Robert Ludlum, eat your heart out

Ludlum, right? Author of crappy thrillers, who invented the standard operating procedure of titling your book The (enter random name) (enter intriguingly sinister plot item). I present something similar. What might finally push the Blair over the edge?

I theorise that it's The Edinburgh Gambit. According to Tom Green Ribbon Griffin, the Liberals in Scotland are considering the wisdom of quitting their coalition with Labour ahead of the Scottish election next year. Now, without the Liberals, they have no majority. This means either staggering up to the election with some kind of jury-rigged minority government - call it the Callaghan option - or the bum's rush, if the Liberals, Scot Nats and Green can agree on a common front.

The impact could be deadly. Gordon Brown is not, after all, likely to put up with such a threat to his powerbase. Labour's much-joked over Scottishness might turn out to be a n active power reality. Equally, the shock/humiliation of a Labour government - a Labour government! - being unceremoniously dumped in the street might be fatal. So, should we do it? For the first time since 1974, a Liberal is in a position to shake politics to the keelson.

There's an argument for inaction. Isn't there always? We should let Blair have an orderly succession, for fear of something or other. I'm not sure, though, from a Lib Dem viewpoint, what it is we've got to fear - we have promised to cram down responsibility on the bastard, and we will only look weak if we don't take our opportunities.

Personally, I don't want an orderly succession. I want him to be dragged out of Downing Street, screaming and clinging to his Anthony mug, and then conveyed on the sharp steel floor of a black Maria or army truck to Northolt and the jet that will deliver him to the Hague Tribunal. I'm not sure whether rebellious troops, cops with vicious dogs, or a mob would be better. But I'm sure we can work it out. More seriously, the supposed "Philip Gould memo" fills me with dread about his plans.

The proposed "farewell tour" sounds to me like nothing more but a relaunch of Blair's political career outside the Labour Party. He appears to be trying to re-address the non-political property'n'cars'n'spite vote he's courted so long - for what? I suspect he hopes for a further political career. Winston did, and Ll G did, and Theodore Roosevelt. And, like so many people who don't want to consider history with the rigour it deserves, Blair loves ill-thought out historical analogies.

Update: The more things change.. I still find it hard to understand some of the dynamics here. The original letter calling for Blair to stand down within the year was signed mostly by shiny-faced men who did well out of the war, super-Blairites like Tom Watson. I assumed this was an act of virtual politics, so that the eventual "Blair out" motion that actually came out of the Labour Conference Arrangements Committee would provide for him quitting in a year's time perhaps, as opposed to going on and on, thus getting him another 12 months and the chance to pull the same trick again. It's a manoeuvre with some history in the Labour Party, notably the motion to withdraw troops from Iraq..

But then it began raining bag-carriers as everyone involved quit. Suddenly it looked damned real. And then there's the Gould note, wonderfully snarked by Matthew Norman in yesterday's Indy. Jamie K seems to think he plans a further political career, as I suggested. Perhaps he'll call it the Bull Shit party, by analogy to Teddy Roosevelt?

Very bad news

This is very bad news indeed, especially if it turns out to have been shot down. The Nimrod MR-2 fleet has been increasingly in demand in the last few years for very different roles to its primary mission, patrolling the North Atlantic looking for submarines and the shipwrecked, as the Army has become aware of some of its capabilities - a huge range of radio communications, excellent IR and radar surveillance, and more besides. Not only the Nimrod, but also the Royal Navy's Sea King ASaC-7 early warning helicopters, have been drawn on for overland ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) tasks - both have the Searchwater 2000 radar, originally developed for spotting ships but also suited to spotting tanks and even aircraft.

This is problematic, as the plane itself is not really suited for this role. The operational pattern is essentially flying around slowly at 500 feet or so, as over the North Atlantic, whilst the electronics team investigate suspicious goats on request from the army. This is not ideal, especially not for an aircraft with a crew of 14, no armament of any use over land, and the performance of the 1950s airliner it is based on. Especially not, either, when the upgraded MRA-4 programme has been such a cash-guzzling disaster flick and only 12 of the planes exist. (The position with the even-fancier electronic intelligence spy ship, the Nimrod R-1, is even tighter - the total fleet is 3.)

A broader point is that there has been a lot of faith in the last few years that "platforms are irrelevant" and only capabilities count. Hence it's fine, indeed very wise, to use a maritime patrol aircraft over a hostile land battle at low altitude because it has the sensors you want. It's cheap, after all. This only works, however, if the enemy are clueless enough not to shoot at the big grey bird chugging about in the weeds. Perhaps they were five years ago, but learning in wartime is Darwinian.

Another point is that wars strain non-obvious capabilities. The Government has always been keen on cutting "nice to have" or "non-core" activities in favour of "the front line" - perhaps more so in the last few years with the advent of the consultant raj and their obsession with the core business. But this only makes sense if you know what "the front line" is. The Nimrod crews - the Kipper Fleet - and the RAF air transport fleet have been the hardest-worked and most-risked segment of the force, whilst the fighter/bomber force mostly defends the Norfolk coast. The photo-reconnaissance force has been under even greater pressure, and has seen its aircraft (the Canberra PR-9) withdrawn in favour of an as-yet undelivered converted business jet for its pains.

Stupid web things of the day

For a start, which second world war army are you?

You scored as Finland. Your army is the army of Finland. You prefer to defeat your enemy by your wit rather than superior weapons. Enemy will have a hard time against your small but effective force. Finland 88% Poland 88% British and the Commonwealth 69% Italy 69% Soviet Union 50% France, Free French and the Resistance 50% Japan 38% Germany 38% United States 25% In which World War 2 army you should have fought? created with QuizFarm.com

Mine's a liquorice Molotov cocktail with herring on the side, please. And where has that Italian journalist got to? I'm reasonably pleased with that, although I was very nearly Poland. Jamie K, Comments Dan and a few others got the same result.

Then there's that seal thing. This is what I came up with..

Even more giant floating radar

Remember this post regarding the US military's gigantic floating X-band radar installation? Well, it turned out that the 282 foot long, 50,000 tonne beast that is meant to be a key part of the ballistic missile defence scheme wasn't in position during the North Korean missile scare because it was in need of dockyard attention in Hawaii.

It turns out that the problems with it are worse than we thought. Essentially, as you could have guessed by looking at it, it's desperately unseaworthy, and its planned station is in one of the stormiest seas on earth. Not just that, but it can't be towed in waves of more than 8 feet and therefore can't move if the sea gets up, and it doesn't have a sea-boat that could be launched to rescue a man overboard. Not to mention the total lack of any self-defence capability (although the sea ought to see to that tolerably well).

Yours for $815 million.

More Deterrence

Apparently if Iran gets a nuclear weapon,

A nuclear Iran is likely to give or lend nuclear weapons to terrorists, resulting in an undeterrable nuclear strike against an American city or cities.

And the answer to this dread scenario? Why,

a credible threat of force.

Eh? Employing a credible threat of force is only useful if the party you threaten cares about it - in which case they will either be compelled to do something or deterred from doing something. Which adds up to the same thing. If they are undeterrable, a credible threat won't cut it - only the force itself will. Deterrence is a way of seeing strategy that assumes a world of realpolitik. In the title of the classic textbook, it's all about people, states and fear.

Traditionally, this is why the Realist school of thought loves deterrence. There is a lot to be said for Classical Realism, even though this does not make one popular on the left (ask Justin of Chicken Yoghurt fame) - for a start, one of the key insights from it is that starting wars is usually very stupid. Another really important point about realpolitik is that the crucial assumptions are that people and states are actually very alike. We are all human, fallible, and terrified. And we all seek to be less terrified.

Compare the worldview in which there are some people who not only cannot be appeased, they cannot even be deterred. That is to say, they don't even share the human emotion of fear. Even Hitler was deterred from a few things - he didn't use chemical weapons on London or the Red Army, chiefly for fear that we'd "drench Germany with poison gas" in Winston Churchill's words, and he didn't attack Malta, though it would have been a big strategic gain, for fear of losing the Parachute Corps.

There's a long tradition of this stuff - people who have no respect for their own lives, Asiatic hordes, barbarians, ultramontanes. Mao even applied it to his own side. Blue ants, he said. What a lot of the historical instances have in common is that it usually comes before an attempt to exterminate the people so described. After all, if they are a horde without fear, who cannot be deterred, they aren't really people..are they?

