Reason Magazine - Topics > National Defense

If It's OK for Navy SEALs, Why Not College Kids?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:57:00 EDT

Slate's William Saletan sized up the Pentagon's Human Performance study and concluded that fears of genetically enhanced super humans are unfounded. Unless, of course, there's something scary about arming soldiers to the teeth and then keeping them awake for three days:

[The study]involved tests of the effects of caffeine on performance for a group of Navy SEALs, following 72 hours of intense training activity with almost total sleep deprivation. A variety of metrics were used, including computer-based tests of reaction speed and mental acuity, psychiatric self-assessment surveys, and marksmanship tests. The test was to determine the optimal caffeine dose to ameliorate the effects of fatigue and stress.

The authors of the report do their best to avoid openly condoning the use of amphetamines without a prescription, with disclaimers like this one:

The use of supplements, primarily to ameliorate sleep deprivation and to improve physical performance, is report[ed] to be common among US military personnel. This behavior is a cultural norm in the US and is recognized, but not endorsed, by the US military. For instance the PX at most military bases stock popular supplements.

But as Saletan points out, it's tricky to condemn amphetamine use when it works so well. This is one instance where the military is a little behind the curve. Attention deficit medications work much better than caffeine does when pulling an all-nighter, as reason contributor Juliet Samuel explained here.

Still unable to dismiss your fears of a military state maintained by superhuman mech warriors? Me too.

Porkbusters of the World, Unite!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:45:00 EDT

Remember that whole War on Earmarks thing from last year? Well, so much for that.

Lawmakers had promised to cut back on earmarks and mandated better disclosure of them after steady criticism that they were funding programs with little debate or oversight. The promises led to an initial decline in earmarks last year that was trumpeted on Capitol Hill. But the new data show that they are surging again, at least in the proposed Pentagon authorization budget, which sets out priorities to be funded in a later appropriations bill. [...]
Requests include $204,000 for an infantry platoon battle course from Sens. Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both Arkansas Democrats; $2.2 million for nanofluids for advanced military mobility from Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky); $98 million for a Northrop Grumman project to develop an aircraft sensor suite, from Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Mel Martinez (R-Fla.).
Chambliss was a part of another bipartisan group of lawmakers who also requested allocating $497 million to United Technologies, Lockheed Martin and Pratt; Whitney for "advanced procurement or line close down costs," the watchdog group's data show.
Funding for an indoor small-arms range in Connecticut? It's in there too, at $11 million, care of Sens. Lieberman and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).

All of which illustrates that you can scream about busting pork until you're blue in the face, but as long as we're spending trillions on defense with unprecedentedly lax oversight, every new defense authorization and "emergency supplemental" will be a grotesque festival of government waste.

Blog It, Soldier!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:12:00 EDT

A small victory for openness from a surprising quarter:

At one of the Army's leading intellectual hubs..., the commanding general there has directed his troops to start blogging. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who heads the Combined Arms Center [CAC] and Ft. Leavenworth, told his soldiers in a recent memo that "faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. ...
Lt. Gen. Caldwell, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is a blogger himself, contributing to Small Wars Journal. He made waves in January when he wrote that "we must encourage our Soldiers to... get onto blogs and to send their YouTube videos to their friends and family."

Of course, this is goes against the military's current official position. Remember the YouTube ban on military networks? There's even a mini campaign inside the military at the moment, along the lines of the old "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters, reminding soldiers that blogging can compromise security.

But my bet is that Lt. Gen. Caldwell's way of thinking will win out in the end. The idea, he says, is "telling the Army’s story to a wide and diverse audience." More openness, not less, will reconnect the average American with the average soldier--something pro- and anti-war factions should both want to see, each for their own reasons.

Why not have a few classes reminding soldiers not to post sensitive material (and reminding them what "sensitive material" includes) and then let 'em have at it?

Via Danger Room

"I'm not saying I'm depending on Maxim to keep me alive over there, but it helps"

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:58:00 EDT

Does Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) hate our troops? If not, then why is he trying to ban morale-boosting men's magazines from U.S. military bases? From Stars & Stripes:

A Department of Defense committee that reviews materials sold on bases ruled last year that magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse are not pornographic. But Broun's Military Honor and Decency Act includes language that could make those magazines eligible for the ban.

[...]

"They're making it a point of undermining soldiers to almost make them feel like we're back in elementary school," Pfc. Nickolas Sears said Friday at Camp Red Cloud, South Korea. "We're all adults here, and if it's something we want to do, we should feel free to choose as we please."

(Link via The Weekly Standard)

UPDATE: Senior Editor Radley Balko already targeted his sights on Broun's bill.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The New York Sun's Alternative Take on the Big Apple

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

...

"Is It Too Late for the GOP to Dump McCain?"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:35:00 EDT

That's the question that the Newark Star-Ledger's Paul Mulshine is asking after talking to one Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. From Mulshine's col:

"Since about 1997 or 1998, he has lost all skepticism of the use of U.S. military power, period," said Welch when I got him on the phone yesterday. "He has been totally consistent since then that the answer to any military question is more boots on the ground."
To that end, McCain wants to increase the size of the military overall by 150,000 troops and of course wants to "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," as he so musically put it. But McCain has no idea how to pay for all the military action that will get his mug on Mount Rushmore alongside his hero Teddy Roosevelt.
On domestic affairs as well, says Welch, the earlier version of McCain was a lot more reasonable. As late as his 2000 campaign for president, he was arguing that the next president should deal with such prosaic problems as the debts for Social Security and Medicare.
"McCain would have been more suited to the time of 2000 and might not have done many of the things Bush did," says Welch. "Maybe his tenor was the tenor we were looking for after Sept. 11, 2001. But I don't think it's the tenor we're looking for after 2008."
The funny part, as Welch notes, is that it wasn't really Republicans who nominated McCain. He failed to win even a plurality of Republican votes in the crucial early primaries. The votes of Democrats and independents gave him that insurmountable lead in a crowded field.

The whole col on McCain here.

No Boobs on Base. Except When Paul Broun Visits.

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:01:00 EDT

Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., (profiled by Dave Weigel here) wants to ban the sale of Playboy on military bases.

“Allowing sale of pornography on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad,” Broun said.
Broun said he wants to bring the Defense Department into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law “so that taxpayers will not be footing the costs of distributing pornography.”

Except taxpayers aren't actually funding it:

Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations.

Which triggered this stunner from Broun's office:

But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved — “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.

That line of argument would open up all sorts of other possibilities.

Mi Visa Es Su Visa

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:48:00 EDT

Travel abroad much? Get ready to leave your fingerprints all over the world:

The U.S. government today will order commercial airlines and cruise lines to prepare to collect digital fingerprints of all foreigners before they depart the country under a security initiative that the industry has condemned as costly and burdensome. [...]
"If we don't have US-VISIT air exit by this time next year, it will only be because the airline industry killed it," [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff said recently. "We have to decide who is going to win this fight. Is it going to be the airline industry, or is it going to be the people who believe we should know who leaves the country by air?"

The exit fingerprints come on top of the new 10-finger entry prints being rolled out this year, which is estimated to expand the 90-million strong foreigner-fingerprint database by more than 20 million a year (the DHS says it will keep the prints on file for 75 years).

But wait, we're just talking about foreigners, right? Fat chance:

Other countries are also joining the biometric bandwagon. Japan last year began collecting some fingerprints when foreign visitors enter the country and the European Union is considering it. These countries are also talking about sharing these databases.

