natural gas stations on the interstates. You wouldn’t need new stations. Just an extra pump.
Without getting involved in the argument over the physical feasibility of using different compressed gases as vehicle fuel [I am sure it can be done, I am not sure of the economics compared to coal liquifaction, non-alcohol plant based (algae) fuels, etc.] I would like to note one of the huge problems with the conversion of existing gas stations to a compressed gas fuel.
The installation of the tank and special pump is going to involve a whole bunch of digging around the current tanks. That will quite possibly involve the discovery of leaks in the old tanks. The EPA is death on leaking underground fuel tanks. It doesn’t matter who caused the leak, the current owner is liable for the full costs of an EPA certified clean up, right now, if the land is to be used for anything ever again. Most gas stations in this country have changed hands at least once, and the risk of an old leak being found is a legacy matter that could easily turn into a huge cost, shutting down the station for good and making it a money pit for the owner forever.
In my small town, there was a small, privately owned, gas station sitting on a prime commercial corner. The owner sold it to someone else when he retired. When they were tearing down the old station to build some other building, they found that a tank that dated back to WW-II had leaked. The new owner was well and truly scrod. They pulled all the tanks out, but the clean up effort for what has leaked would cost an order of magnitude over what the property is worth. Absolutely nothing can be done with the land without the clean up, and it would involve tunnelling under [and closing for a while] a US highway, a neighboring Safeway, other businesses, and possibly our Middle School and school district admin building.
The lot has been empty for well over a decade. I believe the owner left for parts unknown quite a while ago. If you were a risk analyst for either a gas station chain or even a private owner, when there is a significant possibility of an immediate total financial catastrophe balanced against the possibility of some additional future profits years from now if your choice of gas [LPG or CNG] catches on, what would you advise? Any profits will come after years of carrying the conversion and inventory costs as a loss, with the very real possibility of being beaten by the choice of either the “wrong” gas or new synthetic gasolines.
I suspect that is one of the major barriers in converting to one infrastructure or the other. If coal liquifaction and/or algae based fuel wins economically; it means either no conversion at all if it is compatible with current refined fuels; or if it is not, at most swapping out what one tank and pump handles without digging things out. No real major investment. Thus, retrofitting of the existing infrastructure is going to go slowly and be biased towards liquid fuels. NEW construction stations may make the choice to take the risk, but how many new gas stations are built in a year and how many years before it is possible to travel across the country on one of the non-liquid fuels or the other? Especially since the government is at war with any energy producing company in this country?
I think it would take a major reining in of the EPA’s powers, and a bunch of other regulatory agencies’ powers, before any such conversion makes economic sense for private companies. Of course, if the State takes over the energy industry [I can hear the drooling from DC now], they can do as they please regardless of economic or physical reality.
At any level, on almost any domestic subject that the Federal government has involved itself it, our prosperity and probably even our survival is going to depend on neutering the Federal government in most of what it does. It may have to involve certain tight bands or their equivalent on our political class of both parties.
Subotai Bahadur
Papa Ray @ 107 wrote about the infeasibility of fueling the US vehicle fleet with propane (LPG): “an untrue and very ignorant statement.”
Mr. Ray, there is some value in this discussion, because your offhand dismissal of reality illustrates a key challenge in moving past fossil fuels — the inability of many human minds to comprehend the scale of the challenge.
LPG is of course a fossil fuel, just like gasoline. It is derived in part from imports, just like gasoline. According to the government’s Energy Information Agency, the US uses about 150 Million gasoline-equivalent gallons of propane annually for vehicle fuel. On the other hand, the US uses approximately 140,000 Million gallons of actual gasoline annually.
So LPG’s 150 Million gasoline-equivalent gallons (a pretty large number) represents only about one thousandth of the gasoline volume that would need to be replaced. One thousandth!
