Entries Tagged "military"

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Israeli Barrier Around Gaza

Putting aside geopolitics for a minute (whether I call it a “wall” or a “fence” is a political decision, for example), it’s interesting to read the technical security details about the barrier the Israelis built around Gaza:

Remote control machine guns, robotic jeeps, a double fence, ditches and pillboxes along with digitally-linked commanders are all part of the IDF’s new 60-kilometer layered protection around the Gaza Strip.

[…]

The army has set up a large swath of land around the Strip for placing barbed wire coils, an electronic fence, and two patrol roads named Hoovers Alef and Hoovers Bet. There will also be a third patrol road a few hundred meters from the fence. All the land was “purchased” from the border settlements by the Defense Ministry. The army said it would allow farmers to work some of the land if possible.

Besides the barriers, the army has relocated over 50 cement pillboxes from their location inside the Gaza Strip to the new border. Some of these will be equipped with 50-caliber machine guns with laser sights that can be fired from control rooms equipped with monitors and radar along the border.

[…]

The IDF is also taking into account that the Palestinians may try to dig tunnels under the fence, but would not elaborate on steps it was taking to thwart such action.

In Beyond Fear pages 207-8, I wrote about the technical details of the Berlin Wall. This is far more sophisticated.

Posted on September 12, 2005 at 11:32 AM • View Comments

Peggy Noonan and Movie-Plot Terrorist Threats

Peggy Noonan is opposed to the current round of U.S. base closings because, well, basically because she thinks they’ll be useful if the government ever has to declare martial law.

I don’t know anything about military bases, and what should be closed or remain open. What’s interesting to me is that her essay is a perfect example of thinking based on movie-plot threats:

Among the things we may face over the next decade, as we all know, is another terrorist attack on American soil. But let’s imagine the next one has many targets, is brilliantly planned and coordinated. Imagine that there are already 100 serious terror cells in the U.S., two per state. The members of each cell have been coming over, many but not all crossing our borders, for five years. They’re working jobs, living lives, quietly planning.

Imagine they’re planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months—food shortages, fuel shortages.

Let’s make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.

Impossibly grim? No, just grim. Novelistic? Sure. But if you’d been a novelist on Sept. 10, 2001, and dreamed up a plot in which two huge skyscrapers were leveled, the Pentagon was hit, and the wife of the solicitor general of the United States was desperately phoning him from a commercial jet that had been turned into a missile, you would have been writing something wild and improbable that nonetheless happened a day later.

And all this of course is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless possibilities for terrible trouble.

This game of “let’s imagine” really does stir up emotions, but it’s not the way to plan national security policy. There’s a movie plot to justify any possible national policy, and another to render that same policy ineffectual.

This of course is pure guessing on my part. I can’t prove it with data.

That’s precisely the problem.

Posted on August 26, 2005 at 11:37 AM • View Comments

U.S. Government Computers Attacked from China

From the Washington Post:

Web sites in China are being used heavily to target computer networks in the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies, successfully breaching hundreds of unclassified networks, according to several U.S. officials.

Classified systems have not been compromised, the officials added. But U.S. authorities remain concerned because, as one official said, even seemingly innocuous information, when pulled together from various sources, can yield useful intelligence to an adversary….

“The scope of this thing is surprisingly big,” said one of four government officials who spoke separately about the incidents, which stretch back as far as two or three years and have been code-named Titan Rain by U.S. investigators. All officials insisted on anonymity, given the sensitivity of the matter.

Whether the attacks constitute a coordinated Chinese government campaign to penetrate U.S. networks and spy on government databanks has divided U.S. analysts. Some in the Pentagon are said to be convinced of official Chinese involvement; others see the electronic probing as the work of other hackers simply using Chinese networks to disguise the origins of the attacks.

Posted on August 26, 2005 at 7:59 AM • View Comments

Caches of Explosives Hidden in Moscow

Here’s a post-Cold War risk that I hadn’t considered before:

Construction workers involved in building a new hotel just across from the Kremlin were surprised to find 250 kg of TNT buried deep beneath the old Moskva Hotel that had just been demolished to make way for a new one. Police astonished Muscovites further when they said that the 12 boxes of explosives lodged in the basement could have been there for half a century.

And now, new evidence points to the possibility that Moscow could be dotted with such explosive caches—planted by the secret police in the early days of World War II.

Posted on August 4, 2005 at 7:58 AM • View Comments

Thinking About Suicide Bombers

Remember the 1996 movie Independence Day? One of the characters was a grizzled old fighter pilot who had been kidnapped and degraded by the alien invaders years before. He flew his plane into the alien spaceship when his air-to-air missile jammed, causing the spaceship to explode. Everybody in the movie, as well as the audience, considered this suicide bomber a hero.

