Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Since Attaturk, the Turkish military has served a the defender of a secular constitution in a country that was dominantly Muslim at the expense of majoritarian democracy. But, it appears that this role has now ended for good as the senior military leadership has been purged by the combination of dozens of arrests of senior military officials by civilian law enforcement authorities and the mass resignation of the remaining top military officers. It isn't entirely clear from half the world away to what extent the charges that have led to the arrests of military officers are valid and to what extent they are cover for a political purge.

It also isn't clear what made it possible for the arrests to be successfully carried out this time when in the past civilian authorities have seemed unable to carry out these kinds of arrests, although the generalized influences of the Arab Spring in the region could be a factor.

Turkey's days of military supremacy over civilian rule has ended, bringing it out of the classic newly emerging democracy phase of development. But, it isn't yet clear if the civilians who now have unquestioned supremacy will be able to avoid the temptations to engage in unconstitutional conduct or establish a religion in governmental affairs, which could be worse.

The example is a worthwhile one for American political scientists to examine because a similar strategy of civilian arrests of military leaders is essentially the only recourse in the U.S. Constitution should there ever be a threat of a coup in the United States and a coup is by far the most plausible end of regime scenario for the American system of government.

READ MORE - Turkey's Invisible Democratic Revolution

Libya As A Blood Sport

Gaddafi and the rebels are gladiators in a blood contest confined to a Libyan arena whose terms are controlled by the international community. In this contest Gaddafi has already received the thumbs down from a modern Casear.

Four months ago, Gaddafi was the unquestioned absolute ruler of his country, as he had been for forty years, and there was not even an organized political opposition. Now, the writing is on the wall.

With that kind of reality to face, perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the assertions that Gaddafi's regime have been lies so bald faced that they appear delusional.

The inevitabilty of the outcome boils down to one key fact: Libya is not a viable autarky.

Libya runs on oil wealth (with imports make up more than 28% of its domestic consumption) and without export revenues, mostly oil, it would swiftly collapse. It is not food self-sufficient. It does not have a significant domestic arms industry. It can't make its own cars or medicines, and certainly can't do so with domestic materials. It can only use its $60 billion in international financial reserves and 4.62 million troy ounces of gold reserves if the international financial community recognizes the authority of someone to use those resources, which Gaddafi's regime is not at the moment. A brief NATO intervention has already rendered its air force, its navy, its tanks and its heavy artillery useless.

Until now, the international community has respect Gaddafi's legitimacy and Libya's sovereignty, allowing the nation to keep oil wealth that the outside world was perfectly capable of taking by force. With international recognition of his legitimate authority as head of state lost, his days are numbered.

Libya has already lost the support of the international community. The UN authorized international coalitions to impose a no-fly zone, embargo it from arms, and freeze the nations assets (and the assets of Gaddafi and his inner circle). New regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are no longer allies. Convoys of resources brought across the Sahara from Algeria, Niger, Chad or Sudan would be obvious to spy satellites and reconnaisance aircraft, and could be stopped by NATO airplanes if they wished.

Chad is not friend, it had to drive out Libya forces in an international war that just ended in 1987. Italy, whose prime minister Berlusconi had pleaded $5 billion in aid a reparations for Italy's 32 years of colonial rule in 2008 is not going to honor its promise through a Gaddafi lead regime. Sudan has its own discontented masses, international sanctions (including a war crimes indictment for its sitting head of state), the loss of its Southern provinces in an independence referrendum, and ongoing insurgency in Darfur, and more to worry about. Niger's totalitarian dictator has to worry about escaping the North African revolutionary trend, is one of the poorest nations in the world, and has a Tuareg insurgency (one that probably draws considerable succor from Libyan benefactors as Saharan tribal groups are at the heart of the Libyan state apparatus) to try to keep from reinvigorating itself. Gaddafi has always bought himself friends in the past, but the only country still willing to stick its neck out for him now is Uganda, which is ill suited to be a capable ally. Moreover, strong reliance on predominantly Christian Ugandan support would turn Islamist forces against Gaddafi in a way that might impair his own coalition.

Most of Libya's oil comes from oil fields in the East and leaves via ports near rebel controlled Benghazi, and the international community has a special military interest in preventing Gaddafi from gaining control of those resources.

International forces aren't getting their hands dirty by putting troops on the ground in Libya, where rebels and forces loyal to Gaddafi fight each other. But, Libya is so dependent upon resources that they control and is so weak itself, that NATO can control the terms of the battle. If NATO decides that it is unhappy with the way that the battle is playing out in this arena, it has the power to change the rules.

Realistically, there is no easy to visualize face saving way that the international community could restore access to the resources they control to Gaddafi in the absence of a treaty concluded with the rebels. Gaddafi direct role in the Locherbie, Scotland aircraft bombing has been established by defectors. He will likely be linked to other terorist acts against Western interests by defectors. His conduct of the civil war and his delusional statements during it have forever proven him to be a violent madman. If he managed to crush the rebels militarily, despite NATO involvement, he would be viewed in the international community as an illegitimate butcher and denied access to international trade, military resources and the country's foreign assets apart from some sort of oil for food arrangement.

Without a treaty and if he fails to crush the rebel regime based in Benghazi, the rebels will probably be granted exclusive use of the oil resources they control and Libya's sovereign wealth, the arms embargo and no-fly zone and NATO coalition efforts to stop the use of heavy weapons by Gaddafi will continue, foreign oil companies will not send workers back to Gaddafi controlled oil fields and pipelines, rebels will manage to destroy the pipelines necessary to bring that oil to market, and Libya-Tripoli will lose a war of attrition. The mercenaries loyal to Gaddafi critical to keeping him in power will mutiny sooner or later when it becomes clear that they will not be paid. The standard of living will collapse. The oasis farmers and herders who are loyal to Gaddafi won't be able to produce enough food to feed the Eastern part of the country without outside support. Western rebels, even if forced to go underground, will fester as a resistance force striking whenever the Gaddafi regime can't catch them. Gaddafi has lost the option of transitioning to a constitutional regime that democratizes and liberalizes while leaving him a role as head of state in some capacity.

