Category: Uncategorized

Thierry Henry was fantastic. Beats four Real Madrid defenders, then slips the ball across the face of goal and past the keeper, and Arsenal has an away win at the Bernabau. The Gunners may be out of the Premiership, but they’re certainly off to a great start in Europe.

As for my other team, Milan, at least they didn’t lose to Bryan Munich.

I always resist upgrading utilities which are perfectly functional. So, I’ve been ignoring Adobe’s blandishments ever since installing version 5.1 of its Reader on The Beast. They caught me in a weak moment, however, and I inadvertantly upgraded to version 7.0.

It’s a pig, about five times larger than its predecessor, it managed to screw up opening automatically from Opera and about the only thing I noticed immediately were the vital XP-style icons. Of course, they’ve moved things around, too, so I have to think about what is where.

But all these sins are forgiven, not because it wasn’t hard to fix the file associations, but because Adobe Reader now exports PDF to raw text! Of course, it probably did this 1.5 versions ago, but since no one bothered to tell me, I’m telling you. I’ll be busy for the next few weeks, of course, converting all those annoying PDF-format ebooks to PDB format for use on my dear, darling Treo.

So, make me wait, Mr. Department of Transportation Bureaucrat. Force me to stand in line, Miss Bank Teller. Take your time, Ms Seating Hostess. I scoff at your paltry powers, for lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of tedium, I shall fear no boredom, for a one-gigabyte library is in my freaking pocket!

USAF Captain RS sees an excess of H2O:

For the first time, I think you’re all wet. OK, so you’re a member of MENSA, but are you a veteran of Air Force service? I think not. Well, I am. 21 years, to be exact. And although I’m only a former public affairs officer, I served in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. I imagine you were just a lad back then, so I can forgive your ignorance.

That was a war which was indisputably won by airpower alone. Even Army generals, strategists and tacticians will admit that. Even though my unit was air-to-air, we were the major contributors to the Iraqi air force’s decision to simply give up and go home. The Iraqis, led by Saddam Hussein, were entirely unprepared for the aerial onslaught they encountered. They thought they were prepared. Hussein had spent billions on “bomb-proof” bunkers and multiple redundant command and control systems. He had the world’s most highly developed and densely distributed anti-aircraft system. Yet all his anti-aircraft defenses were vaporized or rendered blind within 72 hours by coalition air forces. From then on, coalition aircraft roamed unopposed, owning the sky over all of Iraq. Hussein’s forces were rendered reliant only upon shoulder-fired weapons or vehicle-mounted automatic weapons. They hardly managed to fire a missile against coalition aircraft. By pure luck, they managed to down a handful out of the thousands ranging freely around their sky.

“OPERATION DESERT STORM
Evaluation of the Air Campaign

the claim that the F-117s were responsible for collapsing the IADS on the first night appears open to question because (1) the F-117s did not hit 40 percent of their tasked targets on the first night and (2) of the 11 IADS-related targets attacked by F-117s and assessed by DIA, 8 were assessed as needing additional strikes…. Moreover, Air Force intelligence assessments of the extent to which the
IADS was operating in the first few days of the war do not support the assertion that the system was “collapsed” during the first few hours of the first night. Daily intelligence summaries prepared during the war, called DAISUMs, characterized the IADS on the third day of the campaign as “crippled but information is still being passed” and “evidence of degradation of the Iraqi C2 network is beginning to show.” The DAISUMs also described overall Iraqi electronic warfare activity as low but radar and SAM activity in Baghdad and KTO as heavy. By the fifth day of the air war, the DAISUMs described the situation as, “In general, the Iraqi IADS is down but
not out.””

So, what was that you said? Particularly troubling is the fact that the Nighthawks missed 40 percent of their targets. Sure, we’ve probably gotten better, but I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Iranians haven’t been paying attention to this either.