The situation with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is somewhat more favorable. If we replaced all gasoline in the US with CNG, we would approximately double US natural gas demand. Double! That is a huge number of gas wells to drill and pipelines to construct, or a huge volume of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to import. But then, avoiding imports was the main objective.
The scale of human energy demand is staggering, almost incomprehensible. As a purely technical matter, replacing oil can be done — and will need to be done, since fossil fuels are finite. But it is not going to be a trivial matter. And it certainly is not going to be done with LPG.
It may not be necessary to replace gasoline with natural gas. It may be overblown hype but new methods are being developed to turn natural gas into gasoline at a price that would make it competitive. From the article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21261/
“”We’re able to produce a barrel of gasoline for much cheaper than Fischer-Tropsch can,” says Kenneth Hall, coinventor of the process and former head of Texas A&M University’s department of chemical engineering. Hall says that a Fischer-Tropsch plant is lucky to produce a barrel of gasoline for $35 but that a much smaller Synfuels refinery could produce the same barrel for $25. Under current fuel prices, such a plant could pay for itself in as little as four years, the company says.”
If this is feasible and practical we need not change the fuel distribution networks nor would we need the expensive tanks needed to contain it, we’ll just keep on using gasoline.
sb@110
This nation will never be truly free until the Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act are repealed.
By any means necessary.
“The installation of the tank and special pump is going to involve a whole bunch of digging around the current tanks. That will quite possibly involve the discovery of leaks in the old tanks. The EPA is death on leaking underground fuel tanks. It doesn’t matter who caused the leak, the current owner is liable for the full costs of an EPA certified clean up, right now, if the land is to be used for anything ever again. Most gas stations in this country have changed hands at least once, and the risk of an old leak being found is a legacy matter that could easily turn into a huge cost, shutting down the station for good and making it a money pit for the owner forever.”
This is no longer a problem in Texas. Several years ago it was mandated that tanks older than so and so, or that didn’t meet such and such had to be replaced.
That has been done.
But in fact, most LPG and such is not buried down here, it is in above ground tanks (super duper pressurized and high tech containers) all done with proper grounding and other safely stuff. I pass them by all the time.
But your right some states would not want them above ground but below, so as to make more shrapnel when they do blow up. /sarc
Other states may have problems as you say but not around here.
“If coal liquifaction and/or algae based fuel wins economically; If coal liquifaction and/or algae based fuel wins economically;…”
I don’t think it is a contest of “who wins”. I believe it will ultimately (if the government doesn’t interfere) be a combination of several fuels. But it should be noted that the plants for coal liquefaction are mighty expensive and not entirely proven on a scale such as a new refinery so unless they can get big bucks they will never get it off the ground. I did hear that they got the approval and go ahead on a plant in West Texas. I imagine it will be years before it is operational.
Algae? Well if we are to believe it, the U.S. Air Force has that process ready for prime time. I will believe it when I see actual large scale algae farms all over and many others getting on board.
TCobb A lot of amazing things have come out of A&M, so they could be speaking the truth. But like all things, turning it into a commercially viable venture requires tons of money and with things like they are now and will be for the foreseeable future, the Saudis and other filty rich would be the only ones who could/would risk it.
I think your right that gasoline is going to be king (with diesel running a close second) for many years, and solar and wind sucking hind tit.
Coal is the King of electricity and that is a good thing as the U.S. has a more than ample supply of it for the next few centuries.
Yes, it is unfortunate and puts our Republic at risk that our nation has not had a viable, realistic energy policy for years, if ever for reasons well known.
“Mr. Ray, there is some value in this discussion, because your offhand dismissal of reality illustrates a key challenge in moving past fossil fuels — the inability of many human minds to comprehend the scale of the challenge.”
The Eco-terrorists have been and are winning, witness the above statement which should prove that he doesn’t comprehend the scale that petroleum/gasoline plays in the world today. Nothing including gas or any combination of others can replace petroleum for transportation uses. And won’t be able to for many, many years.
“That is a huge number of gas wells to drill and pipelines to construct, or a huge volume of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to import.