The exact way that the end game will play out isn't clear, so the spectators can still watch with baited breath. Will the rebels rally and seize the rest of the country? Will international forces increase their involvement and end it? Will covert CIA and other international covert assistance give the rebels a decisive edge? Will Egypt or Tunisia or France intervene more directly to topple Gaddafi? Will Gaddafi's mercenaries, loyal military officers and inner circle stage a coup or defect? Will a stable stalemate be reached and produce a treaty or armistice or enduring cease fire that splits Libya into two or three different countries? Will Gaddafi be killed or die or flee leaving his forces leaderless to surrender? Will Gaddafi crush the rebels and control the entire country, but hold onto only an internationally isolated shambles of a nation until he dies in a prolonged seige? Will pretenders to a monarchy mobilize the rebels with the promise of a constitutional monarchy regime?

In an age where targeted killing is U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the global war on terror, can we doubt that CIA operatives in Libya are authorized to assassinate Gaddafi and his top aides?

The civil war in Libya is still young. The ability of internationally supported forces in Ivory Coast to forcibly remove the incumbent president who lost the Presidential election with French military support offers hope that this struggle need not be a long one. Libya is not a huge country. Gaddafi controls no more than 4 million or so of the country's 6.3 million people, and only a fraction of the 76,000 soldiers the nation had before the civil war began. While Libya's territory is vast, almost of the people the combatants are fighting for control over live close to the coast. There isn't any obvious way that the Gaddafi regime will be decisively ended, but there is no obvious way that it can restore its prior tranquility, wealth and international stature either.

The lesson of post-Cold War conflicts in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbajain, Bahrain, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Moldova, and now Libya has been that in a post-Cold War world, international powers often can and will intervene decisively to determine the outcome of military conflicts according to their interests and international norms, and that Third World dictators can't count on not facing consequences for their actions. A new generation of leaders watched Star War I and decided that real world Naboos don't deserve to suffer in the face of international indifference. The world order that the League of Nations tried to bring into being after World War I, and that the United Nations tried to bring into being after World War II has finally arrived.

We aren't all of the way there yet. Letting local forces engage in blood sports to determine who will win control while providing decisively outside influence, as the United States did when it intervened on behalf of the Northern Coalition that was losing a war for control of Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2001 has become a model, while the model of the Iraq War, in which foreign forces occupy and rule a country with their own troops to effect regime change, viewed through the lens of previous failure in Vietnam, has been determined in hindsight to be a model not to be repeated if at all possible. Decisive large scale military intervention not limited in scope would probably end the fighting sooner, but the widespread fear is that local forces who aren't capable of securing territory on the ground by themselves won't be capable of holding onto it either. So, the international community has decided that it can manage to set the rules of engagement, but not to fight the battles within the arena itself.

Western powers aren't the only superpowers in these cases. Bahrain has established that small Arab monarchies can't survive an uprising without ceding power to the masses or relying on Saudi Arabian military support. The Saudi military could put up a fight with the military resources that the United States has provided it for year after year in the arrangements designed to earn Arab acceptance of Israel reached in the Camp David Accords, but Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman would be finished without Saudi Arabian support in the face of foreign or domestic military opposition. Yemen, which as a no monarchy has ceded Saudi backing has proved that to be the case. Morocco and Jordan, while still absolute monarchies, have learned that they must heed public opinion if their regimes wants to remain in power. The King of Swaziland must know that a serious offense to either South Africa or other international parties that make his regime possible could snuff out his regime in a matter of days without serious repurcussions if a genuine domestic uprising took hold. Lesotho's regime is similarly situated.

READ MORE - Libya As A Blood Sport

Altitude Sickness Vulnerability Overwhelmingly Genetic

Robert Roach, who directs the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado, performed a similar test last year, taking 28 research subjects to a simulated altitude of 16,000 feet by putting them in a special chamber that mimics the effect of a low-oxygen environment. A blood test, screening for those six genetic elements, was able to predict with 96% accuracy which of the 28 would fall ill.

From here.

The military wants to know so that it can predict which soldiers will be most impaired when deployed rapidly to a high altitude situation, so it is funding the research, replicating the study described above with 140 subjects, and if it is successful, having a mass production "Acute Mountain Sickness Prediction Kit" for the military in place by 2014.

Military models indicate at least 25% of unacclimatized troops parachuting into a battlefield at 10,000 feet—and more than 80% of troops fighting at 13,200 feet—will get altitude sickness. One military study of a prolonged operation in the high mountains of Afghanistan found 14% of troops evacuated for medical treatment didn't have combat injuries—they had altitude sickness. Uncounted others, not sick enough to merit rescue by helicopter, were huddled in base camps while their units went out fighting, said Dr. Muza, the Army research physiologist. In most cases, acute mountain sickness dissipates within three days as the body adjusts to the elevation, though in severe cases, it can linger or lead to fatal complications. . . .

Projections for proportion of unacclimatized troops who will get sick at high altitudes.

10,000 feet – 25-35%
11,500 feet – 50-60%
13,200 feet – 80-90%
14,800 feet – 90-100%


Source: Stephen Muza, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. . . .

While the military is funding the new research, a predictive blood test could also be marketed to the public, Dr. Roach said. That could benefit Colorado's ski industry, which says up to 40% of its visitors come down with mountain sickness. The Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colo., estimates the illness damps spending at mountain resorts by $200 million a year, as afflicted tourists don't much feel like shopping, skiing or dining out.