On the ground, nothing Iraqi could move without becoming a target. Their bunkers were proven very vulnerable and were taken out methodically one after another until none remained intact. We systematically destroyed every communication center, all power generation, all fuel distribution, all military transportation, all bridges and railroads, everything Hussein could use militarily. We did so with near surgical precision, only very occasionally hitting civilians, and then usually because Hussein had deliberately either hidden military hardware in civilian neighborhoods or facilities, or had grouped innocent civilians in military targets.

When our ground forces moved forward, Iraqis were so shattered from the sustained air war they were surrendering to unmanned aerial surveillance aircraft! (I’ve seen the tape.) There was no organized Iraqi resistance. They simply surrendered en masse. Even as we moved into Iraq, there was no real resistance. I suggest you do some homework and revisit your topic. It is unique in the annals of warfare.

But the war was not won, even so. My point is not that air power is worthless, far from it! Air supremacy is absolutely vital for the ground operations that are required to win a war, especially for a military that must be sensitive about accepting casualties. But this does not mean that air power alone is sufficient, as many commentators and the more extreme advocates of air power believe.

Otherwise, keep up your usually great work.

Respectfully,
RS
Captain, USAF (Ret.)

Obviously, I disagree with some of the good captain’s conclusions, but I appreciate him lending us the benefit of his experience and expertise. There’s nothing I like more than hearing from someone with direct practical information about the matters we are discussing theoretically.

AW has more than a few things to say:

I appreciate your well thought articles and insight into a wide variety of subjects, and will continue to read anything you write. Once in a great while, I disagree but understand your perspective and position, and have learned to look at some issues differently. I figured I’d send you an email on your recent article (Air power and low probability). I was dismayed at your criticisms which were taken by me as being selective and one sided.

I was, for ten years, a US Army intelligence analyst from 1991 to 2000, with a primary training targeting Korean Ground Forces, but also specializing against Irregular Warfare, such as that we see happening in Iraq and Afganistan. My period of service additionallyinvolved me in the critical actions of our service actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as other less known hot spots.

I was taken by your recalling the common military dictum tat airpower does not win a war, particularly your writing that ‘the history of strategic bombing is a history of complete failure’. I was also put out that you preferred to reach back to WWII and Vietnam, and criticized the air war v. Serbia for Kosovo.

First, air power does not win a war… alone. Nor do ground and naval forces… alone. Although I recall many missions in WWII were unsuccessful from the strategic stand, as you pointed out, from another position the attacks tore out the will to continue from a major portion of Germany’s society. Dresden comes to mind. Massive use of air was still in its infancy. To measure actions then to actions now as equal is foolish. Technology, target intelligence collection, force application, and knowledge gained through lessons learned from past air application make that air so much more deadly it is not measurable against WWII actions. It is absurd – like stating the use of a bicycle is equivalent to a Porsche 959 because they both have wheels, breaks, they go forward and stop – so the 959 will provide no better results than the bicycle.

This misses the point, however, which is not that the Air Force cannot deliver significantly more explosive power in a significantly more precise manner than in WWII, but that there is no reason to believe that the gap between promised capability and actual results has been significantly reduced. The results in all of the various past conflicts mentioned were massively short of what had been promised by the advocates of air power. This trend seems quite likely to continue, indeed, until the air forces of the world demonstrate otherwise, it is the most logical position.

Vietnam is completely non-contextual, having been a ‘low intensity’ war having nearly non-existent heavy industrial production sites, and receiving the bulk of its weapons and war material from Russia and China. It was a completely different war from WWII, as the US had to learn a different way to use air in support of ground, more tactically than strategically. Or political position at that time was restricted, and not Total War. If our government had supported Total War, we would have crippled the sources and severely impact the weapon production side of the Vietnam conflict – by attacking those production sites in China and USSR. That conflict, by political choice, became a Battalion-Company level conflict war-of-will, decided man-to-man, and required a inner commitment to
win US soldiers as a collective did not have, that our South Vietnam allies would not learn, and the North Vietnamese forces were infused down to their souls. In short, only one participant was willing to kill and die to win – and those were the guys that were going to win no matter what technology or weapons were tossed at them, as much as because of their convictions as our own.