Already, more than 160,000 U.S. citizens have applied for newly required ID cards, featuring Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips, to travel to Western Hemisphere destinations that previously accepted common driver's licences. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who never needed passports before now have them.

As in all things immigrational and consular, there is no such thing as unilateral armament, though the U.S. does get to play harder ball with smaller countries due to its size and power. In the words of French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, "We are open to some demands, but we want reciprocity." And since the U.S. just signed deals with the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia and Malta to get these formerly dodgy countries within shouting distance of the reciprocal "Visa Waiver" program in exchange for onerous security and privacy concessions that the existing Visa Waiver countries (like France) probably wouldn't accept, expect the EU to make more and more noise about how full biometric data collection for its Grand Canyon-visiting citizens amounts to the same as, well, a visa.

The upshot is that immigration restrictionists (particularly those motivated by security concerns) will continue getting what they want -- in this case, a trigger mechanism for hunting down furriners who overstay their visas, which is either the largest or second-largest category of illegal immigrants in the United States. The bad news is threefold: As Kerry Howley said yesterday, when restrictionists win, the economy loses. As James Bovard said in our February 2004 cover story, database management and point-of-entry security mandated by Washington can be an ugly thing.

And as I've been trying to say for years, whatever we impose on the world, the world will get around to imposing on us. It's getting increasingly hard to believe that there once was a time you could get a one-way stand-by plane ticket to Europe without ever attracting undue attention or entering a gargantuan database, and then slip entirely off the grid, ignoring whatever pointless and short-lasting visa (or spending) requirements they talked about in the Let's Go book. Are we much (or at all) safer after having traded that liberty in?

Putting the "Oh?" in O.S.S.

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:36:00 EDT

One of John McCain's many curious foreign policy initiatives is his desire to launch a new Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in order get more civilian shoulders on the wheel of the shadowy War Against Islamic Nutjobbers. The OSS was FDR's wartime intel & covert-ops shop; after the war it was disbanded, then basically re-formed as the CIA.

Why do we need a CIA and an OSS? Beats me. More importantly, what does the this-is-why-I-love-the-Internet site OSS Reborn say about it? "[N]ot without merit; but there are significant obstacles."

Whole thing worth a read for you Wild Bill Donovan fans out there.

Iraq at Five Years

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Editor's Note: With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, reason staffers look at where they were when the shooting began in 2003—and where they are now. In 2006, reason published an "Iraq Progress Report," in which "advocates for liberty weigh in after three years" and the June 2006 cover story featured three views on "'Mission Accomplished,' Three Years Later." For an archive of reason's Iraq coverage, go here.

Radley Balko, Senior Editor:

In the lead-up to the war, I was suspicious of the Bush administration's assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, dubious that the federal government is capable of building a liberal society in Iraq from scratch, and in general opposed to the idea of attacking a country that had no discernible ties to the September 11 attacks. Like most people, my positions were based on the assumption that there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That we now know there weren't only makes the decision to go to war more regrettable. My position hasn't changed at all.
As for what we should do now, I really can't see any option other than a plan to withdraw troops as soon as possible. Yes, it will be disastrous. But it seems to me this is a pill we're either going to have to swallow now or later, the difference being that swallowing it later will only mean more U.S. casualties in the meantime. We can't pay the Sunnis not to attack us forever (or maybe we can, but we shouldn't). The New York Times mentioned a striking figure in an editorial the other day. For all the talk about pork barrel spending, the total amount of federal spending in all congressional earmarks combined would fund the war in Iraq for about two months. This has been a colossal waste of blood, treasure, and global goodwill.
It's worth noting that it was the crazy, wild-eyed libertarian foreign policy experts who predicted what would happen in Iraq almost to the letter. Yet for reasons that escape me, the neoconservatives who got everything so massively wrong are still taken seriously, and get huge platforms from which to denigrate opponents of the war as "unserious."

Nick Gillespie, Editor, reason.tv and reason online:

After almost 4,000 U.S. deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and trillions of dollars poured into the desert sands, Americans have gone from "shock and awe" to something approaching "Aw, shucks." According to data from the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank often credited with providing intellectual grounding for the Iraq War, 59 percent of Americans say the war was a mistake and 60 percent want a timetable for pulling troops out. Given a similar percentage favored invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, that just might be too little, too late.
I was never in favor of invading Iraq, which I thought was a bait and switch from the 9/11 attacks engineered by a Bush administration whose "War on Terror" had run out of steam given its inability to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. When U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein (a man who makes me want to believe in hell, just so he can get what he deserves for all eternity), the Americans hubristically pulled a page from the playbook of Shelley's overreaching Ozymandias, and replaced one "colossal wreck" of a regime with another. It's incredibly dispiriting how arrogant and stupid the U.S. forces were when it came to losing the peace, but really, more of us should have seen it coming.
The question I worry about is what American foreign policy will look like five years hence. I'm not a pacifist, and I don't think that military intervention is always a bad thing (ideally, it should be used like Astroglide: sparingly and after a lot of foreplay). But I don't think we've learned very much as a country from the Iraq mess, other than not to rely too much on retreads from the Ford administration to call the shots. I certainly don't think John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, much less their advisors, have learned much from recent mistakes. Some of them are more ready to bow down to popular opinion but really, that's no way to conduct foreign policy. As a country, we're still a long way away from even starting a conversation that will yield a post-Cold War consensus on how the U.S. should act as a military power. That's not just a bad thing, it really dishonors those who have sacrificed life and limb over the past five years.

Kerry Howley, Senior Editor:

I don't remember where I was when the war started, or when the war turned one, or two, or three, or four. I was in college for the flashy beginning, in Burma for much of the following two years, where the war presented itself as a daily collage of gruesome black and white pictures in the junta's state press. The quality of the print was so bad that many of the pictures just looked smudged. You had to look for the black spaces, and imagine blood.
When I came back, the war was as it is now-hard to imagine and easy to ignore. Every liberty lost here is an abstraction. I have only the vaguest idea of what Nisour Square looks like; my image of Fallujah consists of charred bodies hanging from a single bridge. I can't fathom what it means for a collective to have lost 100,000 people prematurely, or for a state to waste $2 trillion it does not have. Few people I know have ventured out of the Green Zone, and no one I know has been hurt. What do I think about the Iraq War as it enters its sixth year? I think it seems tragic and brutal and criminal, and very far away.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Associate Editor:

In March 2003, I was just a few months out of college and I had already helped start a war.
My first journalism gig was as the pet libertarian at The Weekly Standard, the neocon home base generally credited with nudging the Bush administration into Iraq.
It's quite exciting to inaugurate a war, and we at the Standard were far from alone in feeling the thrill. Like much of the pro-war commentariat, I thought, "Whatever happens, it can't get worse." After all, what's worse than a genocidal dictator filling mass graves and stockpiling nukes in the volatile Middle East? (Belief in WMDs was robustly bipartisan at the time.) There even seemed to be a decent chance things would get a whole lot better-an oasis of freedom in a desert of tyranny and all that. My colleagues at the Standard and I supported the war with the best intentions, something that opponents of the war often lose sight of. We dreamed of a free, friendly Iraq. Better for us, better for Iraqis.
As a libertarian, I could have and should have known better than to think government actors would get things right, since my political philosophy is grounded in the idea that government is uniquely bad at getting anything done cheaply or efficiently. War is too often a classic example of government action creating waste and confusion on a spectacular scale, good intentions or not.
As it turns out, things could get worse—and they did.

