The Origins of War
Philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith on the origins of war.
Entries Tagged "war"
Page 2 of 6
Defeating al Qaeda
Rare common sense:
But Gen Richards told the BBC it was not possible to defeat the Taliban or al-Qaeda militarily.
“You can’t. We’ve all said this. David Petraeus has said it, I’ve said it.
“The trick is the balance of things that you’re doing and I say that the military are just about, you know, there.
“The biggest problem’s been ensuring that the governance and all the development side can keep up with it within a time frame and these things take generations sometimes within a time frame that is acceptable to domestic, public and political opinion,” he said.
[…]
Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy told the BBC Gen Richards was “right” that there was no purely military solution and said there would be “no white flag surrender moment”.
“This is a complicated issue. It will be for the long haul. It’s got to do with history.
“But I think he’s right to talk about the different ways that this has got to be taken on – militarily yes but diplomatically and in a peaceful sense of nation building in Afghanistan is also important,” he said.
Statistical Distribution of Combat Wounds to the Head
This is interesting:
The study, led by physician Yuval Ran, looked at Israeli combat deaths from 2000 to 2004 and tracked where bullet entries appeared on the skull (illustrated above), finding that the lower back (occipital region) and front of the temple areas (anterior-temporal regions) were most likely.
I’m not sure it’s useful, but it is interesting.
Ant Warfare
According to Moffett, we might actually learn a thing or two from how ants wage war. For one, ant armies operate with precise organization despite a lack of central command. “We’re accustomed to being told what to do,” Moffett says. “I think there’s something to be said for fewer layers of control and oversight.”
Which, according to Moffett, is what can make human cyberwar and terrorist cells so effective. Battles waged on the web are often “downright ant-like,” with massive, networked groups engaging in strategic teamwork to rise up with little hierarchy. “Such ‘weak ties’ wide-ranging connections that take us beyond the tight-knit groups we interact with regularly—are likely of special importance in organizing both ants and people,” Moffett notes in his book.
WikiLeaks Insurance File
Now this is an interesting development:
In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”
The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site.
It’s either 1.4 Gig of embarrassing secret documents, or 1.4 Gig of random data bluffing. There’s no way to know.
If WikiLeaks wanted to prove that their “insurance” was the real thing, they should have done this:
- Encrypt each document with a separate AES key.
- Ask someone to publicly tell them to choose a random document.
- Publish the decryption key for that document only.
That would be convincing.
In any case, some of the details might be wrong. The file might not be encrypted with AES256. It might be Blowfish. It might be OpenSSL. It might be something else. Some more info here.
EDITED TO ADD (8/9): Weird Iranian paranoia:
An Iranian IT expert warned here on Wednesday that a mysterious download file posted by the WikiLeaks website, labeled as ‘Insurance’, is likely a spy software used for identifying the information centers of the United States’ foes.
“The mysterious file of the WikiLeaks might be a trap for intelligence gathering,” Hossein Mohammadi told FNA on Wednesday.
The expert added that the file will attract US opponents and Washington experts can identify their enemy centers by monitoring individuals’ or organizations’ tendency and enthusiasm for the file.
TacSat-3 "Hyperspectral" Spy Satellite
It’s operational:
The idea of hyperspectral sensing is not, however, merely to “see” in the usual sense of optical telescopes, infrared nightscopes and/or thermal imagers. This kind of detection is used on spy satellites and other surveillance systems, but it suffers from the so-called “drinking straw effect”—that is, you can only view a small area in enough detail to pick out information of interest. It’s impossible to cover an entire nation or region in any length of time by such means; you have to know where to look in advance.
Hyperspectral imaging works differently. It’s based on the same principle as the spectrometry used in astronomy and other scientific fields – that some classes of objects and substances will emit a unique set of wavelengths when stimulated by energy. In this case, everything on the surface below the satellite is being stimulated by sunlight to emit its unique spectral fingerprint.
By scanning across a wide spectrum all at once across a wide area, it’s then possible to use a powerful computer to crunch through all wavelengths coming from all points on the surface below (the so-called “hyperspectral cube”, made up of the full spectrum coming from all points on a two-dimensional surface).
If the sensor is good enough and the computer crunching powerful and discriminating enough, the satellite can then identify a set of points on the surface where substances or objects of interest are to be found, and supply map coordinates for these. This is a tiny amount of data compared to the original “hyperspectral cube” generated by ARTEMIS and crunched by the satellite’s onboard processors, and as such it can be downloaded to a portable ground terminal (rather than a one with a big high-bandwidth dish). Within ten minutes of the TacSat passing overhead, laptop-sized ROVER ground terminals can be marking points of interest on a map for combat troops nearby.
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting:
Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to “capture” the federal government—to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn’t—and doesn’t—look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete—and therefore more useful—definition of the term.
The link to his talk is broken, unfortunately.
EDITED TO ADD (12/15): Video here. Thanks, mcb.
Monopoly Sets for WWII POWs: More Information
I already blogged about this; there’s more information in this new article:
Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.
The British secret service conspired with the U.K. manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.
Terrorist Havens
Good essay on “terrorist havens”—like Afghanistan—and why they’re not as big a worry as some maintain:
Rationales for maintaining the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan are varied and complex, but they all center on one key tenet: that Afghanistan must not be allowed to again become a haven for terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda.
[…]
The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.
In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.
By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.