I find it difficult to believe that the Iranian people are any less willing to fight and absorb tremendous casualties than they were during the Iran-Iraq war when they took over a million casualties. Is there any reason we should assume they aren’t?

You mention Serbia, 78-days of air strikes. I helped manage those actions, and regardless of the press, those strikes were devastating and tore the will to fight out of the Serbian military and civilians. It culminated in the last major strike, B52s on Mount Pastric, the action which caused such a complete morale failure that it destabilized the Milosovic government and provoked the withdrawal Serb forces three days later. I point out Milosovic, and his party, are no longer running Serbia or making trouble with their neighbors or minorities.

My understanding is that it was the threat of Russian ground forces that caused the Serbs to withdraw, not the air strikes which did not seriously degrade the Serbian military. In any event, the stated purpose of the air war was to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo; it is now known that it not only did not prevent this, but stepped up the pace of it. Given that the air war ended on 20 June, 1999, and Milosovic did not step down until losing a national election in September, 2000, this strikes me as very dubious assertion of cause-and-effect.

Finally, 45 days or so of hammering Iraqi forces as well as military and civil sites prepared the collapse of the Iraqi military – as it did in the first Gulf Conflict. The same with Afghanistan.

In contemporary war, you find the enemy’s rally and supply points, food, ammunition, maintenance parts, fuel and water sources, and you eradicate them. This while you cause them to live with little sleep and numbing fear, in the knowledge they are impotent against an unending air assault. You use every means you can to destroy the will to fight, as our political or military will was destroyed in Korea, Vietnam, and Somalia.

I have never argued that air power is anything but a vital tactical element in winning a war. The point is that a war fought only by air cannot be won without using nuclear weapons. Very, very few of the commentators currently calling for war with Iran are contemplating all-out invasion, they are operating under what I consider to be the delusion that Iran’s nuclear program can be stopped and its regime overturned with nothing more than air strikes and special forces.

If, God forbid, we fight anywhere again, including Iran, you may be assured that if both our political and military will are committed to the action, the historical key component will be a massive conventional air action in the month prior to any ground deployment. What happens after is debatable.

There are three levels in modern day diplomacy driven conflict. For Iran, if the purpose of a potential conflict with is the elimination of nuclear related sites, the United States will be effective and accomplish its end purpose, by hammering those sites with air and missile strikes. If the US seeks to force a government change, the present Iranian administration and offices are targeted. If it is desired to force a cultural change (Western style Democracy, or a shadow thereof), it will have to be a deployment ground forces and accompanying casualties. I’m thinking the present administration would be positively inclined to do the first, a toss up on the second, and a distant possibility on the third.

So, air will be a critical tool, probably the primary tool, and maybe the only tool, of armed diplomacy to get what we desire. Further, it will be massively effective, as I have described it has been in the most recent conflicts.

Obviously, I disagree. It appears that we may get the chance to find out. If I am wrong, I will certainly concede the point. I wouldn’t mind being wrong at all, as the alternatives are rather ugly.

As far as a more homogeneous political structure than Iraq making it difficult to act in Iran, I would point out that there are always groups of people at odds with each
other to fill a vacuum. Should the head be cut off in Iran, there is no doubt it will be the same. Things fall apart everywhere without leadership – add food rationing, no electricity or clean water, lack of food and a crippled economy and chaos and dependency are guaranteed. Somehow, I think that if a government is too busy trying to keep itself functioning and feeding its military and people, it’ll be much more difficult to cause mischief building nukes.

The North Korean example should suffice to dismiss this.