Iran, for its part, already has a strategic deterrent capability. It's called oil. As well as its own exports, it has a very significant missile capability (to say nothing of all those hordes of suicide bombers the war party claims) designed to sink tankers and attack Saudi and Kuwaiti oil loading infrastructure. In current market conditions, I would seriously wonder whether a 2 kiloton or so nuclear explosion would not do less damage to the West than an extended disruption of Gulf oil shipments. There's also an operational level deterrent - remember those 140,000 US soldiers and marines in Iraq? They are mostly concentrated around Baghdad and to the north-west, with a main supply route running out of this concentration through the Shia heartland parallel to the border with Iran. The US Army and Marines in Iraq are formed to a flank operationally, and heavily dependent on the British Army down south to hold the line and the SCIRI to stay quiet.

But the war party does not seem to be worried by this. Why aren't they deterred? They are irrational! Maybe we should..


Another point, in passing. Why would anybody think that a state, having just achieved a gigantic national project employing the best of its scientific-technical elite, the undivided attention of its military-industrial bureaucracy and vast sums of money, in the teeth of the world's great powers - would instantly give the thing away? States don't behave like that. No states do. Pakistan didn't. Neither did North Korea, and if you think North Korea is any less crazy than Iran..

Slightly confused?

J-Ro on airpower. RPVs and CPVs (computer piloted vehicles) Oh My!

J-Ro on airpower. More on the limits of airpower

The West Yorkshire Question

I've never taken the West Lothian question very seriously (how many men have we lost because of it?), and I usually don't engage with it. But there is something I'd like to fork over about the semi-federal nature of Britain. One may recall that, not so long ago, Dave from PR and other Tories were complaining about the hypothetical situation where a Labour government is elected with a working majority UK-wide, but a minority of MPs in England, implying that it depends on Scottish MPs to continue in office. They argued that, as Scotland has self-governing powers on many issues, it would be wrong for the government to legislate on anything purely English unless it had a majority of English MPs (put it another way, unless the Tories said so).

This would, in practice, create an administrative potmess of epic proportions as the government followed its own policies in all-UK matters and those shared with Scotland and Wales, the Tories' policies in England-only matters, and God knows what in cases of doubt.

But that isn't my real beef. The problem is the idea that if one area of the UK elects a lot of MPs of the other party, it's perfectly fine to chop it off so the Conservative Party can hoist a flag on the rest. I propose, then, the West Yorkshire question.

If it is unacceptable for a government with a parliamentary majority in the UK, but not among English MPs alone, to legislate for England, why is it not also unacceptable for a government with a majority of English MPs - but not if a strongly supportive region such as West Yorkshire were excluded - to legislate for the rest of England?

Update: Charlie's comment induces me to restate the problem. The Tory understanding of the WLQ is that, roughly, either there should be a new England-only level of government or that there should be an effective Conservative veto on England-only legislation. But why does this argument not also hold for, say, West Yorkshire? England-only legislation could be passed under such an arrangement by a government with no majority of MPs in Yorkshire, depending on their strength elsewhere. If this is wrong at the UK level, it's very odd to consider it entirely right at the level of England.

My conclusion is that this is purely self-serving. The Tories like West Lothian because it offers the (distant) possibility of gerrymandering a large number of Labour, Liberal and nationalist voters out of much of the parliamentary agenda. They don't draw the further inference because it would deny them the same privilege. For bonus points, consider this. WLQ assumes that the UK is a confederation, in which the centre cannot overrule the members. Devolution assumes that it is a federation, in which powers are divided among levels of government in one entity. Why do the Tories reject the European Constitutional Treaty, which would have created a confederal structure for the EU, on the grounds that it weakens the UK as a national state, whilst arguing for confederalism at home?

Niall Ferguson

It's late, but this snark attack on Niall Ferguson must not be missed. Click through and read Rob Farley's review of Colossus, too.

After suffering through some of his earlier writing, I've always imagined Niall Ferguson sneaking into the Imperial War Museum in the dark of night. Certain that the coast is clear, he rips off his black track suit to reveal a replica of the uniform that Lord Raglan wore during the Crimean War. Ferguson stands behind a cannon, raises his faux marshal's baton, and exclaims, "Lads, let's send these blighters back to the Seven Hells from whence they came!"

Heh. I actually studied the history of the British Empire at one point, and I recall that Niall Ferguson, despite his recent fame, was astonishingly insignificant in the historiography. You just didn't encounter very much of him. Compared to John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, David Cannadine, Ronald Hyam et al he was non-existent. Perhaps we were just weird, but I suspect this reflects a deeper truth.

A war for neurotics

Now it's all over, what was all the shooting about?

To answer that question, we'd first need to know something of each side's aims. Hezbollah's were reasonably clear, at least as far as the decision to take the two soldiers prisoner went: put pressure on the Israelis to release their remaining Lebanese prisoners, and not incidentally demonstrate they were still Gangster Number One. After all, Hamas had managed to pull off the capture of Gideon Shalit and the destruction of a tank only days before, so something needed doing to maintain respect.

What they didn't reckon with, basing their perceptual framework on Ariel Sharon's 2004 decision to exchange prisoners, was the Israeli freakout that followed. Once that began, Hezbollah's aims were to hold on to as much as possible whilst keeping their army in being, and score prestige triumphs like rocketing Haifa harbour and flying drones into Israel. Simple enough.

What were the Israeli aims, though? Just get the soldiers back? Negotiation would have done that. And, in the end, it doesn't seem to have worried them very much. The Israelis seem remarkably unconcerned that two of their soldiers are left in Hezbollah hands - still! Demolish Hezbollah? Well, they seem to have liked the idea. But, if you look at the situation maps, their actions do not correspond to such grandiose goals. Quite simply, they did not go very far into Lebanon, ever - despite the talk of going to the Litani, they only went there as a token presence. Secure the north from rockets? This would have meant going well beyond the Litani, perhaps to the Awali river line, which would have put the great bulk of the rockets out of range for as long as they stayed. But they spent so much time talking of a two mile deep security zone - which would help not a jot.

There are a couple of explanations. One is that they would have marched to the Litani but Hezbollah (and the Shia Amal, and the Communists) beat them. I'm not sure. They certainly put up an impressive defence, but whether they could have prevented Tsahal from breaking through if it had been bent on doing so is another matter. In all, four Israeli divisions were employed, and at no time was a manoeuvre bigger than brigade strength launched except perhaps at the very end. Another is that the Israelis were trying to avoid the 1978 scenario, where Hezbollah just retires behind the Litani in an affair of outposts, by trying to draw them on to their positions in the south. Another is that they were conflicted and unsure of aims, and that there was effectively no overall strategy. If 1982 was a war for psychotics, with its obsessive blitz ever further north and climatic massacre, this was one for neurotics.

The drawing-on tactic is possible, I suppose, but for an army as tank-oriented as the Israelis against an enemy made up of small mobile ATGW teams, very unfavourable. It would have amounted to parking a lot of tanks in southern Lebanon as targets. It might have had some appeal to a command torn between the will to wound and the fear to strike, though, unwilling to plunge north but under pressure to confront the enemy. It might also have appealed to the airpower theorist, Halutz, as a way of flushing Hezbollah fighters so his aircraft could attack them - but three-man rocket teams are not good targets, and the decision not to charge north meant that they wouldn't collect at the bridges like good little sheep. (This may be the result of learning the wrong lesson from Kosovo.)

That the IDF simply didn't have a strategy is perhaps supported by the fact a key commander, the head of the northern command, was sacked. Everyone will now draw whatever conclusions they want from the war - the 4th Generation Warfare crowd will point to the rocketing of the Haifa port and the village reserve groups with their rockets as more evidence for their side, the neo-cons will cry Iran, the Quai d'Orsay will positively purr, and the Lebanese will in all probability conclude that the more tank-hunters between them and the Israelis, the better.

I prefer the Colonel's analysis, which is that Hezbollah is just at the turning point from a guerrilla force to an army in Maoist revolutionary war theory. They are known to have studied Vietnam extensively, after all. For the laughs, meanwhile, Col. Lang described the Hezbollah first line of defence as the Tabouleh Line, with the next being the Shawarma Line. I disagree. I think the talk of bunkers and tunnel complexes is overrated - every front-line account I've seen speaks of small groups of tank hunters shooting and moving, hiding out in the open, and practically all the Israeli losses came from them. It's more accurate to say that Hezbollah drew the Israelis into a hoummus.

Let's hope it's the last one

I sincerely hope this is a final situation map. Sorry about the last one going missing.

Lunchmap, 11/08

Is here.

A fuller analysis post will follow, as will much more from this week's blogqueue.

