Category Archives: National Security

Now here's an interesting heresy: Scrivener's Error says,

In every declared symmetric conflict in the gunpowder era, the side with the higher tail-to-teeth ratio has won the conflict. Not every battle; not every asymmetric or undeclared conflict, although even there it's statistically significant in favor of the big-tail forces. But every “war” has been won by the tail, not the teeth.

…

The short version of this is “Brave soldiers win battles; brave REMFs win wars.”

It just has to be the right sort of tail.

Group News Blog: Legions of Imperial America:

The United States of America spends 56% of total government military spending on Planet Earth, with a published FY2008 military budget of $623 billion* (in 2008 dollars). China is a distant second at 6% with an estimated 2004 military budget of $65 billion. The entire “Axis of Evil” (with Pakistan thrown in for good measure) spends barely 1% at less than $15 billion.

While they excel in force projection against weak third world nations, there have been increasing signs that aircraft carriers are also awfully big targets. Some suggested that in these days of cruise missiles, the carrier's days were numbered.

Now comes some suggestion in the UK Daily Mail that even old-tech submarines are too quiet for anti-sub technology: The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced.

Not from the world's most reliable source, and there seems very little about it in the newspapers as yet, although the blogs are all over it. The Agonist asks if this Daily Mail story (which gives neither the name nor the date of the US exercise) is actually old news being re-floated at budget time?

Further evidence that I am insufficiently paranoid: Dispatches from the Frozen North runs with my post on the Swede who emailed the FBI that his son-in-law was a terrorist in order to scuttle a business trip (Foreigners Still Don't Realize How Dumb Our Government Is).

He has some great scary scenarios which are likely being adopted by al Queada right now, now that he's spelled them out (and the likely over-reactions) in such lovely detail.

Only problem is that the FBI is now interviewing the author. (This last part is, I think, a joke.)

I swear, if I saw this in a movie, I'd turn off the DVD on the grounds that it was just too stupid to be worth wasting my time.

Firedoglake, The Falafel Squad,

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails….

But I don't watch movies that dumb.

UPDATE (11/9): FBI Denies Data Mining Grocery Records

Glenn Greenwald has an odd exchange with an Army Colonel.

There's a lot of evidence that the Army is politicized: after all, the senior officers are in the tank for GWB or they are forced out. The junior officers are leaving in droves as a result. The enlisted appear divided, with a very substantial group at least unhappy about the war with no end in sight.

This isn't good, but I wonder how different it really is from Vietnam. You know, that conflict from which the Colin Powell's Army said it learned so many lessons. Before it forgot them.