The fact that this trait is so overwhelmingly predicted by genetics is itself surprising.

READ MORE - Altitude Sickness Vulnerability Overwhelmingly Genetic

War

U.S. military involvement in the civil war in Libya began today, as part of a coalition of forces including Britain and France.

More than 110 Tomahawk missiles fired from American and British ships and submarines hit about 20 Libyan air and missile defense targets in western portions of the country, U.S. Vice Adm. William Gortney said at a Pentagon briefing. . . . The salvo, in an operation dubbed "Odyssey Dawn," was meant "to deny the Libyan regime from using force against its own people," said Gortney. . . .

Earlier, French fighter jets deployed over Libya fired at a military vehicle Saturday, the first strike against Gadhafi's military forces, which earlier attacked the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

Prime Minister David Cameron said late Saturday that British forces also are in action over Libya. . . . British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said the Royal Air Force deployed Tornado GR4 fast jets, which flew 3,000 miles from the United Kingdom and back, "making this the longest-range bombing mission conducted by the RAF since the (1982) Falklands conflict."

While there were no U.S. warplanes flying over Libya late Saturday, the coalition was softening Libyan positions before enforcing a no-fly zone, Gortney said. . . .

Obama is planning for the U.S. portion of the military action in Libya to only last for a few days, according to a senior administration official, who was not authorized to speak about sensitive military matters. "After that we'll take more of a supporting role," the senior official said.

Obama authorized U.S. military force from Brazil on what happened to be the eighth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. . . .

Earlier Saturday, incoming artillery rounds landed inside Benghazi, and pro-Gadhafi tanks rolled into the town firing rounds, witnesses said. A flaming fighter jet plummeted from the sky, nose-diving to the ground. Khaled el-Sayeh, the opposition military spokesman, said the plane was an old MiG-23 that belonged to the rebels.

As night fell over Benghazi on Saturday, the city became quiet and calm. While plumes of smoke could be spotted, the pro-Gadhafi tanks seen earlier were not in sight. . . . Gadhafi forces had withdrawn from the city and that they were positioned 50 kilometers (31 miles) outside Benghazi.

The war in Libya joins the ongoing active military operations of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, although the operation in Iraq is winding down. So far, the Libya operation does not involve significant numbers of U.S. ground troops, who are taxed from other operations, instead relying mostly on U.S. Navy and Air Force resources, which are far less strained.

The prevailing assumption behind the outside intervention, authorized by the United Nations Security Council, is that it will decisively shift the course of the conflict in Libya by denying Gaddafi the one edge he has in hte conflict, superior access to heavy weapontry, such as fighter jets, helicopters, artillery batteries and tanks. Another possible but not certain possibility is that senior Gaddafi supporters, particularly those in the military, will see that their plight is hopeless and abandon his regime.

READ MORE - War

Bullies

Earlier this week, I went to my son's elementary school play. It was a series of skits put together by groups of several kids each in the drama class as part of the bullying prevention program at the school (with vocal and instrumental renditions of "Stand by me" as an intermezzo between each one).

A pattern illustrating the operational lesson that the children had learned from the program quickly emerged. A kid ("the target"), usually alone, gets bullied, sometimes by a bully alone, and sometimes by a ring leader and some henchmen. While alone, that kid can't win. But, another kid or group of kids intervenes on behalf of the kid being bullied and prevail - sometimes by force of numbers and sometimes combined with an appeal to authority (the principal or in a particularly overwhelming situation, a cell phone call to the cops).

The lesson seemed to be that you can't stop a bully alone, and when you are being bullied are often in a poor position to help yourself without assistance. After all, you were singled out when you were alone precisely because you were perceived in the first place, often accurately, as vulnerable. But, the program argues, you as a member of the school community have a moral obligation to help out your fellow students when they are in this kind of bind, because the secret to overcoming a bully is to have allies. The key ingredient that the program seeks to internalize in the kids and drill into their consciousness by repetition is that there is a moral duty to intervene on behalf of kids who are being bullied. Kids need to stand by each other to stay safe.

While the scenes weren't very realistic, the basic strategy that was proposed is plausible and the virtue of seeing a solution to the problem in terms of social context and personal obligation to others in the community is a refreshing and useful lesson for the kids that can extend far beyond the school yard.

As a practical matter, resorting to authority without peer support is often not very effective, and the old standby of the last generation - learning to box or do karate, reinstated into the debate by a Chinese setting remake of the Karate Kid movie, also doesn't work that well in real life. But, peer support does work, and the intervention of someone else on your behalf can make all the difference and resolve the problem in a stable way.

Moreover, this kind of strategy doesn't have to be completely successful to its full extent to work. As long as a small minority of kids in stronger positions than the target of the bullying are induced to intervene when necessary, and a great majority are induced to be less inclined to encourage or support the bullies, the strategy will work. A community in which a significant minority of kids who are in reasonably secure social positions feel a moral obligation to stand by isolated vulnerable kids who are being bullied and are ready to act on it is a community in which bullying is likely to become an undesirable option for would be bullies.

Bullies and Foreign Affairs

A natural analog to this view is what I see as an emerging conventional wisdom in foreign policy and military affairs. The single most decisive factor in determining the outcome of wars is who each side has as allies are in the conflict, and who watches without getting involved. Similarly, cops almost always win in individual confrontations with criminals because they can resort to the resources of a much larger and more cohesive team. Only when criminals band together into gangs, or organized crime families or cartels do they pose a serious challenge to police authority.