Nearly every discussion of Iran invariably uses Iraq as a point. I have great disdain for those who
continue to criticize our present position in Iraq, and use it for demagoguery or self-promotion, and to position themselves in a manner as to demean our forces and government, regardless of which political party runs the US. Especially if they have no experience in military matters (‘any man who in the interests of the commonwealth feels confident that he can give me good advice in the war which I am to conduct, let him not refuse to help his country, but go with me to Macedonia’). Some things, if you believe they will better you or your friends or the world, must be done. And those who criticize with bias rather than act with knowledge are fools.

My simple observation is this: there are 24 million Iraqis, and about 250,000 coalition forces. If
one-tenth (2.4 million) of the Iraqis really didn’t want anyone on their soil, they’d bury us under a pile of stones, and they wouldn’t give a damn about our tanks, air power, or whatever. It is apparent that probably one percent of the population is willing to act in a manner to make it hard for the new government and our forces, and probably only one percent of those rabble rousers are willing to conduct direct action.

One need not be a military expert to remember what the actual military experts and politicians were saying previously, and comparing it to what they are saying after the shooting starts. The Iraqi occupation has not been a cakewalk, the fact that the occupying forces are still being killed on a daily basis three years later shows that the German/Japan model does not apply – as I wrote two years ago, longtime readers will recall, you don’t hear that comparison made anymore, do you? – and I am skeptical that setting up a democratic Shiite government that would be perfectly happy electing the likes of Hamas is what the administration or the American people had in mind from the start.

As for the numbers argument, the “tiny minority of troublemakers” notion has obsessed occupiers for decades, if not millenia. PJ O’Rourke famously poked fun at in “All The Trouble In The World” when he was visiting the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland. Given that the Afghans waited ten years to kick out the Soviets, I think it is far too soon to conclude that the success of the occupation is a sure thing.

I have tried to be as clear in my writing as you are in yours. Though I differ in the tone and content of your most recent editorial, I continue to admire your observations in other areas, and look forward to both your weekly opinions, as well as your blog site.

This was an interesting and informative critique, and I’m always happy to post such criticisms here. While we may disagree on the probability of air power being successful if utilized in Iran, I very much appreciate AW’s willingness to think things through and engage in a discussion of these matters.

Jess is feeling a bit torn:

I’ve been reading a lot of the online columnist Vox Day. Although I think he confuses correlation with causation much of the time, I really can’t argue with a lot of his observations. One of his favorite topics is feminism. The gut reaction I have is totally opposite his views; however, every life experience I’ve had says that he is right. I’m still digesting this one. He’s a completely sexist guy, but every time I think that he’s saying something completely unfair, I can’t provide any memories or experiences to the contrary.

The reason Jess is feeling confused is that reality is finally beginning to catch up with his social conditioning. This is the socialization that the public school advocates are concerned about homeschooled children lacking, because they aren’t interested in a child’s ability to play nicely with others, but rather with his unthinking acceptance of the Officially Approved Views. Most people, being untroubled by logic, don’t have any problem with witnessing one thing and believing another; you have to be in the habit of actually processing the information you receive in order to detect anomalies in the first place.

And before you feel too smug about your own better grasp on reality vis-a-vis men and women, note that this indoctrination doesn’t apply merely to feminism, but to everything from the legal system to the nature of the money in your wallet.

As for his correlation/causation statement, if there was one rhetorical device I would remove from the Great Unwashed, this might be it. People use this all the time, apparently because they are under the mistaken impression that it is some sort of rebuttal. “You’re confusing correlation with causation” they say, despite offering absolutely no rationale for this supposed confusion, never mind the fact that a) Y didn’t happen before X, b) it was publicly predicted that if X then Y prior to X, c) in other situations where Y did not happen, there is no X, and d) there is a logical and reliable relationship between X and Y. And so forth. In these cases, it’s an unconscious admission of adherence to the Accident Theory of History, where nothing happens for any particular reason and all events are unrelated… a theory to which only the historically illiterate subscribe.

The value of any model is its predictability. The fact that we can view historical events with the precision of hindsight does not mean that predictive models of the past are worthless, it means that we can use the ones proven to be correct to distinguish between causative and correlative relationships.