Michael C. Moynihan, Associate Editor:

Anniversaries of catastrophic wars are typically moments of ritual self-flagellation. So what, then, was I wrong about, what have I changed my mind about, five years later? Where does one begin. In those years proceeding the 9/11 attacks, one was forced, often by the social obligation of dinner discussions, to wade into the swamp of Middle Eastern politics; to be pro-war or anti-war, regardless of your level of political engagement or knowledge.
Groping at the unfamiliar—which ones are the Sunnis? what is a Kurd, exactly?—the post-9/11 cult of the amateur (myself included) rebelled against the supposedly lazy and corrupt "MSM," and instead offered endless lunkheaded comparisons between 2003 Iraq and 1945 Japan. The insurgency that flowered, many bloggers blithely suggested, had its historical antecedents in the Werewolf Organization, a band of former Nazis that harassed Allied occupiers and quickly melted away. The Iraqis, brutalized by war and dictatorship, were ready to have a go at democracy. Of course, none of this would happen.
The best mirror of my bewilderment and disappointment is George Packer's brilliant book The Assassins Gate, a clear-eyed account of the stupidity and venality of those sent by the Bush administration to mismanage the occupation. As one CPA advisor told me in 2006, Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was known inside the green zone as "Kick Back and Relax." And as Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran's noted with wonderment, James K. Haveman Jr., the official put in charge of Iraq's health care system, landed in Baghdad and launched an anti-smoking campaign. I suppose this is something I always knew, just something that I hoped wouldn't be true in this one case, but boy was I wrong in thinking that the U.S. government could ever achieve a level of honesty and competence needed to even try to promote democracy in an undemocratic region.

Jacob Sullum, Senior Editor:

I was against the war before I was even more against it. I never had any doubts that Saddam Hussein was a murderous thug, but I believed he was a deterrable murderous thug. So even when I assumed he had at least some "weapons of mass destruction," I did not think the threat was big and imminent enough to justify the invasion. Now that we know he had none, I'm embarrassed that I gave as much weight as I did to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations. I'm only slightly less embarrassed about my warning that Iraq surely would use its dreaded (but nonexistent) chemical weapons once the U.S. invaded. Here is the truth starting to dawn on me, right after the fall of Baghdad: "Could it be that Iraq never had a significant WMD capability?" I added that it might not matter, since "even before jubilant Iraqis started pouring into the streets, waving improvised flags and tearing down Saddam's statues, ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom' had metamorphosed from a pre-emptive act of self-defense into a humanitarian mission to rescue people from a brutal dictator."
People who supported the war assure me the Bush administration made the argument about fighting terrorism by turning Iraq into a liberal democracy and thereby transforming the Middle East even before the WMDs went missing. My impression during the lead-up to the invasion was that it was all about neutralizing the WMD threat, since Saddam could decide any day to use those weapons against us, either directly or by passing them on to terrorists. If I had believed the aim was to make the world safe through democracy, which I now hear was the idea all along, I would have been even more skeptical, and I think most Americans would have been as well. I doubt that many who supported the war imagined the U.S. would still have such a large presence in Iraq five years later, let alone that it would have to stay indefinitely simply to prevent the chaos unleashed by the invasion from getting even worse.

Jesse Walker, Managing Editor:

In 2003 I thought there was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, even if the country held weapons of mass destruction; that the U.S. would easily topple Saddam Hussein's regime but would run into serious troubles when the occupation began; and that the war would do much more harm than good.
Five years later, I am less likely to concede the possibility that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

David Weigel, Associate Editor:

Do you remember the pro-war protestors? I was one of them. Five years ago a pack of conservatives at my college planned a "crash" of the final anti-war rally before the start of the war. When the forces of non-intervention set up on the library steps and started speaking, we walked right in front of them, blasting the Saddam Hussein love ballad from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut on a ROTC student's boom box.

I have excuses for all of this. I was 21. My expertise in American interventionism came from watching Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo reports on CNN. I had friends in the Army. I wanted to "free the Iraqi people." The takeaway is that, like millions of people, I was naive and uninformed about the doings in Mesopotamia and I did my little part to enable a catastrophe.

Matt Welch, Editor in Chief, reason magazine:

I was neither for nor against the war when it was launched, though most of the stuff I was worried about ended up coming true (especially "we will create a damned-if-we-do scenario unless we start looking for creative ways to devolve power and responsibility to the rest of the world").
But the mere fact of that ambivalence points to what's changed most about my thinking since then. Until five years ago, the prior three major U.S. interventions -- the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo—each went quite a bit better than the skeptics predicted. In the same way that almost all past U.S. presidents end up looking good in retrospect (to somebody, anyway), while history marches toward a better future, my hunch was that the pattern would hold true to our post-Vietnam wars as well. No more.
Because of the magnetic logic of perpetual interventionism (on both sides of the political aisle); the strategic problem of anti-Americanism, the temptation of inapt historical analogies and the way that power wants to be corrupt, I have gone from a guy who begged for U.S. leadership in a feckless world to stop the slaughter in Sarajevo, to someone whose primary voting motivation is to provide a check on America's expansion of responsibility for the world's affairs.

Michael Young, Contributing Editor, reason; Opinion Page Editor, Lebanon Daily Star:

The assumption that our thoughts should have changed on Iraq is presumptuous. Certainly, the Bush administration's abysmal postwar strategy until the surge last year invites a critical reassessment of what could have been done for the better. But what does not, and should not, is the bottom line of the war: the fact that the United States managed to remove one of the world's worst mass murderers from power, so that today 55 percent of Iraqis believe that their lives are good, according to a recent poll—including 62 percent of Shiites and 73 percent of Kurds.
The thing with conflicts is that they can be like that old joke about the man who swims halfway across the ocean, only to swim back to where he left from because he's tired. Is the U.S. halfway across the ocean of the Iraq war? Would swimming back to the departure point be a pointless waste of expended energy, so that persisting in Iraq would bring more dividends? It's difficult to say. The gross blunder of the administration was to leave such questions without answers. But it is difficult to justify retreat from Iraq a year into tangible signs of progress thanks to the surge.
Those who back an American withdrawal on the grounds that Iraq is already in a state of chaos don't know what they're talking about. The Moloch of uninhibited chaos and carnage would be infinitely worse, as I remember from my own experiences growing up during Lebanon's civil war. For numerous reasons—the fate of the Iraqis after a pullout, Iran's continuing rise as regional superpower, the future of the Kurds, the threat to regional stability—the U.S. has no choice but to stick it out in Iraq. And as the doubts creep in, Americans might want to think back to what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein, who in two decades was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of nearly 1 million people.
So, sorry, but invading Iraq was the right thing to do, even if it could have been done a million times better by a more competent group of people. When I think of Iraq, somehow I have no profound problem slamming George W. Bush's faults while welcoming what he did to the Baath regime—the barbaric, genocidal, thankfully bygone Baath regime.

Air Force News Flash: "Cold War Has Given Way to Cyberwar."

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:58:00 EST

The Air Force has been feeling neglected lately, since they're not very visible in Iraq and Afghanistan. They faced two options: (1) Do their (important) jobs quietly and be glad they're not getting blown up, or (2) launch a major ad campaign reminding America that they are in charge of Air, Space, and Cyberspace. (No word on whether they had to squabble for jurisdiction with the Department of Transportation over the Information Superhighway.) They chose option (2) for the low, low price of $81 million over the next two years.