What’s the difference?

Partly it’s which side you’re rooting for, but mostly it’s that the pilot defended his planet by attacking the invaders. Terrorism targets innocents, and no one is a hero for killing innocents. Killing people who are invading and occupying your planet—or country—can be heroic, as can sacrificing yourself in the process.

This is an interesting observation in light of the previous post, where a professor makes the observation that the motivation of suicide terrorism is to repel what is perceived to be an occupation force.

What are the lessons here for Iraq? I think there are three. One, the insurgents (or whatever we’re calling them these days) would do best by attacking military targets and not civilian ones. Two, the coalition forces (or whatever we’re calling them these days) need to do everything they can not to be perceived as invaders or occupiers. And three, the terrorists should try to advance a worldview where there are no innocents, only invaders and occupiers. To the extent that the bombing victims are perceived to be invaders and occupiers, those who kill them defending their country will be viewed as heroic by the people.

There are no lessons for London. There was no invasion. Every victim was an innocent. No one should consider the terrorists heroes.

Posted on July 18, 2005 at 2:47 PM • View Comments

Causes of Suicide Terrorism

Here’s an absolutely fascinating interview with Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor who has studied every suicide terrorist attack since 1980.

RP: This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

….TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

….TAC: If you were to break down causal factors, how much weight would you put on a cultural rejection of the West and how much weight on the presence of American troops on Muslim territory?

RP: The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism.

If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.

….TAC: Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders also talked about the “Crusaders-Zionist alliance,” and I wonder if that, even if we weren’t in Iraq, would not foster suicide terrorism. Even if the policy had helped bring about a Palestinian state, I don’t think that would appease the more hardcore opponents of Israel.

RP: I not only study the patterns of where suicide terrorism has occurred but also where it hasn’t occurred. Not every foreign occupation has produced suicide terrorism. Why do some and not others? Here is where religion matters, but not quite in the way most people think. In virtually every instance where an occupation has produced a suicide-terrorist campaign, there has been a religious difference between the occupier and the occupied community.

….TAC: Has the next generation of anti-American suicide terrorists already been created? Is it too late to wind this down, even assuming your analysis is correct and we could de-occupy Iraq?

RP: Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop—and often on a dime.

Pope recently published a book, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Here’s a review.

UPDATED TO ADD: Salon reviewed the book.

Posted on July 18, 2005 at 8:10 AM • View Comments

The Adaptability of Iraqi Insurgents

This Newsweek article on the insurgents in Iraq includes an interesting paragraph on how they adapt to American military defenses.

Counterinsurgency experts are alarmed by how fast the other side’s tactics can evolve. A particularly worrisome case is the ongoing arms race over improvised explosive devices. The first IEDs were triggered by wires and batteries; insurgents waited on the roadside and detonated the primitive devices when Americans drove past. After a while, U.S. troops got good at spotting and killing the triggermen when bombs went off. That led the insurgents to replace their wires with radio signals. The Pentagon, at frantic speed and high cost, equipped its forces with jammers to block those signals, accomplishing the task this spring. The insurgents adapted swiftly by sending a continuous radio signal to the IED; when the signal stops or is jammed, the bomb explodes. The solution? Track the signal and make sure it continues. Problem: the signal is encrypted. Now the Americans are grappling with the task of cracking the encryption on the fly and mimicking it—so far, without success. Still, IED casualties have dropped, since U.S. troops can break the signal and trigger the device before a convoy passes. That’s the good news. The bad news is what the new triggering system says about the insurgents’ technical abilities.

The CIA is worried that Iraq is becoming a far more effective breeding ground for terrorists than Afghanistan ever was, because they get real-world experience with urban terrorist-style combat.

Edited to add: Link fixed.

Posted on June 25, 2005 at 7:30 AM • View Comments

Disarming Soldiers

Airplane security is getting surreal:

…FAA regulation that requires soldiers—all of whom were armed with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns and pistols—to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted on June 20, 2005 at 3:04 PM • View Comments

Battlefield RFID Listening Rocks

From the Financial Times:

The US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants.

The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft. The project is being carried out by scientists at North Dakota State University, which has licensed nano-technology processes from Alien Technology, a California-based commercial manufacturer of RFID tags for supermarkets.

This kind of thing has been discussed for a while. One of the best discussions is still Martin Libicki’s paper from the mid-1990s, “The Mesh and the Net: Speculations on Armed Conflict in a Time of Free Silicon.” (It’s available as a book, and online.)

Posted on June 2, 2005 at 8:14 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.