The protesters in Egypt and Tunisia couldn't have prevailed if the armed forces in those countries hadn't refused to back the current dictator. Protesters in Bahrain look doomed to failure because Saudi Arabia and other little Gulf monarchies have sent in troops to back that regime.

Protesters in Libya had a harder go of it because Gaddafi was able to utilize family ties and mercenaries to secure greater loyalty from his troops. The willingness of the French to stick out their neck and recognize the rebels in Libya as the legitimate government of Libya, an international consensus to freeze sovereign wealth and leadership group wealth, and yesterday's UN Security Council vote to authorize military force against Gaddafi (with usually anti-interventionist permanent members of the Security Council abstaining rather than vetoing the action) supported by the Arab League, British and French and American military might, and Qatar has changed that game, forcing Gaddafi to reverse his course of action by declaring a cease fire and probably insuring victory for the rebels, at least in the Eastern Benghazi area.

The Taliban were swiftly removed from power because they too found no international allies in the wake of 9-11. Serbia, in contrast, was able to maintain its control over Kosovo for much longer, with Russian backing, and Russian backing has been key to determining who prevails and who does not in conflicts over control in the Caucasus republics. Iraq's lack of allies against broad international coalitions in both the first Gulf War and the Iraq War, led to its defeat in each. Kuwait's ability to secure allies allowed it to resurface despite the fact that it had been crushed militarily and occupied by Iraq.

Tibet fell because no one inside our outside the Chinese government intervened on its behalf against China in 1959. Hungarian reformers in the 1950s, Czech reformers in the wake of the Prague Spring, and Chinese protesters in Beijing were defeated for the same reasons. Outside support from France was important to the success of the Americans in the American revolution. In World War II, decision of the United States to stop sitting on the sidelines was pivotal to the resolution of the conflict.

Until a couple of generations ago, the basic public policy stance on domestic violence was that "what happens in the home is not anyone else's business." And, the basic public policy stance on foreign affairs was that sovereignty provided local political leaders absolute authority to run their domestic affairs as they saw fit.

The attitude towards domestic violence has changed. Now, we arrest people who beat their wives and kids, and people who know about it feel some moral responsibility to summon outside intervention.

The attitude towards sovereignty has changed too, albeit more slowly. The Holocaust, reinforced by examples like genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and Cambodia, and the rediscovery of the Armenian genocide in Anatolia, have helped shape that attitude. In U.S. history, something akin to this view (i.e. that the Civil War was justified because it freed the slaves) legitimatizes the U.S. Civil War. We no longer trust that those in political power will show enough restraint to prevent epic catastrophes in the absence of outside intervention. Increasingly, the international community feels that political leaders for show excessive brutality towards their own people forfeit their sovereign immunity from outside intervention. The international community increasingly feels a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of nations that are being bullied by their neighbors and domestic populations that are being bullied by their leaders.

Even Russia and China have reached a point where they are not going to object to international military intervention when a leader who has lost the support of half of his own military and many of his senior civil servants starts attacking his own people with jet fighters, and promising to slaughter whole cities that have risen up against him. And, even now, this support comes only with the implicit understanding that the international community is intervening only to the extent necessary to prevent mass slaughter of civilians and level the playing field.

Sovereignty still trumps a wide panoply of repressions. Apartheid was sanctioned, but direct intervention wasn't taken; the international community waited for it to collapse from within. Isolated unjustified killings of individuals aren't enough to forfeit it. Very repressive regimes, like those of Burma and North Korea are tolerated. Disregard for electoral outcomes or electoral fraud don't provoke international intervention, nor do illegal coups. But, we have at least reached the point where large scale killings of one's own people crosses a line, after which outside intervention is viewed as acceptable if anyone can be found to volunteer to take on the task.

The citizens of nation that is repressed can secure meaningful international intervention only by taking to the streets or taking up arms, and producing a response from the leaders of that nation that crosses the line.

Still, the international community has advanced from a situation where there truly wasn't any authority beyond the sovereign to one a bit like Medieval Iceland, which had courts to adjudicate when someone's misdeeds rose to the level that justified action, because executing that order, once rendered, was a private affair to be organized and financed by those who show an interest in taking action. Similarly, off the coast of Somalia, the international community has reached a consensus that Somali pirates are legitimate targets, but this determination is being enforced by a loose knit collection of national naval assets.

Excessive isolationism and respect for sovereignty sends a message that greater misconduct by national leaders will be tolerated; while an international community in which some kinds of domestic conduct is viewed as unacceptable and likely to provoke international intervention with real consequences discourages this kind of misconduct by national leaders.

READ MORE - Bullies

WMDs As An Invalid Concept

The usual case against the Iraq War is that we initiated the war to remove "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" (WMDs) that post-war intelligence did not reveal, although Donald Rumsfield, Dick Cheney and a few others central to starting the war are convinced that the post-war search was just botched. (There was never any connection between 9-11 and Iraq either.)

Neuroskeptic takes a different tack on the issue. The concept of Weapons of Mass destruction is overinclusive, he argues. Nuclear bombs are without a doubt highly destructive. But, no one claimed that Iraq had or was about to obtain those. Yet, there is no good evidence that chemical weapons (which is what the Iraqis were allegedly developing and had used in the past), or biological weapons, are actually particularly worse than plain old bullets and conventional explosives delivered en masse, which have been equally deadly or worse than any past example of chemical or biological weapon useage. He does not even include the most extreme examples of killings with conventional weapons such as Dresden or World War I trench warfare. He acknowledges the theoretical mass destruction risk posed by biological weapons, which could cause a global plague, but Iraq wasn't alleged to have been developing those either.

Neuroskeptic's analysis is notable, because it denies that there was good cause to start the Iraq War even if everything that intelligence sources had alleged was true. As he points out, chemical weapons, even if Iraq had them, wouldn't be any different in the magnitude of the destruction that had the capacity to cause than their ample conventional weapon capacities.

