An excellent Wired analysis of the Pentagon’s “network-centric warfare” vs. the requirements of effective counter insurgency. Example:
Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about a different kind of power, one that came when connected troops started to share information in ways that circumvented, and bypassed, the Industrial Age military chain of command. But that helps only if troops can connect in the first place. It can take up to a week for them to wrangle their laptops into updating the biometric databases that track who gets in and out of Fallujah. Intelligence reports can take even longer. The people best equipped to win the battle for people’s minds — US troops on the ground, local policemen, Iraqi Army officers, tribal leaders — are left out of CPOF’s network. It’s a bandwidth hog, and the soldiers and marines fighting these counterinsurgencies aren’t exactly carrying around T3 lines. Only recently did infantrymen like the ones in Fallujah even get their own radios. The Pentagon’s sluggish structure for buying new gear means it can take up to a decade to get soldiers equipped. (Though to be fair, CPOF was purchased and deployed years ahead of schedule.) In Fallujah, the marines of Fox Company, based in an abandoned train station, mostly use their CPOF terminal to generate local maps, which they export to PowerPoint. Their buddies in Fox Company’s first platoon, working out of a police precinct, have it even worse. When they want to get online, they have to drive to the station.
As for Iraqi access, while CPOF technically isn’t classified, all of the data on it is. Locals can’t see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network’s power grows with every new node. But that’s only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off.
Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq’s civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq’s larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks’ successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, “This enemy is better networked than we are.”
The insurgent groups are also exploiting something that US network-centric gurus seem to have missed: All of us are already connected to a global media grid. Satellite television, radio, and the Internet mean that many of the most spectacular attacks in Iraq are deliberately staged for the cameras, uploaded to YouTube, picked up by CNN, and broadcast around the world.
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“The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that’s just a sliver of what we’re trying to do,” Nagl says. “It solves a problem I don’t have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals.”
Betsy McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, a non-profit working on the critical problem of eliminating hospital infections. I recommend downloading and filing for reference the RID brochure “15 Steps you can take to protect yourself“.
Here is her latest op-ed on hospital performance:
Last month, health inspectors in New York City shut down Serendipity, an upscale ice cream parlor. Though the closing made headlines, it is a common occurrence for less-famous eateries charged with violations like unclean cutting boards and floors, workers who fail to clean their hands, and improper food handling that could lead to bacterial contamination.
Restaurants in New York are inspected, without prior notice, once a year. In Los Angeles, inspections are done three times a year, and restaurants must display their grade near the front door. After L.A. instituted this inspection system in 1998, the number of people sickened by food-borne illnesses fell 13%, according to the Journal of Environmental Health. Other cities are now following L.A.’s lead.
Why aren’t hospitals held to the same rigorous standard? The consequences of inadequate hygiene are far deadlier in hospitals than in restaurants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2,500 people die each year after picking up a food-borne illness in a restaurant or prepared food store. Forty times that number — 100,000 people — die each year, according to the CDC, from infections contracted in health-care facilities.
Data recently published by the Journal of the American Medical Association show that infections from just one type of bacteria — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — kill about twice as many people in the U.S. as previously thought. The finding is based on lab tests, not on what hospitals report. If the same methodology were used to quantify deaths from all hospital infections, the death toll would likely be much larger than 100,000.
These infections are caused largely by unclean hands, inadequately cleaned equipment and contaminated clothing that allow bacteria to spread from patient to patient. In a study released in April, Boston University researchers examining 49 operating rooms at four New England hospitals found that more than half the objects that should have been disinfected were overlooked by cleaners.
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An earlier post on McGaughey: Hospital infections & how you can reduce your risks.
Claims for Environment, Energy Use Draw Fire; Fighting on the Farm
The MSM seems to be waking up to the ethanol scandal — the WSJ [$$] in this case:
Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater U.S. energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. Today, the corn-based biofuel is under siege.
In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question its environmental bona fides and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil.
A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels “offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease.” A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world’s poor.