Lunchmap, 10/08

Today's updated Google Earth overlay is here. It seems that the right flank march, long predicted here, is now underway. A new Israeli armoured division has appeared in the north and is moving north through Khiam (yup, where the UNTSO guys were until that unfortunate contretemps with the six-hour artillery barrage) and Marjayoun. This is the fourth division to be employed, therefore a one-third increase in force. However, note that it's not (at the moment) heading west down the Litani Valley to envelop the Hezbollah force in the south - it's going north, into the upper Litani valley.

There are two possible explanations for this. One is that the Israelis have decided to go down the river on the north bank as well as the south, and they are seizing the start-line for this movement, perhaps also doing the rumoured move towards Nabatiyeh to get rid of rocket teams said to be firing from this area. The other is that they are going much further into Lebanon, either up the river into the Beka'a or else over the Druze Chouf mountains towards Beirut. Either of these would require more than one division, and the other in the Kiryat Shmona area will be needed in part as a flank guard in the Litani bend (note that the Golani brigade has been pulled out to rest).

The first would make more sense, but then, nothing in this war makes much sense.

Better get this map out..

..before it gets hopelessly out of date. 1600BST situation map, here. Latest unconfirmed reports suggest that the right swing from the Taibeh/Khiam front down the Litani Valley is under way.

The case for electric cars

Read the whole thing.

Still incredibly stupid

In the middle of this Dan Nexon post lies this nugget of astonishing stupidity.

One note about this number, 275,000. I had lunch with my uncle today, in town for a conference from his duties as Sgt Maj for the 1 MEF (the whole MEF) in Iraq. He works rather closely with the Iraqi forces out in al-Anbar province, and he reported that at any given time, 25% of all Iraqi forces are on leave. Why? there are no ATMs in Iraq. The soldiers get paid in cash, and they have to go home after each pay-day to hand the money to their families. So, with this in mind, this force of 275,000 only has 206,250 soldiers available on any given day.

I've blogged about this before, chiefly because as well as reducing availability this is a terrible security risk. The regular reports from Iraq that several dozen soldiers have been taken off a bus and machine-gunned are caused by this mad practice. There may be no ATMs in Iraq, but in 1914 the British army's mobilisation plan foresaw that each married reservist's family could draw a proportion of his pay, in cash, in their home town. After three years, they still haven't hit on the idea.

Can anyone think of a good reason why not? I suspect it's simply that, with people queuing in suicide-bomber magnet lines outside the recruiting stations, they don't care enough to fix it when they can just buy in more cannon fodder. After all, they still get blown up queueing outside the recruiting stations and nobody's cared enough to deal with that.

Two blogger career paths

After this post, and its sequel here (shorter Washington Post: we asked Richard North what evidence he had for his manic conspiracy theory and he had none), it struck me to wonder why he's doing this. After all, his stated mission is to discuss the European Constitution, although it would be more accurately described as "rail and rave against anything vaguely associated with the EU". What has that got to do with trying to get the Israeli air force off the hook for vapourising a few dozen children by libelling a variety of reporters, photographers and Red Cross men?

Not very much. But then, even his URL is dishonest. (EU Referendum? There was never one of them on the cards.) After reflection, I think I have the answer. Ref's main goal these days appears to be attracting traffic from extreme-right US nutsites. And this is what worries me. The high road to success in British blogging should not be "try to impress godhatesfags.com by being the kid who's even crazier". I suppose it's telling that an über-europhobe like North should end up as a water carrier for the right of the US Right - it's roughly what I've been saying about Britain as a whole since 1996 or thereabouts - but it's depressing.

Meanwhile, Chris Albritton goes to the front.

Most of the time, we never even see Hizbullah. They keep a very low profile and only come out when something happens, such as a bombing. Then the boys with the walkie-talkies appear and wave their arms and yell and generally push the reporters back until the firemen come in and put out the fire or recover bodies. That’s been the extent of my dealings with Hizbullah, and it’s been the case with probably 95 percent of the reporters here, too.

I do not have a Hizbullah “press pass,” as one commenter suggested. They do not hold my passport (they have a photocopy, presumably.) I have neither sought nor received permission from any Hizbullah people to cover anything. No one has prevented me from covering anything. The Palestinians in Rachidiye Refugee Camp did prevent me from taking pictures of their gunmen, although I could still interview them. Everything I’ve reported I’ve either seen with my own eyes, or it has come from trusted non-Hizbullah sources. Like the ambulance story. I spoke with the drivers and I saw the very ambulances. It was not faked, and it was definitely an Israeli missile of some kind that destroyed the ambulances.

As far as Qana, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what the scene was like, other than what my colleagues — who I trust — told me and what I saw on television. As for the death toll going down from 54 to 28, well, that happens. It was apparently a confusing time and the mortician at the al-Bass Government Hospital gave out some numbers that included people also killed that day but in other places. As for why it took so long to get there, well, the strike happened at night and no one travels much after dark here, certainly not in the middle of an Israeli bombardment. I don’t believe Qana was faked, as some bloggers are charging. People like Michelle Malkin are full of it and refuse to see anything with even a scintilla of objectivity or fairness. They are not journalists; they are jokes.

So that’s the latest. I’m having recurring problems finding drivers to take me around, but hopefully that can be solved. I’m also open to story ideas. What would people like to see while I’m in the south awaiting a coming Israeli invasion?

Lunchtime situation map - 04/08

And today's Google Earth map overlay is here. KMZ file, correct at 1300BST, not guaranteed for navigation or flight planning, whatever.

I really hope I don't have to start dating these with the year as well.

Map for today

Today's lunchtime situation map is here. Google Earth KMZ file. Please note that this one includes corrections and supersedes yesterday's.

Improved maps

This map contained an error and has been withdrawn.

EU Referendum

Nice fella, that Richard North.

An unforeseen setback for bioethanol fuel

The use of ethanol as motor fuel is controversial for various reasons - efficiency, land use and cost being first among them. But has a more direct problem been overlooked? The Des Moines Register reports.

Neddermeyer was fired after an April 21 incident at the Denison plant. According to Neddermeyer, he showed up for work that morning and saw that there had been a spill of fuel alcohol. Hundreds of gallons of 190-proof alcohol were contained in a 6-inch-deep holding pond that was about 30 feet by 24 feet.

It proved to be too much to resist, Neddermeyer said.

"I am a recovering alcoholic, and I thought about the availability of this alcohol throughout the day," he wrote in a statement later provided to state officials. "Curious about the taste and its effects, I dipped into this lake of liquor and drank what I considered to be 2 to 3 ounces. The next thing I remember is waking up in Crawford County Memorial Hospital."

Neddermeyer had been found by his co-workers in an incoherent state, unable to say his name or the day of the week.

He was taken to a hospital, where his blood-alcohol level, according to state records, was reported at 0.72 - nine times the legal limit for driving, and almost double the level that is considered potentially fatal for many adults...

"The employer has a right to expect employees not to drink the fuel," Hillary ruled. "Just because some of the ethanol leaked onto the floor is not a good reason for the claimant to drink automobile fuel."

Court records indicate Neddermeyer has twice been convicted of driving while intoxicated.

Neddermeyer said Thursday that he has been struggling with alcohol for at least 10 years and is now getting additional help.

"Things were going pretty well until that day at work," he said.

He should have stuck to Sam Smith's sustainable session bitter.

More maps

Google Erf users can be delighted by yet another updated situation map.

Today's lunchtime map

Is here. Correct at 1200BST. Google Erf KMZ file.

Get your fresh overlays here

If you liked this post, you'll love the Google Earth KMZ overlay. See where those places are on the satellite photos. Understand my nonsensical ravings. Details are accurate as of 1330 hours today.

Monster floating radar!

Remember this post? Not only did it have rockets, plausible deniability and much more comments-rocking stuff, it also had a gigantic sea-going radar station. Chris Williams remarked in comments that

"We only need a submarine and a glamorous lady spy and we've got an Alastair Maclean thriller."

I disagree. The giant floating radar turned up off Hawaii, the Hawaii Star-Bulletin reports, in need of dockyard assistance after spending the last few months on its sea trials around the islands (so it certainly wasn't anywhere near its station off Alaska when the missile crisis-ette was going on). And it's not Alistair MacLean it calls to mind. Take a look.



If that isn't the spitting image of deranged shipping tycoon Karl Stromberg's secret submarine base in The Spy who Loved Me, I dunno what is. It's 28 storeys high, 282 feet long and displaces 50,000 tons.

Save the world, one pint at a time

Alex "WorldChanging" Steffen is a fan of Samuel Smith's organic beers, brewed in Yorkshire's oldest brewery in Tadcaster. Who knew? I'd comment, but I'm barred from his comments thread for opining that Bruce Sterling is not always right.