I know this, because this morning I was innocently trying to read Slate.com when the screen blacked out. Then a logo appeared. It was Air Force, reminding me that this time it was just my friendly neighborhood Air Force deploying an annoying new kind of pop up ad, but next time it could be a "cyber attack." It was a (very) slow day at Slate (except this excellent piece), so I bailed and clicked through on the Air Force ad.

The centerpiece of the campaign's page is a series of stuttery, balky videos showing about how the Air Force is protecting us in "a changing world": "You used to need an army to wage war. Now all you need in an Internet connection." According to the first video, "the Cold War has given way to cyberwar." Who knew? Note: the visual for "cyberwar" in several of the videos is a newspaper story about an attack on Estonia. But whatever.

I'd post the video here, but the people tasked with defending cyberspace didn't offer me the kind of options that come standard with YouTube. In fact, I can't even link to particular videos directly. Also, anyone who uses the word "cyber" as a prefix this often is probably still hanging out somewhere in the late '90s.

I realize we can't assume that the technological and verbal backwardness of the ad agency in charge of this campaign reflects what's really happening inside the Air Force's "cyber defense" arm. But it's terribly not reassuring about the brass who approved this campaign.

They've mastered the art of the pointless Internet poll, though: A poll on the home page asks "Do you believe cyberwar is a possibility?" At post time, 84 percent of respondents say "Yes." Yikes.

Open-Source Warfare

info@reason.com (Jim Henley) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 224 pages, $24.95

At the end of Alfred Bester’s 1956 science fiction novel The Stars My Destination, protagonist and anti-hero Gully Foyle broadcasts the secret of PyrE to every man, woman, and child on the planet. PyrE, the ultimate “weapon of mass destruction,” is compact and unimaginably powerful, and it can be detonated with but a thought. Foyle’s government calls him “insane,” but he says humanity will survive the knowledge of PyrE if it deserves to: “Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?”

In Brave New War, John Robb informs us that Foyle’s future is fast approaching. “The threshold necessary for small groups to conduct warfare has finally been breached,” Robb writes, “and we are only starting to feel its effects. Over time, perhaps in as little as 20 years, and as the leverage provided by technology increases, this threshold will finally reach its culmination—with the ability of one man to declare war on the world and win” (emphasis in original).

A former Air Force officer and current corporate security consultant, Robb devotes little space to so-called weapons of mass destruction. Chemical and biological arms are just not massively destructive, he argues, and nuclear weapons are much harder for small groups to acquire and use than most terrorism assessments suggest. The weapon of choice that Robb identifies is systems disruption. What Robb calls “global guerrillas”—“super-empowered” bands “riding on the leverage provided by rapid technological improvement and global integration”—are increasingly able to identify the points of failure within vulnerable networks, from power grids to fuel pipelines to communities of trust within a nation-state, and strike them intelligently and inexpensively. The result: cascading failures and damage orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the attack.

Robb’s key example: “In the summer of 2004, Iraq’s global guerrillas attacked a southern section of the Iraqi oil pipeline infrastructure (Iraq has over 4,300 miles of pipelines). This attack cost the attackers an estimated $2,000 to produce. None of the attackers was caught. The effects of this attack were over $50 million in lost oil exports. The rate of return: 250,000 times the cost of the attack.”

According to Robb, global guerrillas practice “open-source warfare” in a marketplace of exceptionally
violent ideas. Like Linux programmers or Wikipedia editors, they operate in a decentralized, voluntarist, plugged-in mode, drawing on enthusiasm, experiment, and the exchange of ideas.

From their cradle in post-Saddam Iraq, the methods of open-source warfare have spread to Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, and beyond. Ever smaller groups can flout the nation-state’s monopoly on legitimating force; ever smaller groups can prevent the nation-state from delivering even elementary security or minimal services. Robb argues, persuasively, that the nation-state’s instinctive acts of self-preservation—centralizing security even further, launching preventive wars—will prove not just useless but counterproductive.

Robb is implicitly claiming open-source, systems-disrupting insurgency as the latest step in the military theorist William Lind’s famous “generations” of warfare. According to Lind, we’ve moved from mass attrition war (the first generation, á la Napoleon) through industrial warfare (the second generation, á la the American Civil War and most of World War I) to maneuver/blitzkrieg warfare (the third generation, seen in late World War I and early World War II) to asymmetrical conflicts between states and nonstate forces (the fourth generation).

As Robb shows, the lesson Saddam drew from the success of coalition air power in the 1991 war was that you didn’t need an air force to disrupt Iraqi infrastructure. He spent the next dozen years preparing irregular forces to do the same work more cheaply, as a defensive strategy. Unable to compete with America’s conventional power, Saddam planned to frustrate any U.S. invasion after the fact, as the Iraq Survey Group determined in its postwar interviews with Ba’athist ex-officials. While the U.S. captured Saddam himself within a few months of the invasion, the guerrilla infrastructure and system-disrupting methods survived him.

Systems disruption as Saddam conceived it was an evolution of the standard military concept of “area denial.” Ancient retreating armies burned crops to keep invaders from eating them. Scorched-earth tactics persisted into World War II, and partisans have been harassing supply lines at least since the original guerrilla war against Napoleon in Spain. Sabotage, too, has always been with us. And the ideal in weapons system development has long been to counter your rival’s very expensive thing with your really cheap one—the $1,000 missile that can bring down a $1 million helicopter, for example.

What’s new is the technological empowerment of sub-state actors and the systems interdependence we’ve come to call globalization. Together, Robb argues, these developments allow sub-national groups to wage war not just tactically but strategically and successfully. Old scorched-earth tactics were a useful adjunct to main-force warfare: They could keep an enemy discombobulated long enough for you to bring conventional forces to bear. Think of Soviet partisans buying time for the Red Army to reorganize, rearm, and drive the Wehrmacht back in the massive offenses of the later years of the Eastern Front. Old guerrilla operations created the conditions in which insurgents could raise up forces capable of taking on and defeating a state army, as when the People’s Liberation Army eventually prevailed against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War. But the new systems disruption strategy, Robb writes, is itself sufficient to win. It’s not a precursor to conventional military triumph but an independent path to victory, as the “global guerrillas” define victory.

Robb’s penultimate chapter, “Rethinking Security,” discusses the smart way today’s “market-states” can ensure resilience against global guerrillas and other network failures. A “market-state”—Robb takes the term from the legal scholar and historian of warfare Philip Bobbitt—is a putatively post-bureaucratic government that “secures political legitimacy through the active pursuit of opportunity for its citizens but declines to specify the goals for which that opportunity is used.” Robb believes these marvelous institutions predominate in the developed world. He uses “market-state” as an umbrella term that covers systems as various as the U.S. (an “entrepreneurial market-state”), the European Union (a “managerial market-state”), and the “mercantile market-states” we used to call the Asian Tigers: Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. I have trouble seeing any of these countries as meaningfully post-bureaucratic, but Robb reports that Bobbitt believes they are “in various phases of the transition” to full market-statehood.

Robb rejects the Bush administration’s favored counter-terror strategies of untrammeled surveillance at home and “pre-emptive” war to transform civilizations abroad. He instead favors decentralized, flexible infrastructure and security networks such as “plug-dumb,” two-way electrical grids where end-users can store, produce, and sell back electricity, improving redundancy and diversity. The theory is that the more flexibility nations build into their infrastructure, the less likely it is that terror attacks (or other disasters) can cause cascading, catastrophic failure.

