Posts in the topic "Military"
Fielding Armor on the Cheap
Posted 07 Apr 10
While the Pentagon spends hundreds of billions on gold-plated aircraft and vast ranks of specialized armor, poorer adversaries are doing just fine with Toyotas.
Asymmetric warfare is uneven not just because a small, light insurgent force can tie up huge armies more or less forever, but because they can do it at much, much less cost. William Owens’ article is a little dry, but it makes the point that anyone can field an effective counterforce with very little money. And not just trucks (though what budget-conscious insurgent wouldn’t prefer an off-the-lot Toyota Hilux to a $150,000 Humvee?) You want, say, tactical missles? No problem:
Even the two most sophisticated weapons systems specified, the ATGMs and MANPADs, are cheap and readily available to almost any state or state supported entity. A number of the older and more conventional weapons systems can be made substantially more effective by simple applications of new technology. For example the 73mm SPG-9 can employ a simple laser range finder, greatly aiding its long-range effectiveness. GPS equipment and surveying can make MRL and mortar attacks much more effective. Relatively simple night sights and equally simple voice communications using low levels of encryption at the tactical level are commonly available from a large number of sources. Longer range digital HF or commercial satellite phones using high-grade laptop based encryption systems are not hard to obtain, given even a relatively small military budget.
When one dollar spent by an opponent can stymie $100 of your expenditures, the war just isn’t going to be won – not easily.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
The Infantryman’s Burden
Posted 01 Mar 10
It’s no secret that US soldiers go into combat with a LOT more personal equipment than they used to. Consider two photos, forty years apart:
It’s mostly armor, of course. And in Iraq, water. Still, even as some items have become lighter — consider the Vietnam field radios, carried by a dedicated radioman, vs. modern electronics — there seem to be more of them.
DefenseTech has an interesting article on this point today. In Afghanistan, where firefights take place across wide ground and at high elevations, the infantryman’s load has become a tactical problem. Moreover, the Taliban figured this out, and have adapted their tactics accordingly: firing at a distance, and moving more rapidly and easily than western forces.
After a description of the Soviets’ response to this same problem in the 80′s, the author makes another point: the US military has been focused on a “platform” response. That means rather than providing soldiers with a lighter, more effective grenade launcher — the Soviets’ solution — we’ve concentrated on big expensive machinery like the Bradley fighting vehicle, or various mounted weapon systems.
This strikes me as an excellent example of why the military-industrial iron triangle is such a problem. Defense companies sell ruinously expensive, overbuilt, wastefully ineffective equipment to an overfunded Pentagon so inefficient it has lost a trillion dollars. At the same time, soldiers on the ground don’t have the cheap, simple tools they need to do their jobs.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
You Can Hire the CIA!
Posted 01 Feb 10
Active CIA personnel are moonlighting - for very nice salaries – at private companies.
So far as we know, they’re not actually engaged in black-bag entry or covert assassination. (For a discussion of the latter — why not knock off your business rivals? — see this Overcoming Bias post. Interestingly, the most obvious reason,”because it’s wrong,” didn’t really enter the comment stream.) Rather, CIA experts in lie detecting are hiring out to hedge funds and the like, to evaluate the truthfulness of statements by competitors and partners.
Why anyone thinks the CIA would be good at this is a question for another day. And at a time when contractors nearly outnumber US soldiers in our two wars, concerns about line-blurring between public and private intelligence may seem quaint.
Still, it seems like a slippery slope. In Russia, a profit-seeking military has become thoroughly corrupt. That’s nothing to emulate.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
CIA Enlists Private Tech to Spy on Interweb
Posted 15 Jan 10
The CIA just increased their investment in a private company whose mission is to eavesdrop on social-networking flow everywhere.
Visible Technologies, which trawls “media, video, images, blogs, Twitter, and any RSS feed in 12 languages” for corporate and government clients, just announced a $22m C round. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is both an original investor and a current participant.
Should this bother you? The company’s position is that public statements are, well, public — no expectation of privacy exists. It’s no different than taking a photograph of someone on the street. Or secretly recording the behavior of people inside a supermarket. Or pointing a video camera at an political demonstration …
Legal, sure, until the collected information is used for political purposes. Like compiling dossiers on elderly peace activists: the police would never do that, would they? Oh, yeah, they would.
But that’s not the point of this post. More interesting to me are the quasi-public VC “firms” the government has set up. Besides In-Q-Tel, the Army has its own, OnPoint Technologies (not to be confused with NPR’s talk radio show), and the DOD has a larger initiative they call DeVenCi — Defense Venture Catalyst Initiative. The latter doesn’t invest directly, but facilitates “communications and mutual understanding between innovators and the DoD.” (The difference between funding, vs. guaranteeing large contract purchases in a way that supports the company, may matter less than results, which are likely to be similar.)
Set aside the politics for a moment. Even if the goals of these programs are worthwhile, we should ask, are they a good way to go about it? Remember: taxpayer dollars at work.
For one thing, the employees are well compensated. Furthermore, at In-Q-Tel a significant portion of their pay depends on the financial success of the investments — not the strategic objectives. Conflict-of-interest problems appear inevitable, as fiduciary responsibilities collide with national security concerns. Suppose Visible Technologies became an acquisition target for a Chinese internet company (which is not unheard of). Should In-Q-Tel partners oppose the sale, against their own (and the taxpayer’s) financial interest?