I wonder if National Review and the conservative commentariat will get in an absolute tizzy over this too. Somehow, I doubt it:

Right-wing British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison Monday after admitting to an Austrian court that he denied the Holocaust….

The court convicted Irving after his guilty plea under the 1992 law, which applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.”

So, is it okay to deny Stalin’s starvation of the Ukraine in Austria? Maybe they’d like to dig up Walter Duranty and put him on trial too. What if one denies Santa Claus, is that equally punishable by ten years in prison? And surely denying Hitler’s Holocaust can’t be as bad as denying the existence of the Devil; how can one of his henchmen possibly outrank the Prime Evil his own bad self?

This demonstrates what I mentioned in last week’s column, that Muslims really do have a genuine legal case for prosecuting the publishers of the notorious Danish cartoons in many European countries, the only question is whether Islam is a recognized religion in the country and if the cartoons are genuinely offensive.

UPDATE: Well, at least they mentioned it. “DAVID IRVING [Kathryn Jean Lopez] is headed to jail in Austria for Holocaust denial.” We await the outrage and the cover story….

LW sees my point, to an extent:

I’m retired Air Force and, regarding subject article, I don’t think you fully appreciate the accuracy of new smart weapons. Up until the 2003 Iraq war, they were used in only a limited fashion. In the first Gulf War, for instance, they comprised only a small percentage of bombs dropped.

Dumb bombs have never been very accurate. During WWII, over 100 bombers were sent on single missions to take out single targets, many times unsuccessfully or only partially successfully. Nowadays a single B-2, with smart munitions, can take out as many targets as the number of bombs it can carry, so a single B-2 can replace thousands of WWII era bombers.

The true limitation of airpower is that airpower, no matter how accurate it’s bombs may be, can’t hold ground from which the enemy, or the enemy’s means to continue the fight, has been eliminated. In short, there must be boots on the ground.

Still, your point is well taken. The military is stretched to the point that action against Iran, other than from the air, is impossible. And the Chinese have helped them bury their nuke facilities so deeply that our most robust bunker busters can’t reach them. So an air attack on Iran most likely will only further antagonize Muslims worldwide without eliminating their nuke facilities, thereby exhibiting a profound impotence on our part. That’s not something we need to show the Muslim world, who seem to only understand and respect overwhelming force.

I think the Iran scenario offers an even higher likelihood of making matters worse than the foolish decision to try nation-building in Iraq. The Islamic world would have taken a salient lesson from the beautifully executed invasion and subsequent removal of Hussein from power. That lesson has been lost and others inimical to our national interest have replaced it through the occupation.

As for the efficacy of the new weapons, well, that’s a song that has been sung more than once before. Militaries have been misled into believing that superior weaponry will win wars for millenia; the fact that it has happened once or twice doesn’t mean that it’s very likely this particular time.

Francis Fukuyama lays it all out for the uneducated and ill-informed:

“The End of History,” in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

Remember, this is coming from a quasi-Marxist supporter of Wilsonian global democratic revolution. Note also the link between liberal democracy and communism and the fundamentally similar way the two are brought about. The following paragraph, too, is significant; longtime readers will recall that I have been skeptical of the military threat posed by the jihad to the United States since my first political column in 2001.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq’s W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war’s supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.

An excellent and informative piece, well worth the reading. It is this sort of thing that makes the New York Times still relevant, its ludicrous daily columnists and sophmoric political reporting notwithstanding. Fukuyama’s recommendations are more neo-Marxian globalist nonsense, of course, but his critique of neoconservatism is completely correct.

NL wants to see mushroom clouds:

Seems you figured out the problem yourself. You said Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the only successful air bombing runs. Wonder why the rest failed us? There only firecrackers compared to the atomic bombs. So, why don’t we use them? That’s the real question you should be asking.