Yes we do need more refinerys for LNG or any other gas to become a primary fuel supply. But as far as the gas wells, we have been capping them because we can’t sell it. Plus we have gas wells now that are under restrictive use for the same reason. As far as drilling, the guys in West Texas can bring a gas well in in just a few months or even faster if they just uncap one that has been idled.
Supply of natural gas is not a problem for the U.S. not even counting the fields that have been already proven for gas and not opened up.
As far as electricity coal is king and will be until the eco-terrorists will allow dozens of large scale nuclear plants. Now this is one area that the world has outpaced America in, all because of fearful liberals.
Papa Ray
Gentlemen, if I might interject a little of my meager knowledge into the discussion. I did a study for NASA last year that has some bearing on this subject. You are all correct to some degree.
Liquefied Petroleum Gas requires oil to produce it. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is simply a highly compressed natural gas and hence is more applicable. It appears that if we are going to use our vast and increasing domestic supplies of natural gas, CNG is best option of the two for vehicles.
The tanks used for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) are larger and heavier than those used for gasoline and much, much, more expensive. One that holds an equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline one weighs 100 lb empty is 4 ft long and and will cost you well over $1000. Try to use the same space in the car as you do for a gasoline tank and you will have a rather short range. The reason pickups are so popular for conversion is that you need the space in the bed to haul enough fuel. This is one reason why CNG power for busses and trucks is more popular than for cars; they have the room for the tanks.
The pump that is required is not just a filling pump but a high pressure compressor that can take the low pressure of a gas line and convert it to 3600 PSI. The nice thing about this is that you can have a CNG fueling station in your home using just your natural gas supply line. The bad thing about is that you cannot be assured of having such a station handy.
.
Compressed Natural Gas is already much cheaper than gasoline or diesel, by at least $2.00 a gallon or so, especially in certain Western states. It is a much safer fuel than gasoline in most respects – unless the storage tank has not been properly maintained or has been damaged. If it has been damaged, please phone me and let me know what happens; I will be in the next county.
GM bought back all of its CNG converted S-10 pickups in the early 90’s after two of them blew up during fueling. Better materials for the tanks, such as carbon fiber instead of glass, helps this problem but does not eliminate it. A CNG powered van blew up in Pasadena, CA last year for reasons that are still unclear.
RWE @ 115 — Thanks for sharing. I too was involved some time ago in a study on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) as a vehicle fuel. For Mr. Ray’s benefit, CNG is methane rather than propane.
Part of the study identified that the ideal global solution would be to adopt CNG not in the West, (where there are already huge investments in gasoline vehicles and distribution) but in high population, industrializing, oil-exporting countries (where vehicle penetration was then much less than in the West). Oil-exporting countries would be able to continue exporting more oil, by virtue of using associated gas as their transportation fuel internally. Oil-importing countries would benefit from supporting Natural Gas Vehicle manufacturing in oil exporting countries, since this would lower the global demand (and price) for the oil they would still need.
The concept seemed great. Then we realized we had just identified Iran as the ideal partner.
Johns Hopkins University did some great work a few years back on dedicated CNG vehicles. By designing a high compression engine to suit the properties of CNG and by integrating the pressure tanks in the the vehicle frame, they were able to build a CNG vehicle with 300+ miles range and space for 4 adults & their luggage. But the vehicle would be useless without a pre-existing network of CNG stations. That old Chicken & Egg problem.
My guess is that it will make more sense to use nuclear power as an energy source to manufacture liquid hydrocarbon fuels from a variety of feedstocks (eg coal, shale) and maintain the West’s existing investment in vehicles and liquid fuel distribution. But any way we cut it, moving beyond oil is going to be a huge task — one which will take decades of concentrated consistent effort. It can be done. It is just not easy.