Iraq and Afghanistan considered

The lack of a proper cause to go to war in Iraq, in turn, matters, because Iraq has not demonstrably been left better off than it was under Saddam Hussein.

Certainly, Hussein wasn't a nice guy. He was your run of the mill totalitarian Middle Eastern dictator. But, Iraq had a more developed and economically productive middle class than most of its neighbors; a large share of that middle class went into exile as a result of the war and the nation's infrastructure has still not recovered. The strict totalitarian rule of the regime made possible interethnic toleration that dissolved into ethnic cleansing after the invasion - ethnically mixed neighborhoods and regions have vanished in favor of strict ethnic segregation, the few ethnically mixed areas that remain are constantly at the brink of ethnic violence, and Iraqi Christians have pretty much been run out of the country.

Saddam Hussein was no worse that dicators like Egypt's Mubarak whom we supported heavily until shortly before his fall, and many other dictators and absolute monarchs whom we have supported around the world. Indeed, not so long before the Gulf War we did support Saddam Hussein as a bulwark against Iran and a guarantor of the flow of oil.

Iraq does have a civilian parliamentary government, made possible, in part, by reassurances of foreign military intervention on its behalf, but it is deeply disfunctional, particularly at the national level. It isn't entirely clear that there is a strong sentiment for continuing to operate as a single country. But for international disapproval, the Kurds would have left long ago, and the Shiite Southeast has secessionist leanings. Basic public safety is illusive, as suicide bombers in Iraq are happy to remind us. Is the average Iraqi better off? And, if not, did the war accomplishing anything worthwhile?

It also remains unclear what purpose was served by resurrecting Kuwait, a slave holding absolute monarchy with a tiny number of people keeping massive oil resources to themselves for the purpose of enhancing their standard of living to the detriment of their much more populous Iraqi neighbor, in the first Gulf War, after it had already been conquered by Iraq.

The no fly zone imposed to protect autonomous Kurdish region between the two Iraq Wars from human rights abuses instigated by their own totalitarian dictator is perhaps the only U.S. involvement in that time period that was really justified.

The Gulf War and Iraq War did demonstrate overwhelming Western military superiority over this Third World dicatorship. Indeed, they provoke a revolution in U.S. military strategy, tactics and weapons. But, one normally doesn't consider conducting realistic training exercises to be a sufficient justification for causing hundreds of thousands of people to die in war.

Afghanistan, was at least verifiably the base of the terrorists who caused 9-11, had arguably the most awful domestic government in the world under the Taliban, and, as I've noted before, was so profoundly squalid when we found it that it would be hard for anything we could do to make it worse. They had neither a semi-functional government nor any infrastructure of note to ruin, they were already in the midst of a bloody civil war that we muted for a number of years, the U.S. commitment has been an order of magnitude less than it was in Iraq, and the Afghani middle class went into exile more than two decades before we became involved. Indeed, given U.S. involvement in the resistance to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, we were arguably partially responsible for the dismal state of affairs there and had some moral obligation to fix it. While the Afghan government is corrupt and insecure, it was created with more democratic involvement from the Afghans, is less vexed with deadlock, and is a more clear improvement relative to the Taliban or loose alliance of warlords that controlled respective territories in the country prior to U.S. intervention.

Moreover, the U.S. objective in Afghanistan to retaliate for 9-11 was accomplished, and the goal of making it unavailable as a terrorist base from which the U.S. can be attacked isn't a terribly ambitious one and doesn't require Afghanistan to become an example for the rest of the world to emulate. The extrajudicial abductions and torture tactics used in the Afghan War and War on Terror, however, may have done more harm than good to U.S. interests, inciting more to join the terrorist cause.

Our near simultaneous removal of Iran's two greatest external military threats may not have been in U.S. interests either, and there is a very plausible case that Iran really is or was trying to develop a true weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear bomb.

The one X factor that might arguably justify the Iraq War is the extent to which it has provided a proof of concept model for an Isalmic Arab democracy without resorting to theocracy, and by example, made the revolutions in Tunisia and elsewhere possible. But, given the sorry example that it did provide, it is hard to give this justification, post hoc, of course, much credence. What did Iraq's democracy show that the Kurdish and Afghan examples did not? If anything, it illustrated the limits of democratic government as a solution.

READ MORE - WMDs As An Invalid Concept

Gates Wrong On Future Of Army

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, addressing West Point cadets on the future of the Army, and more broadly the U.S. Armed Services sketched a vision that, while on track for the Air Force, Navy and the Army's heavy forces, is off base when it comes to the appropriateness of a U.S. capability for handling counter-insurgency actions.

Some of his vision, I agree with:

* He made the point that there should be fewer high level officers in the military, and that more input from peers and subordinates would result in the selection of better senior officers, should not micromanage officers and should not encourage a culture that is too risk averse.

* He suggested that the Army should reduce its heavy armor forces.

* He noted that "the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements - whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf or elsewhere," he said."

But, just as the military did after Vietnam, he thinks that it is good policy to try to prevent large-scale counter-insurgency wars like those in Iraq or Afghanistan by removing the capability to conduct that operation from the Army, despite the overwhelming evidence of history that the nation will call upon it again and again to carry out these missions.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates . . . envisages a future ground force that will be smaller, pack less heavy firepower and will not engage in large-scale counter-insurgency wars like those in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates quipped.

The defense chief predicted that Army and Marine forces would increasingly be asked to focus more on short-duration counterterrorism strikes and disaster relief. As he has for the past several years, Gates called on the Army to devote more of its best personnel to training and equipping foreign militaries.