Slightly more seriously, the row related to RFID technology - both teh Bruce and the Worldchanging crowd are strongly in favour for reasons connected with recycling. I'm strongly against for reasons connected with liberty. My point was that in the way of things, the security-bureaucratic complex is likely to sink kajillions in liberticidal applications for it long before we get any benefit from Sterlingian notions of "spimes", "blogjects" and such.

Have you seen this aeroplane?

Associated Press reports on the arrival of only the second aircraft at Mogadishu since the civil war broke out, allegedly with a cargo of armaments for the new rulers, the Islamic Courts Union, to fight the Ethiopians. There's a photo, too...



The aircraft is a no-title Ilyushin 76 which according to AP was registered in Kazakhstan. However, the registration is not visible and is not mentioned in the story. Checking all the Il-76s listed as active with Kazakh operators, I have eliminated most of them from my inquiries as they don't match the one in the photo. However, the closest seem to be either GST Aero, UN-76497 with Air Bas, or one owned by the Kazakh government.

Can you help? Specifically, has anyone seen a UN- prefix Il-76 with that curious flag or panel on the starboard side of the fin?

Airtricity to float

This is cool. Wind power developers valued at around £1bn, thinking of floating on the LSE.

Right flank

Jamie K thinks the UNTSO post was bombed to prevent them observing a possible Israeli flank movement from the northern tip of the country, around Kiryat Shmona, down the Litani valley to the sea, with hopes of cutting off the retreat, which means going further into Lebanon. He quotes me, in comments, suggesting that this area was going to be significant.

Why did I say that? Well, have a read of this Jerusalem Post report. Especially this:

The Nahal Brigade, IDF sources confirmed, was gearing up along the eastern border with Lebanon in preparation for a ground incursion to take over additional Hizbullah-run villages.

In fighting that was described as heroic by Brig.-Gen. Gal Hirsh, commander of Division 91, soldiers from the Golani and Paratrooper Brigades took up positions around the town of Bint Jbail clashing with Hizbullah and killed close to 50 gunmen...

The eastern border - i.e. the extreme right (in both senses of the word) flank. The Israelis are using three brigades at the moment, the Golani infantry brigade, the airborne brigade and the 7th armoured brigade, under the command of two division headquarters, the 91st and one other as yet unidentified. That both the HQs are required although so far only one division equivalent is engaged suggests that more forces are standing by - specifically, the Nahal infantry brigade mentioned above. If it makes an incursion into Lebanon from its current location, it must needs go westwards into the Litani valley.

W. Patrick Lang has details on the location of the UNTSO post. And as everyone no doubt now knows, the Israeli cabinet has announced the call-out of three divisions of reservists. They say they will not expand the war into Syria, and I don't think they will, but they only say they will not expand the operation further into Lebanon yet. In the same report, there's also something very significant about rockets. Especially for fans of the Iranian Dr. Evil view of terrorism.

"It's not simple fighting the war while at the same time taking care of all the logistics," said Maj. Avi, deputy commander of Battalion 51, which operates the new Merkava 4 tanks, "but we're dealing with it."

The biggest problem the tank crews have come up against in this conflict is the large number of anti-tank missiles in Hizbullah's hands, which have hit a significant number of IDF tanks, though Avi insisted they were not surprised by this. The missiles come in a wide variety, not only the Russian-made RPGs and Saggers that the IDF has dealt with before, but also French-made Milan missiles. "You can buy anything with money" smiles Avi

French-made, well, they are also British-made. The point is that state sponsorship is irrelevant because black markets are global. Also, this from the Washington Post:Most of the resistance to Israeli incursions into Lebanon over the past two weeks has involved the use of assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and antitank missiles, including what Israeli officials say are versions or copies of powerful and accurate Russian- and U.S.-made weapons. Versions? Copies? For bonus points, which large sandy country with a civil war on not a million miles away owned a stockpile of Chinese CSS-2 Seersucker (vulgarly known as Silkworms) anti-ship cruise missiles?

Forgot to include this: Ha'aretz has details of the cabinet discussions. Note this: Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister, also
expressed reservations about expanding the ground operation. "Let us assume that you get to the Litani [River], and they continue to fire against Haifa [from] north of the Litani. What have you achieved?" he asked.

Fake sheikh is about right

News of the Screws "investigations editor" Mahzer Mahmood has done it again, as the case against his supposed "red mercury plotters" goes belly-up. This should come as no surprise at all because red mercury does not exist. Well, there's no reason why he can't go on with his pathetic "no-rate sleb snorts cocaine" tales, but it would be nice if the Metropolitan Police didn't treat him with such touching faith.

Right on cue

Really detailed reporting from the Jerusalem Post on the first phase of the invasion. Note especially this:

On Thursday five Egoz soldiers were killed by an anti-tank missile in the village..."many of our tanks took hits, mainly from Sagger rockets; none of the tanks were destroyed but quite a few of our friends were wounded."

I think an earlier version of that article also referred to Kornet ATGMs turning up, but it seems to have gone. These weapons (AT-14) are the latest Russian anti-tank missile in service; the crazy right has been noising a little about them in the past, but it would be interesting to see if anyone can find a reference. Details are here, with this interesting point:

It emerged as the Iraqis' most effective direct-fire weapon against U.S. armor in the desert of southern Iraq. Iraqi commandos traveling in three-man teams dressed in black civilian robes and riding in Nissan pickup trucks moved against the flanks of columns of armor from the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division and launched broadside attacks from several kilometers away using the system. Those attacks had disabled at least two Abrams tanks and one Bradley armored troop carrier in the opening week of the war. US military intelligence officials were extremely interested in capturing one of the missiles intact. They also instructed American soldiers who destroy one of the Kornet launchers to save the remains of the system for close inspection.

Also right on cue, the respectable obscenities of today's salon barbarians. The New York Times Magazine prints this:

From Israel's standpoint, this is no longer a fight with nonstate terrorists who are holding their fellow citizens hostage to their tactics. It is, rather, war between Israel and countries that are pursuing (or tolerating) violent policies endorsed (or at least accepted) by their electorates.

A thing called "Atlas Shrugs" puts it without as much lawyerly antiseptic as follows:

I am not buying into the innocent civilians meme. If by ignorance, complicity, neglect or helplessness the Lebanese wouldn't throw Hezbollah out and establish a strong government, then they must pay the price for the sins of Hizbollah.

Did you take part in the Cedar Revolution? If so, looks like you've got more to worry about than just the Syrians. I mean, these people were the first to cheerlead for the revolution. Have they forgotten? Meanwhile, the shadow of the man Shimon Peres used to be says Israel will never attack Lebanon.

All British

Woman working on CIA contract fired for saying that waterboarding is torture and torture is wrong. Her employer? BAE SYSTEMS.

Maintenance of the aim

The last post went a bit off-topic as the rockets got in the way of the strategy. So, a recap. Hezbollah is following, I think, a sort of fleet-in-being strategy. They want to keep their militia and their quasi-state role inside Lebanon, and anything that weakens the Lebanese government is conducive to that. Even being forced to withdraw from the deep south isn't that bad, as the return of Israeli forces there gives Hezbollah back its missing reason to exist. But what are the Israelis hoping to do, apart from exactly what the enemy want them to?

One argument is purely tactical, or tactics-as-strategy. That is that they just want to get the prisoners back and get the rocket fire shut off. The first counterargument is that Ariel Sharon achieved both these by negotiation, and if he did it you can hardly describe it as weak. Another is the official line, that they want the Lebanese government to deal with Hezbollah. Bwaaahaahaaha, as they say. The Lebanese government is going to be lucky to survive Operation LITANI II, and anyway doesn't have the consensus or the strength to do so. (Over at Aqoul, Tom Scudder asks if a list of Lebanese military equipment suggests strength or weakness on the Lebanese army's part. Answer: it's irrelevant.) And if that is the aim, why did they just bomb a TV transmitter miles north of Beirut that is used by LBC - the Christian Lebanese TV station whose chief political commentator was menaced during the revolution for being too anti-Syrian - and a channel owned by the Hariris? Yes, that's as in Rafiq Hariri.

Alternatively, this is just more of a pattern familiar from 2002. Back then, whilst demanding that the PA and PLO "crack down on the terrorists", the Israelis responded to every terrorist incident by bombing Palestinian police stations - culminating when their army besieged the headquarters of the Palestinian secret service and took away the files on the, er, terrorists. Perhaps it's a weird version of our old friend, airpower theory. This is lent credence by the fact that the IDF chief of general staff Dan Halutz is an aviator, for the first time in Tsahal's history. Chris "Back to Iraq" Albritton dishes this policy nicely - after all, if this really worked, why didn't the 11th of September raid make the US public overthrow George W. Bush? More seriously, Chris's reaction is itself proof that it doesn't. He's getting bombed and he's not any happier about it. Further empirical evidence for the criminal stupidity of this strategy is what's happened to Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz's polls since the rain started a-falling. Two weeks ago, Olmert's approval rating stood at 43 per cent. Now it's 78 per cent. Peretz's have gone from 28 per cent to 61 per cent.