@ Cowboy (88): “They’re naval gazers these days…”
“Naval gazers”–that could have been the title to Wretchard’s post
115. RWE
“Liquefied Petroleum Gas requires oil to produce it. Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) is simply a highly compressed natural gas and hence is more applicable. It appears that if we are going to use our vast and increasing domestic supplies of natural gas, CNG is best option of the two for vehicles.
Well, don’t tell the state of Texas that, or at least in that way because they have invested (and other organizations and counties) millions in Propane (LPG) and offer incentives and grants and such for anybody with over 200 vehicles (fleet). Dallas and Houston have huge fleets of propane buses. The city vehicles are also propane and the availabilty of propane highway and other construction equip keeps going up every year.
Propane is more easily adapted to most vehicles also without sacrificing most of the range of the vehicle. As a liquid, propane is 270 times more compact than it is as a gas. It also extends vehicle engine service life and extends maintenance intervals. The availability of refueling stations in Texas is no problem, even twenty years ago and I’m positive that the number of places to refuel has at least doubled since then. I believe California has hundreds of stations that carry propane which by the way is like earlier stated is a by-product of natural gas and crude oil refining. It is no big deal to increase the supply of it.
I just don’t see why you would think CNG is the better route. Liquefied Petroleum (propane) seems better to me and has been in use for a long, long time in vehicles and definitely the government powers in Texas are pushing it hard.
I say let cheaper natural gas displace coal for electricity, which accounts for about half of all power generated in the U.S. I’m pretty sure we could build at least two plants for the price of just one of the “clean coal” plants. But Obama and his crowd won’t let us build anything unless it fits their idea of green.
Propane’s infrastructure is already established, it can continue to help carry the load until other alternatives are more developed.
Papa Ray
To Mr. Fernandez. You not only knocked the ball out of the park; you hit a grand slam.
Holder’s basic problem is that he’s scared to death of his boss and the religion behind him.
LPG is a LOT easier to work with…
BUT CNG is a LOT more available.
BTW, Natural gas has significant ethylene, ethane, and LPG components. So much so that they are — incredibly — gluts on the market.
Most butane and propane are accidental products from gasoline refining….
NOT withstanding that many wells spout tremendous amounts of ethylene.
BTW, the plastics industry was built upon the Texas Railroad Commission’s insistence that Nat Gas no longer be flared.
The amount of Nat Gas flared in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and KSA would make you flinch…
Just saying…
The need for nuclear reactors in that part of the world…
Forget about it!
If Islam is one of the ten ships then the next century will be a world-wide version of Thirty Year’s War. Goodnight.
“Holder’s basic problem is that he’s scared to death of his boss and the religion behind him.”
Holder’s basic problem is that he WORSHIPS his boss and the religion behind him.
96. ledger
Either Eric Holder is a blithering Idiot or he is trying to cover for his boss who clearly is aligned with radical and/or Muslim thinking.
Either is certainly possible, but I think the second is the most likely explanation.
CNG is a red herring for the retail markets UNLESS you have dedicated and trained technician/fuel jockies. The chances for explosions and fire is exponentially larger when CNG is used by the general public (they are completely ignorant of how to do it safely).
LPG is a by product of natural gas and it is a by product of the oil pumping process. A natural gas explosion is what caused the BP disaster. Did you know they use EFP to pierce the well pipe and begin the oil extraction process? Basically they blow a hole with C-4 in it. That takes some guts to do especially when you have no idea what the concentration of dissolved Oxygen is available at that depth…
Now, LPG is a best case scenario and it is for some reason always left out of the equation. It can be distilled from the liquids column of oil, processed out from the methane mix or even made synthetically by methane reformation. LPG allows the engine manufacturer to make a more efficient engine that will last basically forever as there is no fuel dilution of lubricating oil and no carbon build up.