There is a lot to admire in Robb’s analysis, but there’s a substantial problem too. He detects common methods used by actors as various as Islamist terror groups and Latin American drug cartels, then attributes a common goal to them: to “hollow out the state.” But the evidence that global guerrillas want to create failed states ranges from weak to contrary. By Robb’s own admission, the Ba’athist insurgency prepared by Saddam Hussein hoped to return Iraq to Ba’athist rule. Al Qaeda in Iraq proclaimed an “Islamic State of Iraq” in October 2006, well within the tradition of guerrilla forces declaring provisional governments on the road to power. Chechen separatists have launched systems disruption attacks against Russia, and their goal is not to hollow out the Russian state but to create a Chechen one.

Robb himself reports that Nigeria’s MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) demands “$1.5 billion in restitution (for environmental damage and other problems) from Shell Oil to the local state government and the release of militia and local government leaders.” Similarly, Pakistan’s Balochs “are demanding the termination of the development going into a local port facility and a greater share of the wealth generated by local natural gas deposits.” Robb summarizes the two situations this way: “In their minds, if the state fails, they win.” That is a bizarre gloss. The demands indicate that MEND and the Balochs believe the state has already failed them; they’re waging war to compel a better deal.

Such distinctions matter because Robb claims global guerrillas can successfully wage strategic war on nation-states. But a successful strategic war is one in which a guerrilla group attains its strategic goals. If global guerrillas really just want failed states, the world has no shortage, and Robb is correct. If they want the things guerrilla groups have always wanted—regional autonomy, a greater share of the economic pie, dominion over ethnic or sectarian rivals, an end to foreign occupation, social revolution, national control—it’s much harder to say that any global guerrilla group has yet been “successful.”

Take Iraq’s Sunni insurgents. They have frustrated the consolidation of a post-Saddam government dominated by the country’s Shiite majority. They have kept the United States from turning its presence in Iraq into a secure base for regional power projection. But as of the autumn of 2007, Shiite militias have successfully cleansed most of Baghdad of Sunnis. Sunnis are no closer to taking control of Iraq. And against the wishes of a majority of the American people, the leadership of both major U.S. political parties envisions an indefinite “residual” military presence there. That’s some victory. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden’s hemisphere-spanning Caliphate has yet to materialize, and MEND still doesn’t have its reparations from Shell Oil.

What most of the global guerrilla groups have managed so far is to not lose. It’s a truism of counterinsurgency that “guerrillas win by not losing,” but successful guerrilla movements eventually win by winning. It’s much harder for global guerrillas to “win” than Robb thinks, because most of these groups have larger goals than he acknowledges.

This oversimplification relates to another of the book’s conceptual problems. Robb refers to the damage a global guerrilla attack causes as its “return on investment”: Spend $2,000 to attack a pipeline, as MEND did in one of Robb’s examples, and get a “return” of $50 million in lost revenue to Shell. But this isn’t really a return on investment as the term is used in economics, because the attackers don’t have $50 million when they’re done. Shell has lost $50 million or so, and the insurgents clearly have increased their utility somewhat; they obviously wanted to destroy that pipeline more than they wanted the $2,000. But it seems implausible to value their increased utility at anything close to $50 million. It’s a perfect illustration of the Australian economist John Quiggin’s dictum that war is a negative-sum game. The combined MEND/Shell system is worth a lot less after the exercise than it was worth before.

This point matters because the relative unattractiveness of open-source insurgency may prove more limiting than anything senescent nation-states do to combat it. Global guerrillas have proven they can keep weak states from functioning but not that they can forge strong states of their own. Iraq’s Sunni insurgents are depriving not just the country’s Shiites of electricity and potable water but themselves too.

As of fall 2007, even many Sunni tribal leaders appear to have soured on “open-source warfare” as a strategy for dealing with American and Iraqi Shiite power. The meaning of the so-called “Anbar awakening” is open to interpretation, and disputed. A Brave New War devotee might argue that the Sunni sheikhs are enjoying —at least temporarily—the fruits of an open-source warfare victory. The U.S. government resisted making deals with the tribes for years. Now, after years of open-source insurgency made Iraq ungovernable, the Americans are showering the sheikhs with money and weapons and pressing the Shiite-controlled government to give the Sunnis a bigger piece of the pie.

But the Sunni demands—government jobs, a formal share of state power—seem to refute the idea that failed states are global guerrillas’ goal. Given the Shiite-Kurdish government’s resistance to resolving issues of distributing oil wealth and patronage, and its reluctance to integrate former Sunni guerrillas into the Iraqi Security Forces, it remains to be seen how long the relative quiet will last. (And Iraq remains one of the most violent places on Earth, with millions of internal and external exiles.)

The real lesson of the global guerrilla phenomenon is social, and the social angle is what Brave New War most scants. Global guerrillas have raised the stakes on consent. The experience of post-Saddam Iraq, for instance, suggests that no state or corporate entity can secure an oil distribution network that a sufficiently alienated out-group can’t reach. Consider how heavily Saudi Arabia’s eastern fields depend on Shiite workers, and figure the chances that the Saudi royal family or the American armed forces could guarantee production in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on Shiite Iran.

Resilience in critical systems is all well and good, but as Gully Foyle could tell us, the long-term hope of coping with the global guerrilla phenomenon lies in finding ways to stop pissing each other off so much.

Jim Henley runs the weblog Unqualified Offerings at highclearing.com.

Israel Stiffens Defenses

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:00:00 EST

It might harm their reputation, but Israel's air force is considering giving its combat pilots Viagra to improve their performance in the air.
A recent study conducted by Israeli doctors among mountain climbers in Africa found a link between erectile dysfunction drugs and improved performance in high altitudes, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot reported.

More here.

Via Dan Gifford.

Shoot Down Over Cuba

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:00:00 EST

In June 2000, this magazine published a cover story on Hollywood's "missing movies." These were not, alas, films that had been neglected by inattentive archivists or spurned by Ted Turner's guardians of classic film. The target of this search-and-rescue operation, wrote critic Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, were those tales of injustice, those triumphs of the spirit that Hollywood had little interest in producing. Long under the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets, Hollywood was "a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident."

Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entertainment industry is still sensitive to charges of Cold War jingoism, though the spread of hipster Buddhism has necessitated the occasional dramatization of China's occupation of Tibet. A spate of recent films—none of them produced in Hollywood—is also providing a more nuanced picture of the Cold War, one that eschews simple moral equivalence in favor of the dystopian reality of the Eastern Bloc.

This past year saw the release of The Singing Revolution, a riveting documentary detailing the little-known story of Estonia's non-violent resistance to Soviet occupation; the German political drama The Lives of Others, a deeply affecting portrait of the Zamyatinian nightmare that was East Germany; and Katyn, a dramatic recapitulation of the mass murder of 20,000 Polish officers shortly after the country's partition under conditions set by the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. (Eight years ago, Billingsley wondered presciently why the story of the Katyn massacre never made it to the big screen.)

Even Hollywood's strange love affair with the Cuban revolution, recently evidenced by Oliver Stone's Comandante and Walter Salles' saccharine salute to Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, is at long last showing signs of abating. A few years ago, New York painter/director Julian Schnabel memorably upbraided Castro in his film Before Night Falls, a portrait of the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, imprisoned by the communist government for both his aberrant politics and sexuality.

Now, from first-time director Cristina Khuly, comes Shoot Down, a brilliantly rendered and scrupulously even-handed documentary revisiting the 1996 Cuban downing of two civilian planes over international waters, both piloted by Miami-based exiles from the group Brothers to the Rescue. Khuly, a 37-year-old sculptor, is the niece of shoot-down victim Armando Alejandre Jr.