Gates said he was not advocating the Army should become a counter-insurgency or nation-building force. "By no means am I suggesting that the Army will, or should, turn into a Victorian nation-building constabulary - designed to chase guerrillas, build schools or sip tea."

Here, he is wrong. While the Navy and Air Force can take over much of the "high end" capabilities in conflicts with "near peer" opponents, at great expense, but probably with fewer soldiers as technology automates their functions, the "low end" capabilities involving asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency are obligations that will not go away, missions that require capabilities that the U.S. Army lacks, but should have, and missions where there are no substitutes for large numbers of trained soldiers on the ground.

Indeed, Gates is himself contradictory and ambivalent on the point. He noted that "the training and equipping of foreign armies" should be a mission that the Army, despite the fact that he doesn't see that work as real soldiering, and that officers should consider the training in languages and foreign cultures that are critical to counterinsurgency operations on the ground.

Despite a big push in recent years to build the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, the U.S. Army has traditionally treated the training and equipping of foreign armies as a career backwater, and Gates's efforts to raise the importance of the mission within the U.S. military have met with mixed results.

"How do we institutionalize security force assistance into the Army's regular force structure, and make the related experience and skill set a career-enhancing pursuit? Gates asked, repeating a question he first put to the Army in 2008. "Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging or reconciling warring tribes, may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting PowerPoint slides," Gates told the West Point cadets. "The consequences of this terrify me."

To head off this malaise Gates urged the cadets to take career risks, taking assignments that in the past might have been seen by their peers as career dead-ends. "I would encourage you to become a master of other languages and cultures, a priority of mine since taking this post," he said.

The simple truth is that one can't simply outsource all counterinsurgency missions and asymmetric warfare to someone else's less loyal, less well trained and often corrupt local forces.

Even if the United States retains a Navy just as large as its current one, which is so large that it rivals the Navies of all the rest of the world's potential opponents combined, it could still reduce the number of sailors by about two-thirds by automating new ships that replace the existing fleet to the same degree as it has in the Littoral Combat Ship.

Yet, for all of the Navy's clout, it doesn't have great solutions to the vulnerabilities of its surface combatants to advanced anti-ship missiles, swarms of missile boats, mine warfare or submarines, and it hasn't figured out to deal with asymmetric conflicts like piracy.

This past week, the U.S. Navy took on seventeen pirates who were holding four Americans hostage on a captured yatch off Somalia. This was an entirely appropriate mission that is as old as the Navy. The hostages died, two pirates were killed and the rest were captured. Not the optimal result, but no one claims that a better result was possible by the time that the Navy knew of the problem.

What is outrageous about how the Navy handled the problem is the amount of resources it devoted to handling it. It deployed an aircraft carrier and three surface combatants, with several tens of thousands of sailors with twenty billion dollars of equipment, to take on seventeen pirates who probably outfitted themselves for under $100,000. Admittedly, at the moment, those ships probably had nothing better to do. We aren't fighting a major naval war right now, and we have lots of ships in the sea that are there mostly for other purposes. But, if we use that level of resources routinely to deal with such pathetic and low budget local adversaries, the Navy will lose any war of attrition it faces. It is not enough to be able to defeat pirates. We need to have the capacity to take on asymmetric naval threats in a resource efficient way.

A basic problem with the U.S. force structure is that we have too few infantry soldiers who can be deployed in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. Fighting these two small wars against vastly inferior opponents has strained the Army to its limited and required the U.S. to come just short of instituting a draft by utilizing every available Army Reserve soldier, Army National Guard solider, Marine, borrowed sailors from the Navy, and excessively long and frequent rotations for active duty soldiers. Moreover, we were stretched so thin that we could respond to no other threats in the world had they come up at that point in time.

We shouldn't need to reach that level of mobilization simply to deal with an disorganized rabble in a medium sized country, with no weapon to heavy to be stashed in the trunk of a Honda Accord, no fixed bases of operation, no aircraft, no tanks, no armored personnel carriers, no helicopters and no ships.

In the next war it may well make sense to take out opposing tanks and artillery sites with cruise missiles from ships and smart bombs. But, there is no substitute for boots on the ground in other missions. We need far more of those boots available to meet the needs of the President, we need suitable equipment for those asymmetric missions, and we need to give more of our troops skill sets, like language and cultural skills and civil affairs expertise that is needed to win those wars.

For all that Secretary Gates seems to despite the Victorians strategy of conquering the world over tea, he needs to recall that it worked. The Victorians didn't rule two-thirds of the world with unassailable air power or guided cruise missiles. They conquered the world by understanding their mission, training lightly armed soldiers in the skills needed to conduct that mission, and training gentleman officers to use their heads and recognize that the military is simply one component of a bigger picture of diplomacy and politics.

The hard reality that we are learning is that it no longer works to rely on fellow sovereign nations to take care of their own turf. Wild territory in Central Asia, or unscrupulous arms deals between distant nations with whom we are not currently at war can put the United States and its allies at grave risk. It is no longer the case that a military force in a distant land can't hurt us because we aren't close. In an area of remotely controlled weapons, dirty bombs, intermediate range rockets and trade volumes that can never be inspected in detail, any insufficiently policed state can put the U.S. at risk. We can only defend ourselves by being capable of taking on those threats before they reach our shores. And, that takes military capabilities that Secretary Gates wants to deny our Army in an ill starred effort to convince the Presidents his successors will work for to fight the kinds of wars that are at the center of what his country is calling up the Army to do right now on multiple fronts.

Yes, the heavy side of the Army, like the Air Force, like the Navy, should become more potent and less personnel intensive. But, the Army is the force that should have the primary responsibility for fighting low intensity conflicts and should have far more soldiers than it does, many with very different kinds of training, so that it is capable of addressing those threats.