I have had a 1982 Ford F-150 since it was purchased new from the dealer in Orlando. It has never had gasoline run in it. The engine (a 300 ci straight six) has never been rebuilt in over 300,000 miles. Inside the heads look brand new and the valve train is amazingly clean. Now mine may be an exception but I don’t believe so. I get almost 600 miles from my sixty gallon tank. I would get better mileage but have not had the compression ratio of he engine altered. At 13.5 to 1 ratio the math says my mileage should be somewhere around 16 miles per gallon. Which is more than a fifty percent improvement.
When using LPG the “octane rating” is over 104 so engines can be made with much higher compression ratios allowing for higher engine temps which will enable complete conversion of the fuel to it’s base components of H2O and CO2. That is right, no CO or NO are formed so no expensive converters in the exhaust system and no need for fancy fuel injection systems and complex computer controls all of which add significantly to the cost of a transport unit. LPG is stored as a liquid but burned as a gas so there is no issue with droplet formation in the air/fuel mix and no wetting of the cylinder surface during operation. The downside is the storage vessels have to be checked annually and re-certified every five years after the manufacturer’s initial 12 year limit is reached. And they tend to be bulky and hard to incorporate into gasoline designed cars and trucks. The testing requirements for CNG vessels are INSANE and expensive. Farmers have been using LPG since the early forties to offset the unavailability of gasoline and diesel due to the war.
The transfer of LPG is significantly safer and can be done with minimal training of the retail customer. LPG does not require underground tanks and actually is safer when built above ground. And if LPG tanks do happen to leak the gas is not held to be a EPA regulated pollutant (at this time…).
So, YES WE CAN. But we won’t until the people demand it. Just that simple.
On energy, I am of the ‘let 1000 flowers bloom’ strategy. Most of what it will take to make that happen is regulatory, maybe with a little tax incentives. No so much a subsidy as a reduce the tax claim on the proceeds to help more projects clear the investment hurdles. Let long term energy investments use 5 year accelerated depreciation (or better, an immediate expense for tax purposes) and a whole lot of technologies make a lot of sense fast.
Papa Ray is right that propane is a current technology that we could benefit by expanding, especially in energy producing parts of the country where it is plentiful. Kinuachdrach is right that propane is a small enough piece of the puzzle that it will not be the dominant replacement of gasoline/diesel. My view is that we don’t actually need another fuel as dominant as gasoline/diesel.
I think the key will be allowing the energy markets to fragment a little. Liquids used to provide almost 20% of US electricity production (mostly in the northeast). That has been reduced to ~1% by price competition from coal and gas. Largely because of energy density, liquids are most valuable as production feedstock (plastics) or transportation fuels. I don’t think see anything replacing hydrocarbon liquids for long haul transportation any time soon. If you are driving across the country, even in 20 or 30 years, you will likely have a gasoline or diesel internal combustion engine. But what we can do is chip away at its use for all transportation. In TX, where propane is a byproduct of oil refining and gas drilling, it is cheap, plentiful and available, propane may be part of the answer. For fleets with specific service areas (ie FedEx, postal, utility fleets, buses etc) CNG can be another part of the answer. I believe battery stored electric power will make sense for personal commuting vehicles shortly. Trains are probably going to remain diesel fueled until small scale (1MW) nukes are practical. I don’t think hydrogen, the fools errand of the last decade, will ever be a significant player…it is a way of storing energy, and not a particularly good way of doing it because containment is so hard. There is also the promise of generating liquid hydrocarbons, whether by cellulosic ethanol, or algae, or various nuke fueled processes or coal to liquids, or even waste to energy. I am waiting for Changing World Technologies to get its thermal depolymerization process to work on pig crap.
I don’t think any of there are likely to replace the dominance of drilled liquid hydrocarbons. But if a few of them can each take 1 or 5% of the market…it will make a big difference. Probably the only one that can be much bigger than 5% is batteries, but that is really an amalgamation of a bunch of different technologies.