Apart from that, I defer to this post.

Hizbullah: Our little-girls-face-ripping-off missiles answer to God the most merciful, the most compassionate.
Israel: As Golda Meir once said: we do not actually hate them for ripping off our little girls’ faces but for making us rip off their little girls’ faces.
Hizbullah: And let’s not forget the Palestinians, they have lost their land and some of their little girls’ faces.
Israel: Oh that’s from honor killing, if the girls have sex, they rip off the girls’ faces.
{Angry shouting, inaudible}
Mediator{ pounding gavel}: Inadmissible, we are only talking about face-ripping-off-of-girls in war. We are trying to prevent another Mideast Girl Face Ripping Off Free-for-All.
Israel: Millions of Jewish girls have had their faces ripped off out of sheer cruelty and hate; and dozens and dozens of Israeli girls through suicide bombers and terrorists. We will never forget. So we are accidentally ripping off girls’ faces strategically for survival.
Hizbullah: We are compelled to rip off the faces of little girls in order to hasten justice. We will, if necessary, rip off little girls’ faces until justice is complete and the Compassionate One is sovereign and cruelty is banished.
Israel: We are a humane society and we never rip off faces of little girls except by accident. And by the way, they are overcounting their little girls with their faces ripped off.

Read the whole thing. If you want to be really, really depressed.

Another dip in the quagmire

It seems that, after a week's bombing to get in the mood, the Israeli army is going back into southern Lebanon. What are they trying to achieve? A question that could have been asked all week, but one that gains force with this escalation. Everyone's talking about either "clearing a one-mile strip" along the border of Hezbollah rocket launchers, which cannot be true because it's completely pointless, or else going north to the line of the River Litani (not the Lipari as Jamie K called it, although a brief holiday in Italy seems a far better idea).

The Israelis did that in 1978, indeed they called that invasion Operation LITANI so that the enemy would be in no doubt as to their objective. Reaching it without breaking sweat, and having bombed the hell out of everyone and everything in their path, they found surprisingly enough that the enemy of the day - Fatah - had retreated over it. There is no reason to think that Hezbollah won't do the same, having made a token resistance. The difference is, though, that in 1978 going to the Litani at least transferred the risk from Katyusha rockets from civilians in northern Israel to the soldiers, so long as they stayed there. Now, it seems, the increased rocket range means that Hezbollah's self-declared insecurity zone 30 kilometres into Israel can be maintained from beyond the river.

This scenario may not sound very much like the strategy of a militia determined to challenge the most powerful army in the Middle East, but a couple of points militate against this. For a start, this is Lebanon and Lebanese warlords do not cling to principle when to do so is inconvenient. Hezbollah's interests are served by what would be described at sea as a fleet-in-being strategy, that is to say one that conserves their deterrent capability against the other parties in Lebanon and their northern Israeli insecurity zone. The second point is their stockpile of ATGWs, anti-tank guided weapons.

I predict that these will be this year's surprise hit in the armoury, rather like RPGs were in 2004. If you're not familiar, it's basically a longer-ranged anti-tank rocket with some means of control so it can be shot in a straight line. The first ones to be fielded were the French SS10 and 11, oddly enough, at Suez in 1956 and (unofficially) on Israeli light armour in 1967. Their big success came later, though, with the Soviet AT-3 SAGGER. This missile was used in large numbers by the Egyptian army at the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973, allowing their infantry to hold off the first Israeli armoured counter-attacks. In Vietnam, it made an appearance with the North Vietnamese army in the 1972 Easter offensive, where the Western answer (the US TOW missile) was also fielded for the first time. By the 1980s, with the arrival of large numbers of the things, a serious reassessment of the NATO-Warsaw Pact balance was in progress.

This wasn't, as far as I can tell, widely realised at the time. The increased confidence of the NATO armies that they could at least force a negotiating pause on the Soviet forces in Germany had at least as much and probably more to do with infantry anti-tank weapons than the more widely publicised issue of tactical nuclear warfare. If small groups of infantry or recce personnel with wheeled vehicles and wire-guided missiles could take advantage of the growing urban sprawl between towns, the Soviet advance might be much slower and bloodier than expected even before the armoured battle began. The West German army in particular laid in large stocks of the rockets and trained its soldiers to aim for tanks with extra radio aerials - an indicator that they contained commanders.

So did Hezbollah. During the 1982-2000 occupation, they began to use more and more of these weapons, usually to attack fortified outposts from a safe distance as the Israelis kept off the roads towards the end.

This is what the Israelis face. Small teams of tank killers covering the main force's getaway up the Litani valley towards the Beka'a, giving the prospect of quite a lot of tanks being destroyed for little result. Therefore, there will be a strong temptation to double or quits - try to cut off the retreat, which means going further into Lebanon, and then keep going towards the Beka'a or south Beirut, which means much more blood.

No doubt they will blame one state sponsor or other. Which is ironic, because if Iran really did give Hezbollah ATGWs, they...well...might well be any left over from the TOWs supplied to Iran in the 1980s by the United States, and Israel. One of the biggest categories of Iran-Contra stores was more rounds for the TOW launchers the Shah's arsenal included, the Iranians having fired them all into Saddam's tanks. This is pure snark, though. It doesn't really matter very much where they came from originally, as the market in arms is global as few things are. ATGWs are highly smugglable - a key feature is that they must be man-portable, and if you can carry something on your back you can fit quite a few in a shipping container. That is, of course, what the founder of modern rocketry promised back in 1770-odd. Sir William Congreve claimed his rockets were the soule of Artillery without the body.

Not that his were very effective - they didn't have much benefit over horse artillery, and didn't pack enough punch to be used as siege artillery, and were mostly used to frighten undisciplined colonial enemies unused to modern warfare - an early form of non-lethal weaponry, really. But it eventually arrived. Among the numerous variants of the Soviet katyusha, Grad, FROG and other artillery rocket systems, there are several that consist of the multiple launch tubes broken down into singles that can be carried, specifically designed for guerrilla use. (The Vietnamese invented this, re-purposing the 107mm and 122mm rockets to be fired from a wooden frame. The Soviet Union mass-produced the idea as, I think, the 9K51-P.)

Rockets don't have to come from Iran, either. Ask the Black Watch - just off for their third tour in Iraq, two weeks after the Government denied it! - about their stint at Camp "Incoming"..Dogwood..in the winter of 2004. Grad MRLs are in use with some 50 countries, so they could come from almost anywhere. But the large sandy one with a civil war, vast ammunition stockpiles and no effective government that was exporting surplus military equipment via Beirut until last year cannot be ruled out.

Correction: the AT-3's NATO designation is SAGGER, not "Snagger". Good GlobalSec page on it here.

Have they all gone yet?

All those folk looking for dirt on John Prescott. It's nice and quiet again now. Still, I've been away, far from the nearest wireless LAN, so far away I didn't hear about the new war(s) until getting back to town, and now I'm back.

Prescott and the Dome: Clarifier

One thing not addressed in this post is the exact arrangements between the Government and AEG regarding the big...can it be a beer gut?...pimple on the Thames. As made clear in comments here, the terms under which AEG got the Dome specify that the Government gets a share in the profits over and above AEG's costs plus a percentage markup. So, the insertion of a casino in the Dome would tend to bring forward the point at which the State makes money on the deal, not to mention increase the sums involved.

It's been pointed out elsewhere that the thing was quite a while earlier, well before the Gambling Bill. Pshaw. I don't see that this gets them off the hook - in fact it strikes me as more incriminating than Anschutz buying the Dome after the Gambling Bill passes, because implying a quid pro quo. Anyway, consider this report from the HoC Public Accounts Committee. Note that, although the c-word is used later in the document, the summary description of the AEG scheme makes no mention of a casino at all...although this had been mentioned in the press prior to the report.