READ MORE - Gates Wrong On Future Of Army

Intervention. Why not?

I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to strafe civilian crowds, has deployed heavy artillery against them, and has occupied the streets with armored vehicles and strategically-placed snipers. One man is shouting that “the gates of Hell have opened” in the capital and that “this is Halabja!” (where Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered helicopter gunships to hit a Kurdish city with sarin gas, killing 5000 in 1988).

Two defecting Libyan pilots who flew to Malta confirmed the orders to strafe the crowds from the air and said that they declined to obey the order. Other pilots appear to have been more loyal.

From here.

The U.S. has the capability to deploy fighter aircraft in the region and stop this from happening. It also has a deep history of disrespect for Libyan sovereignty from the Marines sent to Tripolli in the Revolutionary era to the bombing of a Libyan chemical plant in mine. Does Ghadaffi deserve sovereign respect vis-a-vis democratic protesters from a nation like the United States that was founded on revolutionary overthrow of tyrrany? Would a single show of force in this instance establish a credible threat that would influence the behavior of dicators elsewhere even without its actual exercise? We could tell nervous monarches that we distinguish between legitimate monarchies and dicatorships.

Why not? Unlike leaders of regimes in Egypt and Bahrain, we have no history of Libyan cooperation with the U.S. We wouldn't necessarily have to take down the entire regime. There are locals on the ground who could do that. We could simply shut down one military tactic of the regime in order to show disrespect and emasculate that regime in a case where it is clearly engaging in a gross, mass violation of human rights of the worse magnitude. Perhaps we could bomb Ghadaffi's house while we were at it.

It isn't as if the U.S. has some long tradition of non-intervention in Middle Eastern affairs to defend after two U.S. initiated wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Also, the extingency of an unfolding situation could justify not seeking a broad diplomatic coalition. The War Powers Act permits U.S. Presidents to make brief military interventions without Congressional approval.

READ MORE - Intervention. Why not?

Is Collateral Damage Old News?

Accuracy, Assassination, Apples and Oranges

Kenneth Anderson at The Volokh Conspiracy (in a characteristic comment free post), argues that the law and ethics of war is shifting from "proportionality" to "necessity" because with drone deployed missiles, "the technology is getting more and more precise, and when Panetta says the drone targeted kiling technology is the most precise thing in the history of warfare, I think it is basically right and getting more so with new technological developments. That is relative, however — relative to the realistic alternative uses of force, not by comparison to zero."

Certainly, in a very narrow technological sense, guided weapons, be they smart bombs, guided missiles or guided artillery shells are much more accurate than the long range unguided bombs and unguided artillery shells that preceded them. The new weapons can hit smaller targets at greater distances. Bombers and artillery do not destroy adjacent neighborhoods when trying to destroy military targets, nearly as often as they once did.

But, the problem is how these weapons are used, which creates an apples and oranges issue. Traditionally, unguided bombs and artillery rounds were used in the context of pitched military v. military battles, or attacks on the industrial capacity of cities. Assassination, a tool of war and terrorism whose polite name is now "targeted killing" was historically carried out by individuals, face to face, with small firearms or other personal weapons.

Civilized countries mostly didn't admit to engaging in assassination in past eras, and collateral damage in an assassination generally involved a handful of people in the same public place of the target at a time chosen because it was the only time when the assassin not privy to the inner sanctum of the target could get a shot at the target.

Now, drones are used by the CIA to assassinate targets in their homes, and this produces far more collateral damage than traditional methods of assassination, and the individuals killed in collateral damage are far more likely to be completely innocent children, spouses, extended family members and household servants than they are to be professional colleagues of the target who may not be so innocent themselves in the eyes of the entity directing targeted killing, as was the case in traditional assassinations.

Thus, the same technology that has reduced collateral damage in conventional military conflicts has increased the collateral damage associated with assassinations, which have become increasingly common.

Assassination of a particular enemy combatant during an active and declared war is presumably encompassed in the larger notion that killing enemy combatants during war is justified. But, since assassination has historically been a fairly minor tool of warfare and is increasingly becoming an important one, re-examination of that tactic as it presents itself in modern conflicts is in order.

Distinguishing War From Crime

Related is the larger problem with using a "warfare" frame to address conduct that would traditionally be viewed as "crime." In a "war" context, we demand far less certainty of culpability, and far less individual culpability to kill than we do in a "crime" context where we require "probable cause" to search or seize someone, allow the use of force only when exigent circmstances or defiance of announced legitimate legal authority makes it necessary, and view an individual as eligible to be killed only when individually culpable.

The whole notion of "lawfare" is based upon the implicit notion that the courts are an inappropriate place to adjudicate matters of "warfare."

But, of course, the real legal issue is not whether courts should run wars, but when activities that the government chooses to describe as "war" in an opportunistic way for the express purposes of circumventing legal limitations of the use of force and government authority really are "war." Can Congress dispense will all of the constitutional criminal procedure rights simply by declaring war on common criminals?

When war is declared, as it was by Congress in the Authorization to Use Military Force in 2001, on non-state groups and those who aid them, rather than on a foreign state, it becomes far less trivial to determine who is an enemy, and who is a combatant. Critics of "lawfare" argue for a very broad deferrence to the government as it seeks to determine who is an "enemy" and who is a "combatant," with the de facto sole arbiter of the decision in most cases being some CIA employee with little or not practical accountability to anyone, not even the accountability inherent in a military chain of command.

The British MI6 may have personal licenses to kill from the Queen, but generally, the U.S. theory by which our spies are authorized to kill is not so absolute.