Right now, we use liquids for almost all transportation. Largely because it is so efficient and relatively cheap. There will be no replacement for parts of it, but if we can chip away at its dominance, and marginally reduce its consumption, that will have significant effects on pricing and the influence of ill foreign powers. Once they see the writing on the wall of oil demand being gradually reduced, there will be a race by them to get it out of the ground before it becomes worthless. The stone age didn’t end for lack of stones. One of the most intriguing, possibly revolutionary (and possibly useless) technologies is polywell fusion.
OPEC has historically used pricing to kill competing technology in its cradle. I think it would make sense to have a sliding tariff on imported oil (except canada and mexico, where most of our supplies come from). Something like zero above $60, and then $0.50 of every dollar below that. So if oil tanks to $30, there will be a $15 tariff/barrel…keeping the price at $45. That should provide enough cushion to allow competing technologies to survive a low price oil shock.
Just came here, late in the conversation, but I’ll offer thought.
I agree that the US govt’s will to win, and ability to recognize the enemy are crucial, and in doubt. But even if that were to happen, there would still be the questions of means and ends.
About 5 years ago I tried to define where is the center of gravity with regard to the Iraq and Afghan wars. My conclusion was that it was in 3 places: the EU, Russia and China.
Align them and the local troublemakers like Iran, Syria (Iran’s puppet) and Saudi would fall in line. Fail to align them and the US, alone, could not restrain those parties and could at best buy a little time (the proverbial decent interval) before leaving and ultimately losing.
This doesn’t quite account for Paskistan, and by strategic extension, India, tho I was very heartened by Bush’s efforts to forge stronger ties to India.
But on the whole, to the extent anyone in Washington, Bushie or Obamanaut, ever saw it the way, they never made any discernable effort to achieve this grand strategic alignment. The efforts have been disjointed, with discussions of Iranian or NoKo nukes or Afghan force commitments and logistics arrangements and Iraq nation-building, each in its own silo… it seems to me.
Whether such a grand strategy was/is possible, I don’t know. But I was and am pretty sure that without it, or something along those lines, we are in the end just going to leave with our tail between our legs.
A caution regarding propane—if there’s a leak, it’s heavier than air and will settle near the ground and even go underground through drains and sewer vents.
I used to work at a bus operator that had been a very large operator of propane buses in the 1940s-50s. The old-timers remembered when a whole maintenance garage exploded from the drains up, due to a propane leak and then a spark.
This will even be relevant if a vehicle has a leaking fuel system; if there’s not a strong breeze, the gas just collects under and around the vehicle, awaiting ignition. An din teh family garage??? Don’t want to think about that.
Intrinsically, this is much more dangerous than a gas that rises away from danger, and great precautions have to be taken. Propane is great as a power source for an IC engine, but a huge hazard if it leaks into the environmant.
Some here are promoting a need for oil at around $50/bbl. Why not work toward $2/bbl? Energy independence should include the mandate of US becoming The Cheapest Source Of Energy on the planet. Re-industrialization happens faster where energy is cheapest. Survival is about – new – non-gov’t – jobs, not 35MPG CAFE standards.
I haven’t seen a comparison of the unburdened KWH cost of nuclear power production vs. other sources (both using the latest technology), wherein the bureaucratic obstruction, enviromentalist lawsuits and NIMBY issues are nulled. Nor the discount when 200 plants are ordered every year over 10 years, from a couple of competing US suppliers. Or, when hundreds of job-starved communities are bidding for me-first delivery positions, every year. Anyone got any idea what the best case looks like?
We must create “big idea” projects with the potential to employ millions of US workers to the direct benefit of the US economy, or there’s no way we’ll climb outta this hole. And of course meantime, agressively drill and mine.
#122 tehag
If Islam is one of the ten ships then the next century will be a world-wide version of Thirty Year’s War. Goodnight.
If you want to continue to use the Rengo Kantai/Kido Butai metaphor; Islam would be roughly equivalent to the Imperial General Headquarters [Daihon'ei] trying to ride herd on the Army and Navy General Staffs who had very different [and both unrealistic] concepts of the world and how to deal with it. Hmm!, Sunni and Shia?