Eventually you come to this:

10. There are various elements in this scheme which may generate future profits to the taxpayer, but which English Partnerships did not assume when evaluating the deal. For example the extent to which there might be a share in future profits from the Dome Arena and Waterfront is uncertain. Also in 2003 the Anschutz Group expressed interest in placing at the Dome one of the eight large Regional Casinos proposed in the government's draft Gambling legislation. At the time of Meridian Delta's original proposals there had been no discussion on casinos. A casino would require both planning permission and a licence under the recently enacted Gambling Act. The Government has indicated that there will only be one Regional Casino, and it is not yet clear whether the Dome will be successful in obtaining a licence. The Department has no firm view about whether a casino would be a positive or negative factor in terms of value to the deal. It is not party to any related negotiations with the Anschutz Entertainment Group, but recognises that Anschutz are pursuing it because they expect it to increase their profits, in which English Partnerships would take a 15% share after the operator had made a prior return. English Partnerships have not however assumed any return from a casino.[11]

So as early as 2003 they were talking slot machines. I wonder how often John Prescott has been to see the old railroad tycoon before his recent trip? According to the report, the sale closed in June, 2004. It's hard not to see, as they say, a pattern of behaviour here. As far as I can make out, "the Department" is a strangely worded reference to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, not (as I first thought) to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

We missed it

And again, we managed to miss it - the 10th of June, or blogday as it's also known..three years of uninterrupted ranting. Just to celebrate, remember this post about casinos and the Dome? Well, it only took them a year to catch up.

In other schadenfreude-related news, tedious europhobe hack Richard North has fallen foul of Sadly, No!

Cows for Jesus

After all the serious stuff, something amusing. In the US, a cattleman is trying to breed perfect red heifers with no un-red hairs on them. Why is he doing this? It seems all-red heifers are a necessary part of God's design for the Apocalypse, as part of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple..

Artisans have re-created priestly robes of white linen, gem-studded breastplates, silver trumpets and solid-gold menorahs to be used in the Holy Temple — along with two 6½-ton marble cornerstones for the building's foundation.

Then there is Clyde Lott, a Mississippi revivalist preacher and cattle rancher. He is trying to raise a unique herd of red heifers to satisfy an obscure injunction in the Book of Numbers: the sacrifice of a blemish-free red heifer for purification rituals needed to pave the way for the messiah.

So far, only one of his cows has been verified by rabbis as worthy, meaning they failed to turn up even three white or black hairs on the animal's body...

Over in Mississippi, Lott believes that he is doing God's work, and that is why he wants to raise a few head of red heifers for Jewish high priests. Citing Scripture, Lott and others say a pure red heifer must be sacrificed and burned and its ashes used in purification rituals to allow Jews to rebuild the temple.

But Lott's plans have been sidetracked.

Facing a maze of red tape and testing involved in shipping animals overseas — and rumors of threats from Arabs and Jews alike who say the cows would only bring more trouble to the Middle East — he has given up on plans to fly planeloads of cows to Israel. For now.

In the meantime, some local ranchers have expressed an interest in raising their own red heifers for Israel, and fears of hoof-and-mouth disease and blue tongue forced Lott to relocate his only verified red heifer — a female born in 1993 — to Nebraska.

Cloning is out of the question, he said, because the technique "is not approved by the rabbinical council of Israel." Artificial insemination has so far failed to produce another heifer certified by rabbis.

"Something deep in my heart says God wants me to be a blessing to Israel," Lott said in a telephone interview. "But it's complicated. We're just not ready to send any red heifers over there."

If not now, when?

"If there's a sovereign God with his hand in the affairs of men, it'll happen, and it'll be a pivotal event," he said. "That time is soon. Very soon."

I wonder, are they red angus or Santa Gertrudis? And more importantly, what do they taste like?

The wrong end of the telescope

Blogs covered the news that the Forest Gate raid was down to the unsuppported word of a man with an IQ of 69 quite copiously. But there is more to the problem than just bad sources, Sir Ian Blair and the ACPO grandstanding for their new political role, or whatever. Simply, they have lost the plot regarding how intelligence works. Compare and contrast this report from the LA Times on how the Jordanian secret service tracked down al-Zarqawi.

In April, when Zarqawi showed up in a highly publicized online propaganda video boasting of his group's prowess, Jordanian analysts scrutinized the surrounding scenery as well as his blustery talk.

The tape confirmed suspicions that Zarqawi was in the Yousifiya area, a volatile insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, which became the focus of U.S. and Jordanian intelligence efforts, Burjaq said. Throughout the spring, U.S. military officials, too, were publicly identifying the area south of Baghdad as a likely Zarqawi stronghold.

"At a certain stage, more intelligence [resources] were being devoted to Yousifiya," Burjaq said, noting that Jordan's familiarity with the region and intelligence networks played a key role in monitoring Zarqawi's movements there.

"It's not an easy area to get in and out of."

The two Jordanian officials declined to confirm whether they had turned any of Zarqawi's followers against him.

But Dahabi noted, "Some of the people I arrest, I recruit. Some of those who were in my jails helped me to carry out operations."

"Sources," Burjaq said. "To us, this is the tool."

Once it became clear that the Yousifiya information was accurate, the Jordanians became more confident of their sources. Then when information was received about Zarqawi being in the Baqubah area, northeast of Baghdad, they were confident of that as well.

"We started to locate him and the Americans started to locate him," Burjaq said.

Several sources, including a U.S. counter-terrorism official, credited both U.S. and Jordanian intelligence with developing information that led to the targeted hit on Zarqawi and subsequent raids at other locations.

"At a certain point, some of the sources connected," Dahabi said.

What the two Jordanian spooks are describing is a classic method of investigation. Note that they didn't begin by looking for people who might be able to say, just like that, where he was. Rather, they identified the area to look in and began collecting background information, specifically, information that they could check. Checking reduces the number of leads to follow up, and it also provides more information about which sources are trustworthy. And in the process of checking, more background information is available, which further refines where to look. Eventually one reaches the point at which the number of possibilities is small enough to round up the usual suspects.

In the UK, this ought to be familiar, as it's precisely the approach General Sir Frank Kitson codified in the 1960s. The crucial advantage is that it minimises the possible wrongness at each point. If you post huge rewards, seek tip-offs on where "a chemical vest" might be, then act on everything you receive, not only will you not be able to cope with the data-dump, but your activities running after the false positives are likely to have consequences. Hence Kitson's insistence on the importance of background information - it can be of lower quality than operational information without causing fiascos - and checkable information, which even if falsified leaves you with a net gain of information (i.e. that Curt Weldon's sources cannot be relied on, or that the enemy is unlikely to be found in area Y, or Mr. Z can be eliminated from the inquiry).

Now compare, for example, this. You might also want to read this Ken Silverstein report on the intelligence effort before the war with Iraq.

“They say everyone else was wrong,” said this former official, “but we conditioned them to be wrong. We spend [tens of billions of dollars per year] on signals intelligence and when we reach a conclusion, the people who spend less than that tend to believe us. They weren't wrong, they chose to believe us. The British, Germans, and Italians don't have all those overhead assets, so they rely on us. Historically they have been well-served, so they believe us when we tell them the earth is round. The French have their own assets—and guess what? They didn't go with us.”

Creative destruction and the Holmdel Lab

According to IEEE Spectrum, the Holmdel Laboratory, the centre of Bell Labs in their heroic age, is probably going to be knocked down. The structure was once home to the world's best privately-run research organisation, with some 6,000 scientists and engineers and a library second to none. The work carried out there included the development of

the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, the light-emitting diode, the charge-coupled device, fiber optics, satellite communications, touch-tone dialing, cell phones, modems, microwave communications, local area networks, UNIX, C, and C++..

Southampton University would probably dispute the fibre claim, as they invented the process of making the cables industrially (indeed, the original equipment was lost in a fire last year), but anyway. This was where it all began.

The building was nothing if not suited to this role. The V&A's big Modernism exhibition this year is titled "Designing a New World," and that was precisely what Bell Labs was doing. So they hired Eero Saarinen to build them this..



No wonder it impressed the hordes of postgraduates it sucked up like a black hole. So, beyond a decent concern for geek heritage and architectural preservation, what am I drivelling on about this for? There was a reason why AT&T could afford to fund all this research, as detailed here. As the monopolist of all the telephones in North America, each and every phone call paid a few cents towards the R&D budget, a revenue stream that could be relied upon as few other businesses.

This brings us to an interesting point. The great Viennese economist and Harvard prof Joseph Schumpeter's distinctive contribution to economics is his concern for dynamic economics-the standard models usually assume one point in time and no technological change within the model, or else the convention of two moments in time, t-1 and t. Schumpeter argued that the reason there appears to be a long business cycle is that technological progress is not constant, or rather, it's not evenly distributed even if it advances at a steady average speed. There is a breakthrough, which spawns dozens of new opportunities and leads to a period of prosperity. Then, as the diminishing marginal returns set in, the possibilities are exhausted and the technology becomes more baroque, growth stagnates and inflation rises. Eventually, there is a new discovery.