That’s not a hypothetical. Christopher Byron detailed stock shenanigans by In-Q-Tel a few years ago. In somewhat hyperbolic language,
This week there’s more to report on this fishy, six-year-old firm, which has been pouring a reported $35 million annually of taxpayer money into deals running the gamut from the shrewd to the idiotic. The one common feature of them all: if an investment proves profitable, much of the money flows into the pockets of In-Q-Tel’s own employees; if a deal proves a loser, the nation’s taxpayers get stuck with 100 percent of the loss.
Now, evidence is emerging that In-Q-Tel’s brand of “Heads I win, tails you lose” deal-making may go even further than that. A source familiar with In-Q-Tel’s inner workings claims that once an equity deal with a company is worked out, In-Q-Tel officials routinely begin talking the company up on Capitol Hill to help the new partner land lucrative government contracts. A Newsweek story in March of last year suggested much the same thing, reporting that In-Q-Tel helped one of its investment partners — a Nevada-based software firm called Systems Research and Development — obtain government business.
As usual, the fundamental problem is oversight. If the public, or even just a few competent senators and members of congress, were allowed to keep an eye on what In-Q-Tel and its brethren are up to, Byron would have to find other subjects.
By the way, I should mention that my novel Exit Strategy dealt with a government-intelligence VC operation gone rogue. But that was fiction.
This post indexed as: Crime, Finance, Intelligence, Military, Technology
Battlefield Improvisation
Posted 18 Nov 09
Stories of US soldiers outfitting themselves with non-standard equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan are now commonplace: better boots, thermal socks, even — until recently prohibited — their own body armor. Oakley sunglasses are so popular that counterfeits are sold right on base, out of local concessions.
Blame the size of the military bureaucracy, cumbersome procurement procedures, or the simple vastness of the supply chain. More interesting, in some ways, are the improvisations made by poorer forces. I still remember a photo I saw years ago of a Chadian rebel unit, barreling over the desert in a Chevrolet pickup with an anti-aircraft gun mounted in the bed — a homebuilt anti-tank platform. Of course nowadays the “tacticals,” as they’re still sometimes called in the Horn of Africa, use Toyotas. Bricks stacked in the doors serve for armor; a heavy machine gun goes in the back; and a half-dozen young men in bandannas, carrying AKs, hop in.
An airborne example just showed up on the internet. In 2007 the Lebanese military, attacking a force holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp but lacking jets, turned a Huey helicopter into a bomber.
Asymmetric warfare in particular depends on this sort of re-purposing, at least for the poorer side. IEDs are a much less glamorous example.
This post indexed as: Military, Technology
Armageddon
Posted 10 Nov 09
Someone’s blockbuster plot is assembling itself in Pakistan. Officials are openly talking about the possibility of a coup, or of radicals within the military taking over the country’s nuclear arsenal.
As usual Seymour Hersh has elicited some striking off-the-record comments. From a “Special Forces advisor”:
We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two … The Pakistan military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.
That’s a nice image for the elevator pitch.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military, Writing
DEA, Abroad Again
Posted 10 Nov 09
Twenty years ago, the Drug Enforcement Agency began sending paramilitary teams abroad, to conduct “counter-drug” operations at the source. These efforts, begun during the Reagan administration and known as Operation Snowcap, ended in 1994, after a plane crash in Peru killed five DEA agents.
It turns out the DEA teams were revived and have been back in action for more than five years, in Afghanistan. Known as FAST — “Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams” — the agents seem to be involved in rather more than giving advice. Interestingly, although the DEA is part of the Justice Department, the FAST teams are largely funded and supported by the Pentagon.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
Who’s Who in the IC
Posted 10 Nov 09
I read a British thriller recently that included an American covert-operations team — the usual black-bag stuff, infiltration, assassination, like that. The author must have had a tight deadline, because he made these operatives employees of the National Security Agency.
I guess to a foreign audience that sounded good enough, but of course the NSA doesn’t do any of that. They hire cryptographers and network analysts, not ex-SOF paramilitaries.
But it’s easy to get confused. The US has a vast, sprawling, and almost incomprehensible range of organizations involved in intelligence. Broadly speaking they may be divided into military and “civilian” agencies. The former includes, for example, the DOD’s Special Forces Command, and each service arm’s own intelligence units. The latter houses the CIA, the NSA, and innumerable others. The civilian side alone has a budget in the current fiscal year of nearly $50 billion; the military side is still kept secret. (You can “see” the Military Intelligence Program’s budget, every last line of which is redacted, here.)
The point is that if your plot requires spies and secret agents, there are many, many more choices than Langley. Is the villain smuggling a nuclear bomb in on a container ship? Coast Guard Intelligence could save the day. Is the warhead going the other way — stolen from a US decommissioning operation, for example? The Air Force Office of Special Investigations might be involved. Need someone to run down al-Qaeda’s hawala donors? Your hero could come from Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Financial Analysis. And so forth.
Of course, for many authors (and readers) such background wonkery is unnecessary — give your protagonist some Krav Maga training, stubble and an authority problem, and you’re done. For me, though, it’s a little like firearms. Sure, I could just hand out “pistols” and “rifles” and “MAC-10s” to my characters and let it go. (“MAC-10s” is a joke, you know that, right? A topic for another post …) But readers like more detail than that, so I do the research. It doesn’t take too much time.
Finally, the point of this entire post: the best survey of American spy agencies I know of is Jeffrey Richelson’s The US Intelligence Community. Sure, it’s incomplete; necessarily so, since chairs move around in the bureaucracy faster than Richelson’s 3-4 year revision cycle can keep up with. And plenty of material is available online, if you can sort through the reliability questions. But for an all-in-one reference, this book cannot be beat.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military