Last month, an outside expert advising the United Nations on the “right to food” labeled the use of food crops to make biofuels “a crime against humanity,” although the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization later disowned the remark as “regrettable.”
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New and bigger ethanol plants, spurred by money from investors far from the Corn Belt, have contributed to production capacity that’s expected to approach 12 billion gallons next year. But annual U.S. demand stands at just under 7 billion gallons.
So it’s easy to see why the industry supports the Senate version of pending energy legislation, which includes a requirement that gasoline blenders use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. Up to 15 billion gallons of this would come from corn-based ethanol. The rest would come from cellulosic ethanol — an industry that now barely exists — or other fuels. A similar bill passed in the House has no such provision.
Mr. Dinneen, who has been lobbying on ethanol so long he’s known as the “reverend of renewable fuels,” says he’s “reasonably confident” Congress will raise the ethanol mandate. He says he’s talking with the military, labor groups, Southern black churches and others about how ethanol can help them. “We’ve got to build the biggest, baddest coalition we can.”
Baddest coalition indeed! Rather than “a crime against humanity” I would just say “stupid” — a fair categorization of most everything that masquerades as a U.S. energy policy.
Michael Yon emails:
Just returned from the Iraq-Syria border back to Mosul after an interesting day. The progress in Iraq could not be clearer. I’ve never seen so much hope among the Iraqis or our soldiers. U.S. officers and senior NCOs caution me to be careful about sounding too optimistic, but the fact is I have never seen so much optimism in Iraq or about Iraq.
I know they are right about their concerns for setting expectations too high; they know many hard times are ahead. But the fact is I have not personally experienced combat in months, Contrast that to times when we might get into fights several times per day and the optimism seems more grounded.
Had dinner today with a powerful Iraqi Sheik and U.S. soldiers. The food was great, but unfortunately some goat brain was lopped onto my plate. Somehow I ate it without incident.
And Michael’s latest dispatch on his embed with the British.
Americans are captured on surveillance cameras at least 170 times a day mostly without their knowledge. This produces millions of hours of footage revealing the nature of those hidden secrets.
Holman Jenkins comments on what looks to be a fairly sane new film Look [IMDB].
…Barry Schuler, its co-producer, says he began thinking about the subject (surveillance, not sex) in a previous job, as chief executive of AOL, when subpoenas began arriving for access to member emails. Adam Rifkin, the film’s director and screenwriter (previous projects include “Mousehunt” and “Small Soldiers”), had a similar epiphany: He was nailed by a traffic camera for running a red light.
They were, frankly, lucky to get an R rating for their film, a loose-hanging collection of intersecting plotlines portrayed by an ensemble of little-known but interesting actors, whose stories are seen entirely from the perspective of surveillance cameras in ATM machines, high-school parking lots, a department store stockroom, etc.
The characters are mostly unaware their behavior and misbehavior is being recorded. The audience isn’t. Hence the film’s ingenious charm.
Finally, an actual issue is introduced into the U.S. presidential campaign. Could this generate some policy debate?
Imagine a future where the other presidential candidates found they had to offer tax reform at least as good as Thompson’s.
Fred Thompson’s Presidential campaign has been struggling, in part because of a sense that he lacks passion and an agenda. But late last week he unveiled a tax reform that is more ambitious than anything we’ve seen so far from the rest of the GOP field.
Mr. Thompson wants to abolish the death tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax and cut the corporate income tax rate to 27% from 35%. But his really big idea is a voluntary flat tax that would give every American the option of ditching the current code in favor of filing a simple tax return with two tax rates of 10% and 25%.
Mr. Thompson is getting aboard what has become a global bandwagon, with more than 20 nations having adopted some form of flat tax. Most–especially in Eastern Europe–have seen their economies grow and revenues increase as they’ve adopted low tax rates of between 13% and 25% with few exemptions.
The main political obstacle to such a reform in the U.S. has come from liberals, who favor punitive taxes for “class” reasons, and K Street corporate lobbyists who want to retain their tax-loophole empires. The housing and insurance industries, states and localities, charities, bond traders and tax preparers are all foes of low tax rates.