This is obvious, if not trivial. But the key insight of Schumpeter's was the implication of this for competition and the theory of the firm. Traditionally, it is assumed that firms compete primarily on price, and that allocative and productive efficiency are maximised in perfect competition. Schumpeter stood this on its head, arguing that innovators are motivated by the possibility of becoming monopolists and making supernormal profits. The necessary check on them was the possibility that someone would discover something sufficiently new to destroy the monopolist. This feedback loop he named the theory of creative destruction, a phrase that has far outrun its initial use - it's commonly used as a snotty term for classical competition, or even assumed to mean that capitalism requires war. In fact, it means that in principle moving towards perfect competition may actually decrease long-term total factor productivity.

Bell Labs is exhibit A, of course. AT&T's monopoly profit funded the new electronic future, and the Bell Labs management made a deliberate policy of openness towards the competition, helping (for example) others to learn the technique of transistor manufacturing. It could also hardly be faulted for a lack of enterpreneurship - for example, when it was working on the first communications satellite, it came up with some radical answers to NASA's unwillingness to provide it with a rocket.

AT&T was firmly committed to carrying Telstar through, but how to get it launched? When V. S. Chernov of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow visited Bell Laboratories in April of 1961, Rudi Kompfner and I asked if we couldn't get a Soviet booster to launch Telstar.

Eventually, though, those same technologies helped to destroy AT&T. The mothership-the telecoms company that was, after all, the point of all this research activity-showed all the signs of a jealous, conservative, dull monopolist content to sit on its monopoly..

Although electronic switches based on solid-state components had been developed by 1959, AT&T didn't introduce the first digital switch into the Bell System until 1976. And electronic switching was still being gradually rolled out well into the 1980s, when AT&T's monopoly on telephone service came to an abrupt end. The much more rapid introduction of digital switches by MCI and Sprint probably contributed to AT&T's downfall.

And even though Bell Labs and Western Electric developed most of the underlying silicon technology required for the integrated circuit, which eventually became the guts of the electronic central-office switch, AT&T wasn't in on its creation. The upstarts Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, focused as they were on miniaturizing electronics for their military and aerospace customers, led the way instead. Here again, AT&T engineers probably contributed to the lapse by insisting on high-performance discrete components built for 40-year lifetimes in the Bell System. There was no great drive for miniaturization in the system, acknowledged Ian Ross, the president of Bell Labs at the time of the breakup. "The weight of the central offices was not a big concern," Ross said.

It was government action, in the end, that killed the monopolist. But the point remains. Schumpeter was almost certainly right that a trade-off exists between static and dynamic efficiency, but he could never operationalise the principle. The argument that such-and-such a corporate privilege must be retained in order to promote long-term R&D is as common a self-serving excuse as retailers blaming the weather for poor sales. (National telecoms operators are especially addicted to it.)

Some views on recent Afghan fighting

Michael "DSM" Smith of the Times reports some detail on the recent action in Afghanistan in which two UKSF members were killed. Worth reading. How would your answer change, though, if you knew that the two companies of 3 Para involved equal roughly 50% of the total infantry force available to the British Army in southern Afghanistan? (Smith has engaged with the point on his blog. I did too, back in December.

It also seems there is a degree of concern about the air support, specifically in support helicopters. It may be remembered that the Government actually wanted to send back RAF Harriers from Afghanistan to the UK until a few weeks before the deployment began, on the bizarre principle that the whole one battalion of infantry would adequately substitute for them and would need no support. Fortunately this was eventually reversed, and the current Harrier squadron is to be relieved later this year by the Navy's 800 Naval Air Squadron.

There does seem to be a piecemeal reinforcement in progress. Last week, 3 Para and a company of Gurkhas (the only other British infantry there) were joined by a field squadron (like a reinforced infantry company) of the RAF Regiment, who are to take over security for the Kandahar air base so as to relieve the infantry for their own role. The Harrier raid, by the way, appears to have been very vital indeed. AAC Apaches are expensive, RAF Harriers are noisy, but not having to rely on the USAF for your air cover is priceless.

Incompetent, deceitful war profiteers..

...But other than that, they're swell fellows. CusterBattles in more trouble. Especially this:

Ballard also noted that Custer Battles employees didn't use metal detectors and ignored suggestions that an interrogator look over paperwork while a two-man team inspected each vehicle. "What horrified us most of all, however," Ballard wrote, "was their refusal to open the cargo doors of lorries to inspect."

No security inspection whatsoever, then.

Against mass surveillance, again

Shorter Times: Everything you know about the Operation Ore child-porn investigation is wrong.

In information given to Interpol and in sworn statements submitted to British courts in 2002, Dallas detective Steven Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead claimed that everyone who went to Landslide always saw only a front page screen button offering “Click Here (for) Child Porn”.

According to them, this was the way in to nearly 400 pay-per-view websites, almost all of which specialised in child pornography; ergo, anyone who accessed Landslide and paid it money must be a paedophile.

When Operation Ore was launched in Britain in May 2002, pictures of the web page and its “click here” button were given prominent and sustained publicity. But what passed almost unnoticed eight months later was that after British police and computer investigators had finally examined American files, they found that the “child porn” button was not on the front page of Landslide at all, but was an advertisement for another site appearing elsewhere: thus the crucial “child porn” button was a myth.....When police investigators found no evidence on seized computers, they did not assume the user might be innocent or had sought only legal, adult material. They were charged instead with “incitement”. These charges alleged that, simply by making a credit card payment through the internet, the child porn webmasters were encouraged to continue trafficking.

This is why we oppose ID cards, mass wiretapping, monster databases, CCTV, roadpricing - it's because you can't trust the bastards to get anything right, and you can trust them even less to stop getting it wrong.

The trench art of networking

Soldiers in Iraq, dissatisfied with the limited and censored Internet service available officially, build their own. It's impressive, even though the main demand is to download filthy pictures and order foodstuffs forbidden by the chain of command - which, I suppose, gives it a sort of charm. As one of Robert Graves' comrades said, marching towards the front, Dear Mum, I am currently wading in blood up to my neck. Send fags and a lifebelt. Love and kisses.

It's probably a better idea than using a mobile phone, whether with a UK or local SIM inserted. Chez Spyblog there are details of supposed threatening calls made to the families of British soldiers in Iraq, with sceptical comment. Unfortunately, I'm much less sceptical - see this post from November 2005 on weird and clueless policy towards GSM networks in Iraq, and this one with regard to unauthorised mobile networks.

It seems nontrivial numbers of Allied soldiers are using local SIM cards provided by various networks not limited to MTS/Vodafone and Iraqna(Orascom Telecom), and these networks are possibly penetrated by the enemy. The reason for using local SIMs with GSM phones is that it is cheap. The reason not to is that all call details, locations, and numbers called are available to anyone with access to the operator's SS7 switch and databases - not just that, but the phone broadcasts its number and IMEI whenever it tries to register on the network, so jamming the real network and listening could gather identifying data.

Using Skype or a comparable peer-to-peer VoIP applicatiion from an Internet-connected computer would be far more secure - that, and making very sure no mobiles go outside the wire, as a similar method could be used to track troop movements.

On a similar Internet-politics trip, watch Charlie Stross bust my chops over IRC and the Soviet 1991 coup. Looks like I was wrong. It does mean an opportunity for an interesting anecdote, though. A Cisco Systems executive I spoke to a couple of months ago talked of selling the old BT System X digital phone exchanges to the Russians immediately post-communism. To his surprise, the first switch he visited was a 1940s all-electromechanical monster, maintained perfectly by a small army of women engineers who polished every contact, at least once a week.

There was no difficulty making the pristine copper wires do DSL, either, when he returned a few years later with Cisco. So it's probably no wonder there were IRC users in Moscow in 1991..

Strandbeesten

In Trafalgar Square on Sunday, something remarkable - artificial life, or a stab at it. Dutch artist Theo Jensen has been building curious walking machines, strandbeesten, out of lengths of plastic pipe selected by a computer program that simulates an evolutionary process. After a while, he took them out to the beach to race, and bred from the winners, thus providing a form of selection too. Things got interesting when he started a new lineage of creatures that could, being blown about by the wind, pump up compressed air into themselves, and therefore move upwind as well. He hopes that one day, they will wander the North Sea beaches, evolving without his intervention.

They look something like this, at least in the unusual circumstances of Trafalgar Square...



Once the wind picks up beyond a certain point, this one knocks a pin into the sand, and is then blown around it, gathering more energy in its bottles for when it has to move on in the last direction the wind left it pointing.