Decapitating that would render the “10 ships” useless because first, lack of coordination [picture a chicken with the head cut off] and second, eventual lack of support [said chicken after it's body realizes that it has no central nerve inpulses and is exsanguinated]. And if Ernest “Jesus” King could have done that to Japan, he would have. We can against our enemy now, but lack the will.
As far as the Thirty Years War, we have been at this a lot longer than that. The farthest Muslim penetration into Europe was at Tours [draw a 120 mile arc in France centered at the Normandy Beachhead, and another centered at Paris. where they cross is roughly Tours in the Loire valley, and is north of Switzerland, Munich in Germany, and all of the Iberian Peninsula. Charles Martel stopped them there in the year 732. Keep this firmly in mind. Islam invaded deep into Europe in the 700's. The First Crusade, which the Democrats and those few further Left would have us believe was an unprovoked Western barbarian attack on peaceful Islamic philosopher-kings who were the source of all knowledge in the world [which as someone of Chinese descent I take issue with, because up until the early 1500's China had the West beaten scientifically; just was not able to exploit it (no concept of limited liability corporations)] started in 1095-96 after three and a half centuries of invasions, occupations, attacks, raids, and threats by Muslims against Europe. Spain was held by the Muslims until 1492. In 1571 the Battle of Lepanto was an equivalent to the Battle of the Coral Sea [to continue our metaphor], in that European Christians destroyed a huge Muslim Fleet that was the vanguard of another invasion of Europe. They ended up ceding Cyprus to Islam and suffering constant naval raids against Greece and Italy; but they stopped the invasion. In 1683 the city of Vienna, Austria in the center of Europe was surrounded and besieged by between 150-300,000 Muslim troops, and was relieved by a Polish and German army … on 9/11/1683. Note that the last was generations after the founding of the first viable colony in what became America. That counts as entering modern times.
Our current clash with the Ummah can be said to have begun with the plane hijackings by the Palestinians in September of 1970, or possibly with the first attack on the WTC. It depends where you want to draw the line. But the line has to be drawn, and we are well over a decade at least into the modern phase of the Long War. And we will be for generations, unless we gather up the will to deal with it terminally by marginalizing the forces of Islam either economically and politically, or permanently. Even if we submit, we will be dealing with it [See the Three Conjectures]. There is no “Kumbaya” Option.
Subotai Bahadur
126. Daedalus Mugged – sorry but you forgot to credit the huge expansion of nuclear power in the ’70s with the reduction in petroleum dependence in electric generation.
LPG is a byproduct of oil and gas production, called “natural gas liquids.” Its portion of total energy yield is only a few percent at best.
We should mention one downside to CNG – price volatility. Over the last few years it has swung from $3 to $15 and back to $3 a million BTU at the Henry Hub. Makes gasoline prices at the pump seem tame.
I do love its high octane rating though. However, NOX production increases at higher compression ratios meaning the EPA will reduce any efficiency gains from boosting compression.
One of the big political cop-outs as been an energy policy of “All of the Above.” Get real! We have limited investment capital and it is foolish to waste money on unproductive, impractical dead-ends like wind and solar.
SB is entirely correct that the Crusades were a defensive war. See this for example: http://article.nationalreview.com/313252/crusade-propaganda/thomas-f-madden.
Madden also wrote a book on the subject which I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Concise-History-Crusades-Critical-Issues/dp/0742538230/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274037954&sr=8-5. It was Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame who did the most to paint the Crusades as religious imperialism.
I date the start of the current Long War of Islam against the West to the Iranians taking US hostages in 1979. But western leadership since then, including one Ronald Reagan, has declined to get serious about it, thinking instead that we can deal with Islamic ‘moderates’, if only we could find some.
It -is- gonna be us or them, and the longer we wait, the more people will die. These guys have no idea how violent America will be once it gets really mad.