I don’t need to ask that question. First, since we did not launch nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union, China, India, Pakistan or North Korea, we will certainly not do so in the case of Iran. Iran is far less of a potential threat than three of the current nuclear powers as it will have far fewer weapons with a much shorter reach than either Russia or China and it is significantly less crazy than North Korea, media histronics about the Hitlerhood of the man who isn’t even the top dog in Iran notwithstanding.

Second, my understanding is that Iran has its development facilities distributed around eighty different sites; were the USA to drop eighty nukes on Iran, the other nuclear powers would likely regard that as a virtual act of war on them and look to retaliate in a variety of very significant ways.

Chris Naron appears to have read a book:

I noticed you mentioned the fall in real wages again today, and it reminded me of a question I wanted to ask you. Are you familiar with Michael Cox and Rishard Alm’s book Myths of Rich and Poor? Thinking I was ordering something new after reading Thomas Sowell’s article a few weeks ago, I found instead that I had been suckered into a book published in 1999. Oh well.

It is interesting however that here’s a book that attempts to counter exactly what you are saying about the fall in real wages by deconstructing the statistics and reassembling them. Normally, I would take it with a grain of salt–it’s just another partisan GOP attempt to talk up the economy to make “Dear Leader” look good. But this book was written at the height of Clintonian prosperity and by a libertarian (I only assume that given the author’s association with the Cato institute).

At any rate, I would like to get your opinion on their work because much of it reinforces my own intuition about the insufficiency of the real wage stat. To use one of the examples from the book, which would you rather be, a billionaire in 1890 or an average American in 1990? Consider the things you cannot have at any price in 1890 before you choose. (Someone without his Treo…forever…)

They’re confusing the march of technology with real wages. Forget Treos and Macintoshes, how much food can you buy? How much gold? This is just the same sleight of hand that people use to try to claim that there isn’t any inflation either.

Think about it. The number of workers more than doubles. The amount of consumption increases by significantly less than double. I’m assuming that you understand enough of the law of supply and demand that you can figure out what happens to the price. There’s no need to delve into the statistics to prove the concept theoretically, as it happens, the statistics – however nebulous government statistics are – support exactly what theory would predict.

I have no doubt in my mind that you’re right about real wages falling because of women in the work force. But I don’t get your point about buying food. It’s easier to get food now than ever before as evidenced by the fact that poor people tend to be fat. And how does the march of technology not affect standard of living? Is it slight of hand when the truth is that we’re far better off materially now than during the period when real wages were increasing?

The evidence is flawed, given that it doesn’t account for people choosing to eat differently. If the affordability of food was the sole fat factor, then the rich would be fatter than the poor. This isn’t the case, therefore the point doesn’t hold up. Furthermore, the fact that the state and federal governments subsidize the poor’s purchase of their food doesn’t actually make it cheaper. For example, chocolate in the form of a Hershey bar cost 12.3 cents for 1.55 ounces in 1973. The same 1.55 ounces cost 80 cents in 2003. So, you can see, when there’s no technological change to disguise things, the cost of food rose 650 percent while the wage rate fell 16.3 percent.

Did the quality of Hershey’schocolate really improve so much in those thirty years? Is it faster and more efficient? Does it taste 6.5 times better? How would Cox and Alm attempt to explain away that example?

Standard of living and real wages are two entirely separate things. A Turkish harem girl in 1650 had a higher standard of living than a Welsh miner in 1880, but the miner’s wage rate was infinitely higher since the harem girl wasn’t paid for her services. Our standard of living is surely higher than in 1973, but that is based on our advanced technology, not an increase in wages or personal wealth. Suppose, for example, that cheap nuclear fusion is discovered and the government is sudennly able to provide every individual in the country with free pizza, a super-comfortable condo on the beach, flexible robot sex slaves and a 10-foot plasma screen with free video games and movies on demand. Even better, the individual doesn’t have to lift a finger to work for a single day in his life.

Has the individual’s standard of living increased or decreased from today’s norm? And has his wage rate risen or fallen?