Wonderfully, the program which carries out the simulated evolution is written in nothing else but good old BASIC, a programming language I learned when I was about eight years old. Jensen is doing a lecture at the ICA next week, and I hope to come away with the source code - he says it's open source. Perhaps this will be the thing to make me go through with my project for this year, to learn a new programming language and get cracking.

Leaving, driving over Waterloo Bridge, I thought - I hope wankers don't smash them.

Update: Well, yet another cool internet idea turns out to be a bag of useless shit...just like so much else, YouTube just doesn't fucking work Sorry about that. It seems it takes a while for them to start working, and in the meantime the error message "this video is no longer available" is displayed..

St. Helena and a Nonexistent State

St. Helena, the British island in the Atlantic Narrows where Napoleon was confined, is not well known as a centre for dubious financial activities, unlike many other bits of residual empire (the Caymans, Gibraltar, Turks & Caicos, British Virgin Islands etc). This appears to be changing. A website has appeared advertising something called safeholder.com, which claims to offer

a new offshore banking program under the auspices of the Serbian Republic of Krajina (RSK), which is the internationally recognized government of Krajina and Slavonia. The banking licenses are offered to corporations and citizens resident anywhere in the world except the Republic of Serbia & Montenegro and the Republic of Srpska. The license permits operation of all banking and related financial services worldwide except in the aforementioned countries and subject to the laws and public policies of other states. Where no law on the matter exists or there is no conflict, the banking program of the RSK would be applicable according to international law authorities.

There is one immediately obvious problem with this story. The RSK does not exist. It was the self-proclaimed government, between 1992 and 1995, of the tranche of Croatia occupied by Serbian forces during the civil war. In 1995, the Croatian army retook the areas it supposedly governed, expelling much of the population and landing several of its own leaders before the Hague Tribunal. Either the RSK's banking code exists in some curious fashion, floating above the false world of being like Mohammed's coffin, and permitting anyone canny enough to engage Safeholder.com's services to escape more earthly jurisdictions, or else it is unenforceable and anyone who invested money in such a bank will never see it again. Whichever one of these options is pursued, it don't look good.

What kind of banking legislation the RSK might have elaborated in its brief flicker of existence can perhaps be guessed. In fact it's stated. Safeholder compares itself favourably to a variety of well-known extreme tax havens - Nauru, Niue and Montserrat, for example - for speed of establishment, confidentiality and easy terms. Anyone with US$5000 can hope to establish a bank with them within 10 days, with the following capabilities:

Engage in Private & Internet Banking

Take deposits and make loans worldwide

Offer payment services and transfer funds

Issue payment tools such as credit cards and checks

Issue bank guarantees

Issue letters of credit and other financial instruments

Issue bank references

Open correspondent bank accounts

Offer complex financial transactions

I think they must have forgotten "bilk clients" and "launder money". After all, they also claim you might want to set up a casino!

The fact that the licence is said (more than once) to exclude the countries - Serbia and the Republika Srpska in Bosnia - that would appear to be the RSK's successor states should tell us enough about their governments' opinion of this scheme. Fascinatingly, the website includes a nice picture of an RSK banknote.



It really ought to be a nine-bob note, but it's certainly just as dodgy. The folk responsible for this are one Mike Olsson, a Swedish citizen, and one Mirko Miskovic...and one Jonathan Levy. This is the WHOIS record for safeholder.com:

Domain Name: safeholder.com

Registrant Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Administrative Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Technical Contact:
Safeholder, Ltd. safeholder@gmail.com
Safeholder Ltd
Association Hall
Main Street
Jamestown, SH STHL 1ZZ
SH
+1.2902660

Billing Contact:
Jon Levy jonlevy@hargray.com
Jon Levy
37 Royal Pointe Dr.
Hilton Head Island, SC 29926
US
+1.5132840011

Record created on 2004-03-09 07:30:56.
Record expires on 2007-03-09 07:30:56.

Strangely enough, someone of the same name registered cabindapetroleum.com, which claims to be the only licenced gas and oil exploration company in the Republic of Cabinda, based in Jamestown, St. Helena. Cabinda, my well-informed readers will no doubt be aware, is a small exclave of Angola north of the Congo River which contains much of Angola's oil reserves. It is not a republic, and is something like a joint venture between the Angolan government and ChevronTexaco, who are extracting the oil. Unlike Mr. Levy's organisation, which is extracting the urine. After all, there is no reasonable prospect that they will ever be in a position to explore for oil there - and much as I dislike and distrust the Angolan government and their oil pals, I would rather not see anyone lose their savings in this venture.

It could be worse. Cash invested in such a thing is likely to go missing, but where would it go? There's only been one effort to work out what all this means, before this post, which was by the St.Helena Herald. At this (pdf) link, you can read a long interview with Olsson by a local reporter. I liked this exchange for the sheer informational blankness Olsson practices - read, and feel your IQ drop ten points. "RR" is the Herald's reporter, "MO" is Olsson.

RR. I’m giving you an example as to how it could work, what
kind of regulations do you have in store to ensure that it doesn’t
happen it terms of money laundering?
MO. Its not dependent on St Helena law, that’s what I’m telling
you, its dependent on the law of the country where they are
operating from, because most countries got, have nothing to do
with because one of the requirements is that the company be in St
Helena because we got a competent authority that are supervising all
banks, you can not operate that bank in St Helena so they would not
have anything to do with money laundering or anything like that in St
Helena.
English Common Law
RR. So, just moving away. Why quote English Common Law on
your website?
MO. Because English Common Law is applicable to St Helena.
RR. In terms of, in what reference?
MO. In places where we don’t have legislation
RR. I understand that, in what reference are you quoting English
Common Law on your website in relation to Safeholder?
MO. It mainly has to do with Trusts
RR. Trusts?
MO. Trust legislation is actually in English Common Law, it means
that you can, um, put money in a Trust that is not your personal
belongings. You set the rate, the identity from yourself, and this has
been very common in the United States for example where the
insurance premiums are so big.
RR. Yes I understand that, so you are saying that it is do with Trust
purposes so if you want to invest in a Trust?
MO. Umm.
RR. So why, to quote your initial product line, include international
Capitalization and Hedge Funds. Is that what you are talking about?
MO. Sorry
RR. Is that what you are talking about when you say Trusts?
MO. Umm, Hedge Fund is a form of Trust, it’s a fairly specialized
more a short term Trust, the Hedge Fund. For example, we know that
George Sores is the biggest Hedge Fund Administrator in the world.
RR. Umm
MO. If you understand.
RR. Yes I understand, so what other kinds of Trusts, apart from Hedge
Funds are you interested in, or is Safeholder interested in?
MO. Capital Protection Trusts.
RR. Which you discussed earlier?
MO. Sorry?
RR. Which you discussed earlier?
MO. They are all similar, different ways of doing it; the same with
Bailment Accounts, Hedge Funds, yeah
RR. Umm
MO. A variety of different products.
RR. Just looking at a bit of history here how did you get involved in
the Safeholder organisation operation?
MO. Working together with two barristers which I have know for the
last ten years.
RR. So obviously you built a relationship with the Republic of Serb-
Krajina?
MO. I don’t have a relationship with Republic of Serb-Krajina at all.
RR. So whats the relationship? Obviously you are talking to them as
part of Safeholder and as the Operations Director you don’t have a
relationship with them at all?
MO. NO, no, not directly because in that sense not relative for the
operation of the business.
RR. Sorry, could you clarify that for me please? I’m a bit confused
with that statement, could you clarify please.
MO. Its not relative for the product, we have lawyers that are looking
at the legality of everything that happens in the business, I have full
confidence in them. So I don’t have to have any personal relation
with RSK at all.
RR. But surely as the Chief Operators Officer you would obviously
have to oversee every part of the business?
MO. Not every client, that would be impossible.

Is that completely clear? And is the Jonathan Levy who's peddling the oil of ancient Cabindan snakes the same man who appears in this curious conference, this rather embarrassing Counterpunch story, the Serbian Unity Congress's website and this manic conspiracy site?

Stand by for more thrilling revelations.

Hat tip to Jasmina Tesanovic. BTW, check out Doug "AFOE" Muir in the comments.

Cold steel

As the Burschenschafter say in the intervals of slashing themselves and preparing careers in rightwing politics, lieber als des Hofrats Segen war mir des blanken Säbels Schlag. (Roughly, "More than the professor's blessing I loved the drawn sabre's stroke") We see here, for example, that the sword still seems to hold a special place in the violent imagination - as "Camilla's Killers" demonstrated in July, 2004 and the chap who caused the Forest Gate raid further showed by seeking out the leader's address. Curious..