130. Subotai Bahadur
There is one American politician who definitely gets it: Col. Allen West. This clip is a few months old but I only saw it a few days ago. It needs to go viral.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkGQmCZjJ0k&feature=player_embedded
Whitehall @ 131: “One of the big political cop-outs as been an energy policy of “All of the Above.” Get real! We have limited investment capital and it is foolish to waste money on unproductive, impractical dead-ends like wind and solar.”
Right on! There is an analogy here to government debt. If a government subsidizes the construction of a canal or railroad, at the end of the day, there is a canal or railroad which generates additional tax revenue and pays back the government. That subsidy is an investment. On the other hand, if a government subsidizes a long-term welfare case, there is no return. The money is just gone — an expense, not an investment.
Arguably, governments may have a role subsidizing energy research or providing start-up markets (e.g. goverments buying CNG busses); those could be justified as investments. But governments should never subsidize the operations of alternate energy sources. Unfortunately, with wind, solar, ethanol, governments are subsidizing the operations, both directly and through mandates. Big mistake.
The Number 1 energy supply need is for government to roll back excessive regulations, and create a more level playing field on which all energy sources can compete.
10. Lifeofthemind
Hart was merely a restatement of Sun Tzu. i.e. war is based on deception. And a few other Sun Tzu points.
And the indirect approach? Sun Tzu: where you are strong appear weak, where you are weak appear strong.
The whole emphasis of Hart was to avoid another WW1 type slaughter. i.e. direct attack on strongly defended positions.
Some things like opium growing and Heroin production need to be stopped.
Yes. Of course. We have been working on stopping it for 96 years so far and real soon now we will have success.
Or we can do the Conservative thing and return to the situation that obtained before the Progressives tried to “improve” the situation with their anti-drug laws.
It is always amusing to see “Conservatives” spouting the rhetoric of Progressives. Funny thing is that Progressives see the stupidity of their former policies. Which I suppose makes Conservatives reactionaries (“if Progressives are for it I’m against it”) when it comes to the drug laws.
M. Simon,
Liddell Hart was more than muddled in his use of the term “indirect approach.” Rather than offer it as an interesting tool to be considered among others when evaluating a situation he attempted to raise it to the level of a universal principle. To do so he applied it to every case that he could no matter how inappropriate. He constantly changed his definitions and even reversed himself, for example on the relative value of the offense versus the defense, in a desperate effort to retain his position as an authority figure.
The disasters of WW-I were caused by many factors, some of them technical. The abuse that was subsequently heaped on the generals was without any distinction regarding their actual intentions or skills or the conditions they faced. Broadly speaking the Americans and British, despite the horror of the Somme, tried to avoid pointless attacks while the French and Italians spent the blood of their own people recklessly. Today we are also subject to criticism that may be self serving. Some criticism is needed and valuable and sometimes a good analyst whether within or outside of the services can propose a model that will result in a more efficient expenditure of resources. We all I presume hope that in a tiny way we contribute to that effort. Some critics are always so wedded to their own importance and their pet doctrine that they will bend both the terms of their theory and the evidence of a given problem to hammer both into a shape they find useful.
CNG and Liquified-Compressed-Methane should break out in slow-rev sea-going diesels, trains, airships ( perhaps ), and taxis…
That’s a lot of users.
FedEx and UPS are already on board.
Long haul truckers are the next, best market. It’d be no problem for their diesels to run dual fuel. The cost savings would have fantastic ROI.
For those unaware: the EPA has a KILLER TAX on anyone fitting conversion kits to existing motor vehicles.
THAT’S the real reason you are not seeing adoption already.
The tax is $20,000 per year, per engine type, per location. Obviously only a single point factory could tolerate such a crushing burden: after market conversion shops just about don’t exist.
One might imagine that BIG AUTO came up with this tax. It means that all CNG adoption has to go through them.
Ya think they’d be that cynical?
Perhaps the Arab League helped with some Congressional funding… It’s not as if petro-dollars don’t lubricate!