An event soon overshadowed by the saga of Elian Gonzales, the attack on the unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes is now largely forgotten outside Miami. And despite the smokescreen of misinformation presented by Castro and his foreign enablers, the facts of the story are rather straightforward and grimly characteristic of a totalitarian regime.

As three Brothers to the Rescue planes approached Cuban territory, the lead plane, piloted by the group's founder Jose Basulto, briefly breached Cuban airspace. While the planes were searching for refugees in the water, officials in Havana, tipped off by a mole in the Brothers leadership, scrambled Soviet-made MiG fighter planes to knock the planes out of the sky. Basulto's plane managed to escape. When the other two were vaporized by Cuban missiles, both were flying over international waters.

The mole, former Cuban Air Force MiG pilot Juan Pablo Roque, is a chilling reminder of the Stasi-like tactics of the Cuban secret police. Roque infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue by insinuating himself into the exile community—going so far as to write a book for the Cuban American National Foundation detailing his escape from the island—and marrying a local woman as cover. The day before the deadly flight, Roque declined an invitation to participate in the mission and informed his wife that he would be away on business. A day later, he reappeared on Cuban state television to denounce the Brothers as "terrorists" of the empire.

It is perhaps unintentional, but Shoot Down reasserts the controversy and complexity of the Clinton years, often obscured in hindsight by the salaciousness of the Lewinsky scandal and the failures of the Bush presidency. From our vantage point, it's easy to forget that Clinton sanctioned the liberal use of heavily militarized federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and during the seizure of Elian Gonzales from a Florida residence. He also reversed a 30-year old American policy treating those fleeing Cuba as political refugees.

It was this change, we learn, that precipitated Brothers to the Rescue's shift from search-and-rescue operations in the Florida Straits to direct confrontation with the Castro regime. (Prior to the shoot down, Brothers dropped pro-democracy leaflets from within Cuban airspace, to be carried by the wind to shore.) Under pressure from Castro, the Clinton administration revised the 1966 Cuban Adjustment act, reclassifying those fleeing Cuba from political refugees to illegal immigrants worthy of repatriation—unless they managed to reach American shores. This was the birth of the "wet foot-dry foot" policy, under which individuals would be returned to Cuba if picked up at sea. This was also the death of Brothers to the Rescue's previously cordial relationship with U.S. authorities.

The Clinton administration's response to the shoot-down crisis, hotly argued by the documentary's on-screen surrogates, is found by all to be deficient. That leaves viewer wondering what, short of sending F-16s on sorties over Havana, the appropriate response to such hostile acts should have been. It is clear, though, that, as Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) argues in the film, had such an event been perpetrated by the apartheid government of South Africa or Pinochet's Chile, the level of public outrage surely would have been greater.

But arguments like those of Diaz-Balart aren't offered in isolation. Shoot Down strives not to be seen as a "Miami exile" film, leading Khuly to explore—and subtly reject—the Castroite perspective. The strenuous attempt at balance is, at times, irksome. One wonders if the inclusion of Castro hagiographer Saul Landau, who signed a recent editorial on the Cuban revolution with the exclamation "Viva Fidel!," adds anything to the story, other than to act as another layer of insulation against charges of bias.

But this is a minor quibble. Unctuous fellow-travelers such as Landau (who sheepishly confesses to the camera that Cuba's judicial system is "less than perfect") will convince no one that destroying civilian planes was necessary for the revolution's survival.

Almost a decade ago in reason, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley rightly bemoaned the film industry's lack of interest in arguably the 20th century's greatest tragedy: the stubborn adherence of politicians, artists, and intellectuals to the dogma of Marxism-Leninism. The recent crop of films promises, however belatedly, to begin the process of correction.

Currently in limited release, Shoot Down by itself will not redraw the image of Castro-as-beneficent-leader—Michael Moore's paean to Cuban health care was just nominated for an Oscar, after all. But every little bit helps.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

The Care and Feeding of Soldiers: Any Larger Implications?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:04:00 EST

Tyler Cowen wonders whether we can leap to any conclusions about the economy writ large from the starting point of how well the Army takes care of Vets health care--or food.

Cowen's reason contributions.

The War on Terror, and the Terror in Response to War

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:23:00 EST

Been following Ron Paul around a bit lately, and noting his eminently sensible reliance on basic golden rule thinking when applied to foreign policy: how might we feel if the rest of the world treated us as we treat them?

Well, we know how we feel, as subtly revealed in this Associated Press piece up at military.com, a mostly unremarkable roundup of some of the possibilities and plans for a war with Iran (though I am relieved to hear we're back to only one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf right now). But note this interesting language in the last sentence after a long discussion about the hows and whats and maybes of us beginning a military assault on Iran, something that is often referred to, I believe, as "war":

The possibility of U.S. military action raises many tough questions, beginning perhaps with the practical issue of whether the United States knows enough about Iran's network of nuclear sites - declared sites as well as possible clandestine ones - to sufficiently set back or destroy their program.
Among other unknowns: Iran's capacity to retaliate by unleashing terrorist strikes against U.S. targets.

You say war, we say terror. You say war, we say terror. Any chance of calling the whole thing off? We'll see.

The Homosexual Roots of Antiwar Sentiment: Podhoretz Schools the Ignorant

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:47:00 EST

Nice piece in the American Prospect from Justin Logan on the silliness of pro-warriors' endless Hitler analogies and all, worth a read, but I really wanted to just single out this one somewhat extraordinary bit, news to me though perhaps not to longterm careful Norman Podhoretz watchers:

Podhoretz penned a meandering essay in Harper's in 1977 titled "The Culture of Appeasement" which likened antiwar sentiment in post-Vietnam America to the wariness of war in Britain after World War I, and then linked the latter to a homosexual yearning for relations with all the young men who perished in the Great War. In Podhoretz's view, "the best people looked to other men for sex and romance," and as a result, didn't much like them being killed by the score on the Continent. "Anyone familiar with homosexual apologetics today will recognize these attitudes."
Tying things back into the 1970s, Podhoretz pointed to the "parallels with England in 1937" and warned that "this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep." (A correspondent in a subsequent issue of Harper's would admit that he "had not previously realized that Winston Churchill fought the Battle of Britain almost singlehandedly while England's ubiquitous faggotry sneered and jeered from below.")

I haven't felt more like backing out of a room saying, "Uh, yeah, interesting, gotta go" while reading anything in a long time.

But What About the Troops, Ron Paul?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:34:00 EDT

I thought Ron Paul did a very creditable job in his Jay Leno moment last night, and as an old-school libertarian movement geek was over the Moon hearing him name-check Austrian economics as the economics of freedom and hard money. (For much, much, much more on Austrian economics and libertarianism, see....wait for it...my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.)

But there was one place where he missed a chance to mention a detail that I think might have really sold with a "support the troops" public. It was when Leno was asking if maybe pulling troops out of Iraq would really just cause more harm than good. I know his campaign is very conscious of this point, since they were flyering about it to a meeting of the Iowa state GOP that I attended over the weekend: the extraordinary level of demonstrated preference for Ron Paul among the military itself. Donations to his campaign from people in or working for the U.S. military the past two quarters running have been far in excess of any of his opponents. Details and numbers here.

The Gap in Mukasey's Testimony

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:57:00 EDT

During his recent confirmation hearings, Michael Mukasey, the former federal judge nominated to be the next attorney general, conceded that "the president doesn't stand above the law." Yet Mukasey, who is expected to be easily confirmed, also suggested that the president is entitled to ignore certain laws.