…Mr. Thompson’s plan is based on one introduced by GOP Representatives Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling that is in any case not designed to lose revenue. It is intended to allow federal receipts to grow at the rate of the economy, which would leave them at some 18% or 19% of GDP–roughly their average of recent decades. When critics object to revenue losses, they are really saying that the tax share of GDP should be allowed to rise to 20% and higher, which is where we are headed if the Bush tax rates expire.
We’d prefer a flat tax with one rate instead of Mr. Thompson’s two. Once the concession is made that richer people should pay a higher tax rate, the political temptation is always to raise the rate on the wealthy. The virtue of the single-rate flat tax isn’t merely its efficiency but also its moral component: It treats all taxpayers equally. If a person makes five times more money than his neighbor, he should pay five times more taxes, not 10 or 20 times more.
However, what’s refreshing about the Thompson plan is that it goes well beyond the current Republican mantra to make “the Bush tax cuts permanent.” That is certainly needed, but the GOP also needs a more ambitious agenda, especially with economic growth slowing. The flat tax has the added political benefit of assaulting the special interests who populate the Gucci Gulch outside Congress’s tax-writing committee rooms. Lower rates and simplify the tax code, and you instantly reduce the opportunities for Beltway corruption. It is both a tax policy and political reform.
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A sad story, but unsurprising — the story of the damage done by the media to Eli Lilly the drug prasugrel:
When it comes to describing the benefits and risks of prescription drugs, the hyper-competitive, around-the-clock media is rarely at its best. Call the following a case study in the challenge of doing right by doctors and patients — in spite of the need to feed the media beast with copy.
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The new book “Break Through” looks interesting — based upon this op-ed by Jonathon Adler:
The secretary-general of the United Nations, upon issuing yet another global-warming report a couple of weeks ago, announced that “we are on the verge of a catastrophe.” Kevin Rudd, Australia’s just-elected prime minister, has said that fighting global warming will be his “number one” priority. And Al Gore, propelled by his Nobel Prize, still travels the world to warn of doom. His latest stop was the Caribbean, where earlier this month he told a gathering of the region’s environmental officials that rising seas, the result of melting polar icecaps, would threaten their island paradise.
And yet the public does not seem to feel all that heatedly about the warming of the planet. In survey after survey, American voters say that they care about global warming, but the subject ranks quite low when compared with other concerns (e.g., the economy, health care, the war on terror). Even when Mr. Gore’s Oscar-winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was at the height of its popularity, it did not increase the importance of global warming in the public mind or mobilize greater support for Mr. Gore’s favored remedies–e.g., reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by government fiat. Mr. Gore may seek to make environmental protection civilization’s “central organizing principle,” as he puts it, but there is no constituency for such a regime. Hence even the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates, in their debates, give global warming only cursory treatment, with lofty rhetoric and vague policy proposals.
There is a reason for this political freeze-up. In “Break Through,” Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that Mr. Gore and the broader environmental movement–in which Mr. Gore plays an almost messianic part–remain wedded to an outmoded vision, seeing global warming as “a problem of pollution to be fixed by a politics of limits.” Such a vision may have worked in the early days of environmentalism, when the first clear-air and clean-water regulations were pushed through Congress, but today it cannot mobilize enough public support for dramatic political change.
What is to be done? Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to replace the pollution paradigm with a progressive one. They broached this idea in “The Death of Environmentalism,” a controversial 2004 monograph that ricocheted around the Internet. “Break Through” gives the idea a fuller exposition and even greater urgency. The authors contend that the environmental movement must throw out its “unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies” in favor of something “imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented.”
We are still traveling in Argentina. I’ve put “Break Through” on my library hold request to read when we get back to Bainbridge Island. Or in Hobart…
I always value a history lesson from Bernard Lewis. Here he examines the true history of the Palestinian ‘refugees’.