Since the law "starts with the Constitution," he said, the president need not obey a statute that interferes with his inherent constitutional authority "to defend the country." Now that the War on Terror has replaced the Cold War as a reliable rationale for extending executive power, the breadth of this authority to defend the country will be a central issue in national politics long after Mukasey completes his service as attorney general.

Is protecting national security "a loophole big enough to drive a truck through," as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) worried? Or is it, as Mukasey said it should be, a power the president will strive to exercise with the consent of Congress, acting without congressional support only in emergencies?

The Bush administration's track record on the surveillance, detention, and interrogation of suspected terrorists suggests Leahy's fears are justified. Even when there was plenty of time to seek congressional approval and every reason to think it would be forthcoming, this administration has chosen arrogant unilateralism over the cooperation Mukasey recommends so "we don't have to get into butting heads over who can and who can't."

Although the president is commander in chief of the armed forces, Congress has several explicitly enumerated powers related to national defense. In addition to the power of the purse, these include the power "to declare war," to "make rules concerning captures on land and water," "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces," and to suspend the habeas corpus privilege "in cases of rebellion or invasion."

If Congress passed a law that, say, purported to put the speaker of the House in charge of the armed forces, it would be clearly unconstitutional. Regulating the treatment of detainees, by contrast, is squarely within congressional authority.

In a sense, then, it's not surprising that Mukasey conceded the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act, which established guidelines for detainee trials, and the Detainee Treatment Act, which bans "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." Still, it's reassuring, since Mukasey was nominated by a president who initially tried to go his own way in these areas and who issued a signing statement that indicated he reserved the right to ignore the latter law when it was inconvenient.

That was how Bush treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Until Congress amended it last August, FISA required the government to obtain a warrant to monitor communications involving people in the United States. Yet for years Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct such surveillance without court approval.

When asked about this program, Mukasey referred repeatedly to the "gap between where FISA left off and where the Constitution permitted the president to act." He cited Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell's statement that FISA "does not take away the power of the president under the Constitution."

Did Mukasey mean that the Constitution authorized the president to ignore FISA's warrant requirements, as his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, argued? No matter how many times he was asked, Mukasey wouldn't say, instead retreating to the lame argument that Congress, without realizing it, amended FISA by authorizing the use of military force against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.

Even as the administration continues to insist that the NSA's warrantless surveillance was legal, it is pressing Congress to give the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the program retroactive legal immunity. Immunity for what? For assisting the government with its perfectly lawful surveillance?

Clearly, Bush wants to give these companies a free pass for breaking the law in the name of national security. They shouldn't get one, and neither should he.

Giuliani: Toughest Candidate in All the 12 Galaxies

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:54:00 EDT

Rudy is ready for War of the Worlds I, reports the AP:

During a town hall meeting in Exeter, a young questioner asked the former New York mayor about his plan to protect Earth.
"If (there's) something living on another planet and it's bad and it comes over here, what would you do?" the boy asked.
.........

"Of all the things that can happen in this world, we'll be prepared for that, yes we will. We'll be prepared for anything that happens," said Giuliani,

Romney, worried that the invaders might be from Kolob, will be hesitant to strike quickly; of the GOP front-runners, it has to be Rudy if "will protect us from alien invaders" is your main political concern.

UPDATE: You are there!

The Drug War Draft Marches on Through the Night to Baghdad

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:31:00 EDT

Interesting vid clip from the folks at Students for a Sensible Drug Policy about what they're calling "the drug war draft." As readers of reason and Hit & Run know, current law dictates that college students with drug busts on their records get bounced from federal financial aid. The SSDP folks point out that:

The U.S. Military is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals.
To make up for the enlistment shortcomings, the Bush administration has loosened restrictions and is granting more so-called "character waivers" to allow more people with drug convictions to sign up.
Meanwhile, President Bush and some of his friends in Congress support a law that has prevented 200,000 aspiring students from getting the financial aid they need to afford college just because they have drug convictions (most often for misdemeanor marijuana possession).
Of course, young people should be able to serve our country in whatever way they think they best can - whether by going to college and becoming a doctor or a lawyer, or by enlisting in the armed services.
But the "Drug War Draft" created by the Aid Elimination Penalty limits opportunities and forces countless young people out of school and into the military to fight a war they may not agree with. Eerily, the Pentagon-commissioned RAND report Recruiting Youth in the College Market (PDF) states: "The [armed] services might be able to significantly expand their pool of potential recruits by adopting policies that target youth who plan to go to college..."

I don't agree that the AEP forces anyone into the military, though it definitely fucks with student aid in a tremendously stupid and unfair manner that should never have started. But I'm with SSDP on the question of fairness. Here's the clip:

So, Uh, Did Rummy Ever Get Back to You?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:22:00 EDT

This Bush Q&A from last April seems rather relevant now.

United Against Liberty

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:49:00 EDT

Excellent rant from Gene Healy:

I, like Rudy Giuliani, was a 9/11 survivor. And I use that term in the sense that Giuliani does, which means I was sort of near stuff that was going on—across the Potomac from the Pentagon(!)—and I didn't cry, so therefore you should think of me as an American Hero and elect me president.

Anyway, I remember what I thought and how I felt. I felt sick and I felt angry and I felt anxious. But I never for a second thought that anything good was going to come out of this, and the idea that this would be a great unifying moment, a clarifying moment, a moment that would allow us all to fight the Great Patriotic War Against Medieval Retards in Caves without which our lives were vacant and shallow--well, I have to say, that idea never once occurred to me. And though I am generally self-righteous only about my utter lack of self-righteousness, I feel pretty goddamned self righteous that it didn't.
[...]

It's the idea that we're all better off engaged in a grand ideological crusade, collecting ration cards, saving bacon grease and scrap metal, and dutifully attending War on Terror bond rallies. We're all called to different tasks in this crusade. Some of us take point in Sadr City. Some of us cheer them on in the Weekly Standard. But they also serve who only sit and write op-eds.
The notion that our lives lack meaning unless the collective unites us all in service of a higher calling and that mass murder can provide that happy occasion is as old and atavistic as the first cave painting. It's also as natural, human, and evil as all the faults to which flesh is heir.

Here Come the Cyber Wars

info@reason.com (Michael Weiss) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:18:00 EDT

Last May, Estonia was invaded. Rather than tanks and aircraft, the medium of trespass was fiber optic cables—which is nearly as bad, for such a wired country. The "cyberwar," which was precipitated by the controversial relocation of a World War II monument in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, drew international headlines, mainly focused on the Clancy-esque gizmology behind it. "Distributed-denial-of-service" has now entered the lexicon not as a symptom of disaffected Baltic waiters, but as a means of bringing down a country with spam. NATO, which used to only contend with enemy garrisons and missile silos on European soil, now finds itself dispatching allied geek squads to protect against that 21^st century species of automaton: the "botnet."

The U.S. has announced plans to form its own "Cyber Command," a kind of digital NORAD, to better prepare key levels of state and economic infrastructure against foreign hackers. Yet lost in all the bit-rate analysis of Estonia's springtime troubles was any discussion of how the unconventional siege conventionally violated a nation's sovereignty, not to mention its citizens' human rights.

With a tiny population of 1.4 million, Estonia is almost entirely run on computers. The land that helped develop the free VOIP and instant messenger program Skype hosts wireless zones not just on cafe-lined streets, but in gas stations and remote national parks. Estonians bank, vote and pay their taxes online through digital identity cards that are scanned by easy insertion into slots in their laptops, devices that the country's "paperless" government uses to conduct cabinet meetings and draft legislation. Indeed, so proud was Estonia of its commitment to broadband efficiency—and the web's concomitant freedom of information—that its parliament passed a law in 2000 declaring Internet access a basic human right.