Herewith some thoughts about tomorrow’s Annapolis peace conference, and the larger problem of how to approach the Israel-Palestine conflict. The first question (one might think it is obvious but apparently not) is, “What is the conflict about?” There are basically two possibilities: that it is about the size of Israel, or about its existence.
If the issue is about the size of Israel, then we have a straightforward border problem, like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas. That is to say, not easy, but possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime.
If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing, and no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether that country should or should not exist.
PLO and other Palestinian spokesmen have, from time to time, given formal indications of recognition of Israel in their diplomatic discourse in foreign languages. But that’s not the message delivered at home in Arabic, in everything from primary school textbooks to political speeches and religious sermons. Here the terms used in Arabic denote, not the end of hostilities, but an armistice or truce, until such time that the war against Israel can be resumed with better prospects for success. Without genuine acceptance of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, as the more than 20 members of the Arab League exist as Arab States, or the much larger number of members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference exist as Islamic states, peace cannot be negotiated.
A good example of how this problem affects negotiation is the much-discussed refugee question. During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.
What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.
The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.
The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation.
The reason for this has been stated by various Arab spokesmen. It is the need to preserve the Palestinians as a separate entity until the time when they will return and reclaim the whole of Palestine; that is to say, all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. The demand for the “return” of the refugees, in other words, means the destruction of Israel. This is highly unlikely to be approved by any Israeli government.
There are signs of change in some Arab circles, of a willingness to accept Israel and even to see the possibility of a positive Israeli contribution to the public life of the region. But such opinions are only furtively expressed. Sometimes, those who dare to express them are jailed or worse. These opinions have as yet little or no impact on the leadership.
Australia’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, outlined his vision for his country in an article he wrote last year for a local political magazine, the Monthly. Riffing off Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 20th century German pastor and theologian, the bookish former bureaucrat decried what he called “rampant individualism.” John Howard’s conservative government, Mr. Rudd argued, had gone too far by liberalizing labor markets and sacrificing “family time” at “the altar of market utility.” Australia needs a new kind of socialism, he said, one that keeps the economy running but simultaneously emphasizes “equity, community and sustainability” and gives “power to the powerless.”
Mr. Rudd’s pitch came at just the right time. Mr. Howard was entering his 11th year as prime minister. The economy was humming along like it hadn’t in a generation, boasting full employment, manageable inflation and 16 years of economic expansion. Why not try something new, Mr. Rudd’s “Kevin ‘07″ campaign asked. “It’s time for a change,” the slogan went.
On Saturday, voters agreed. Mr. Rudd and his Labor Party surged to victory in one of the largest swings against an incumbent government since World War II, winning at least 83 seats in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament. Now the big question is what Mr. Rudd will do with his mandate. The answer lies, in large part, with how much power the prime minister can wield within his own party.
Mr. Rudd is a relative political lightweight compared to his deputy, Julia Gillard, who earned her stripes in the rough and tumble trade union movement. Mr. Rudd, who is 50, is not a career politician. He was elected to Parliament in 1998, joined the front bench in 2001 and was named party leader last November. The Labor Party is underpinned by trade union money and influence, and Mr. Rudd’s brand of socialism is too far right for many. It’s a risky balancing act. If Ms. Gillard’s hard-line socialism prevails, Australia could see trade unions gain power as the global economy is slowing — in other words, just as Australia, the world’s 15th-largest economy, should be liberalizing, not restricting, its domestic markets.
Fortunately, Mr. Rudd is also hemmed in by his campaign promises, particularly on economic policy. In a bid to “reclaim the middle ground” and make Labor electable, Mr. Rudd effectively copied the Howard government’s program of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes and support for free trade. When Mr. Howard announced a 34 billion Australian dollars (US $30 billion) tax-cut plan, Mr. Rudd rolled out a strikingly similar A$31 billion program. Dubbing himself an “economic conservative,” he persuaded voters he’d be a safe pair of hands. If he strays too far toward redistributionist policies, he risks losing public support rapidly.
If trade unions do take control of Australian policy I don’t think a Labor government will last long. <more>
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