Symbolic though the law might be, it is still the product of a representative democracy in a sovereign EU-member nation. A coordinated attack on Estonia's digital infrastructure is therefore not just a "national security situation," as Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo rightly put it, but also a cause for the United Nations Human Rights Council and Amnesty International. Both organizations have yet to comment on the Estonian cyberwar, although a spokesperson from Amnesty International told me a statement is in the works. She had no idea, though, that Estonia even considered Internet access a human right.

In a sense, the trouble began over human rights, at least as they are defined by cold war historiographers. In April, the Estonian government decided, after much internal debate, to relocate the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Cast as a solemn, head-lowered "Ivan" of World War II, the statue was actually the centerpiece of an oddly placed urban sepulcher for the remains of nameless Red Army soldiers who died in the "liberation" of Estonia from Nazi occupation. Unveiled in 1947 by the returning Soviet occupiers, who had been kicked out by the Nazis, the Bronze Soldier was met with mixed feelings by ethnic Estonians, who were then subjected to half a century of Russian rule, under which a tenth of the population was deported to the gulag. Nevertheless, many patriotic Estonians remember that 11,000 of their compatriots, forcibly drafted into the Red Army, died fighting Hitler. Adding to the anger and frustration the Estonian man-in-the-street must have felt toward the statue, Stalin and Hitler had haggled over Baltic states in their notorious prewar negotiations, which culminated in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In liberating Estonia, the USSR was more expelling its former competitor for imperial real estate than doing much for Estonians.

It's important to see the Bronze Solider for what it really was: imperialist propaganda, not a solemn consecration of war dead. The USSR loved to establish ad hoc burial grounds in the most visible locations of their occupied cities. The one in Tallinn, situated in the center of Tõnismägi Hill, was dubbed "Liberators' Square"—communist reliquary construction at its finest. Even before Estonia gained independence in 1991, the Kremlin satraps who ran the country hardly abided by their own catechism for glorifying the motherland. They built a bus station and a busy intersection directly on Tõnismägi Hill, turning it into an accessible rallying point for Russian extremists, the sort responsible for the two days of rioting that engulfed Tallinn in late April and in which 100 people were injured and one person killed.

These lumpen elements are mainly members of the nationalist Nashi ("Ours") movement, which is headquartered in Moscow and suborned by the Putin regime. The Russian president may now describe himself as the only "absolute, pure democrat" on the planet, but that doesn't mean he'll stop Nashi thugs from attacking the Estonian ambassador in Moscow, even though he's bound by the Vienna Convention to do so. To give some indication of just how upset Moscow gets when threatened with the tampering of its Stalinist legacy, the Russian Federation Council passed a resolution in January calling the imminent relocation of the Bronze Solider "an attempt to legalize fascism."

That Russians are once more resorting to Popular Front rhetoric is characteristic, but also ironic given that Estonia's relocation of the Bronze Statue was actually undertaken with great care and sensitivity, and included the long-awaited identification of the Red Army fallen by DNA testing. Russian's "unknown" soldiers are known at last, and will this month be re-interred in the cemetery of the Estonian Defense Forces. This is all of a piece with Estonia's passage of the War Graves Protection Act in January 2007, designed to align the nation's standard for honoring of military victims with the Geneva Conventions. No NGO or supranational body has objected to the Bronze Soldier's transplantation; only the Russian government has.

Whether or not the Kremlin is behind the violation is almost beside the point, although it is it curious that the cyber-attacks peaked on May 8 and 9, the calendar dates marking the Red Army's defeat of the Wehrmacht. Some Estonians I've talked to are of the opinion that if Moscow was in fact responsible, then this was only a trial run to gauge efficacy. The Bronze Soldier might well have been a convenient pretext for staging an elaborate war game.

The method and organization of the attacks suggest that the perpetrators had national paralysis in mind. They targeted nearly all the Estonian ministries; two major banks (one of which, Hansabank, had to be shut down for more than an hour, at an expense of at least $1 million); the website of the Reform Party, which was forced to host a forged letter of apology for the statue scandal claiming to be from the Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip; and three of the six largest Estonian news organizations.

It's true that the "zombies," or infiltrated computers used to clog Estonian websites, were traced to places like Canada, Brazil and Vietnam. But a number also led straight into the offices of Kremlin and other Russian agencies—not easy silicon curtains to penetrate, even for the most enterprising hacker. So either Moscow was an accomplice in the criminality of its international sympathizers, or it should start worrying about the security of its own network. This isn't likely to happen. Russian officials refused to comply with early requests to help trace IP addresses of any cyber-blitzers who might have been piggybacking off Russian servers. At the very minimum, then, the Putin regime is guilty of benign neglect.

In a 2003 Military Review article addressing the proliferation of cyberwarfare—particularly as it has been waged between Israeli and Palestinian hackers—authors Patrick D. Allen and Chris C. Demchak shrewdly compared the phenomenon to the Spanish Civil War. In both instances, far-flung civilian volunteers were called into action—or "horizontally escalated"—through the use of targeted propaganda. (Russian language instructions explaining how and when to infiltrate Estonian systems were posted all over the web in the days leading up to the first sortie.) State sponsorship was plausibly deniable: If the Comintern could control the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, what's to stop a government from either openly or covertly corralling citizen "hacktivists" to do its dirty work? Most ominous of all, the event may be taken as a prelude to a later and more devastating assault, involving a greater number of players.

Pentagon computers had sensitive information pilfered from them by Russian computers in 2003 during a cyber-attack known as "Moonlight Maze." And in 1999, during an operation dubbed "Titan Rain," Chinese hackers broke into systems at Lockheed Martin, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA under similar motives of military espionage. Yet international law has yet to catch up with technology. According to Allen and Demchak:

Criminal punishment is particularly difficult when the hackers operate from a blatantly hostile nation. However, nations have certain rights under an internationally recognized protective principle if offending nations are not helpful. There is international case law, albeit limited, that might support state action in response to cyber attacks. Under this principle, when a person from country A harms country B, and country A does not prevent that person from continuing to do harm, then country B has the right to take action against country A... Although this principle has not yet been applied in cyberwar cases, the legal precedence exists.

Leo Tolstoy once described the Tsarist system as "Ghengis Khan with a telegraph." Given the communications conquest of recent weeks, cyber warfare is almost certainly going to be a continuing threat. The West should start laying the groundwork to deal with coordinated, state-sponsored cyber attacks before they happen again, and on a larger scale.

Michael Weiss is an associate editor of Jewcy and a contributor to Slate, The New Criterion and The Weekly Standard. His blog is Snarksmith.

More Money Than Sense

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:46:00 EDT

In the civilized world’s latest sordid military venture, the Australian military has revealed plans to forcibly sterilize and displace thousands of innocent kangaroos. The army originally planned to just shoot the beasts, whose grazing has eroded military bases and endangered other animals, until public uproar prompted a rethink. The new thinking: the best use of taxpayer resources would be to simply move the animals.

The kangaroos would be herded into a padded pen and sedated, then shot with a paintball gun to mark them as ready for transport. They would be released in a fenced area covered with shadecloth, the report by the Wildcare protection group for the Defence Department said.
At A$3,600 a head, the cost of moving each animal is more than a standard economy class return air ticket from Sydney to London on Qantas, the national carrier which features a kangaroo on its tail.