The Dormant Treason Clause

Yet, we have reached the point when even a Democrat who was critical on the campaign trail of the war on terror tactics used by President George W. Bush, asserts the right to determine without any due process that a U.S. citizen is to be assassinated on the grounds that the government views him as an enemy combatant.

This seems to cross a line. Traditionally, an enemy is a citizen or subject of a state upon which you have declared war, and once you determine that someone is an enemy, you then determine if he is a combatant. In contrast, your own citizens or subjects are never "enemies" per se, in the law of war sense. Instead, they are loyal citizens or traitors who are engaged in treason. But, the U.S. Constitution defines treason as a criminal, rather than law of war matter, defines the crime, and sets forth the means by which it can be proved.

The line created by the constitution seems a sensible one. Citizens or subjects of enemies in declared wars are subject to the laws of war applicable to combatants and non-combatants respectively. One's own citizens and subjects are not enemies and are subject to criminal laws subject to due process. The place where a person happens to be is irrelevant, and the "dormant treason clause" implicitly forbids the United States from declaring war on U.S. citizens, even if they provide aid and comfort to an enemy on whom war has been declared.

This clear bright line may be complicated in cases of rebellion and insurrections, such as the secession of the civil war, or a genuinely domestic insurgency that must be countered. But, there is no good reason that the more difficult questions of a domestic insurgency need to be addressed under the constitution at this point, because there is no indication that the United States has a genuinely domestic insurgency. The War on Terror authorized by the 2001 AUMF is a foreign war just like any other except that it was declared on a non-state foreign terrorist organization (the 9-11 organization) in addition to an aspirant claimant to state actor status (the Taliban), not a domestic insurgency.

The notion that U.S. citizens abroad should have fewer constitutional protections from action by the U.S. government than they do at home doesn't seem to have any solid legal basis. It is a convenient invention out of whole cloth.

Certainly, the U.S. military can be forgiven for treating a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant" when they did not in fact know that the person was a U.S. citizen and had no reason to suspect that this was the case. The odds that some random individual involved in an anti-U.S. terrorist group in Yemen or Afghanistan just happens to have been born in the United States and is a U.S. citizen are very low and there is no scientific test one can do to determine U.S. citizenship. It depends on events that may be remote in time and place and unknowable to a casual observer. But, when the U.S. government actually knows that someone is a U.S. citizen, applying the laws of war seems inherently unconstitutional.

READ MORE - Is Collateral Damage Old News?

A New Era In Egypt

"President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as president of the republic and has assigned the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to run the affairs of the country," Suleiman said. "May God help everybody."

While Egyptians applauded themselves for toppling Mubarak, his fate was sealed by the military, whose leaders had promised not to use deadly force to put down the rebellion.

Earlier in the day, Egypt's military chiefs said they would guarantee a transition toward "free and honest" elections. But Suleiman's statement left unsaid how that would work, and who precisely would take charge in the interim.

In a televised statement Friday night, the military pledged that it would not act as a substitute for a "legitimate government" following Mubarak's resignation and would take steps to meet the people's aspirations. Reading the statement, a military spokesman praised Mubarak for his contributions to Egypt and hailed protesters who have died in the anti-Mubarak demonstrations.

Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces includes the top service commanders led by Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, the armed forces chief of staff.

From here.

Thursday night, Mubarak, the 82 year old man who had been dictator of Egypt for thirty-one years pledged to stay in office until regularly scheduled elections in September, something that the Egyptian military had reaffirmed that he would do Friday morning. But, when this, along with Mubarak's appointment of a Vice President after leaving himself without a successor for years, and Mubarak's pledge that his son would not run for President after him fell flat, the military apparently intervened, got the newly appointed Vice President to announce a "resignation," and shipped Mubarak and his wife to a resort as close to the Saudi Arabian border as one can get without leaving the country. Eighteen days of street protests, triggered by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, had secured a new regime. With Mubarak finally gone, the crowds were pleased for once.

Mubarak is gone, not only because the people rose up, but because the Army refused to back him up any longer. When the protests began, police killed several hundred protesters. But, the Army refused to fire on its own people and got the police to back off as well.

Recent Political History In Egypt

Egypt's recent political history can be summed up as follows: Egypt, then a tributary state of England under King Farouk (England became its colonial ruler in 1882 and granted increased independence in stages in 1914, 1922 and 1936) declared independence in 1951. King Farouk was ousted in an uprising in 1952 that left Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser in charge, a position that was ratified in a democratic process thereafter. Under Nasser, from 1958 to 1961, Syria and Egypt were joined in the short lived United Arab Republic from which Syria seceded. Nasser's Vice President, Anwar Sedat replaced him when he died in 1970. Sadat was assassinated from Muslim extremists in the Army in 1981 when he was replaced by Hosni Mubarak who was in turn replaced today. No Egyptian leader in living memory has ever left office voluntarily or via a democratic election.

But, there is good reason to be optimistic and believe that the military junta in Egypt will promptly hold free and fair multi-party elections, that democratically elected representatives will form a civilian government in Egypt, and that Egypt will start to have a Western style parliamentary republic with an Islamic flavor. There is also good reason to expect that in the short term, that the new civilian Egyptian government will be too preoccupied with domestic affairs to consider international military adventures such as threats to Israel.

Eygpt is not the country that it was when Mubarak seized power three decades ago. It has a military more interested in running its business ventures than fighting foreign wars, so long as domestic tranquility can be maintained. Like many nations in the developing world, it has not been so closed that its people are unaware of what kinds of governments and political developments prevail in the larger world, its businesses are actively engaged in foreign trade and millions of Egyptians work abroad where they have experiences that they can relate to friends and family when they come home. Unlike some countries in the region, Egypt has a genuine middle class that gives it economic clout apart from oil revenues. Egypt has lacked free and fair elections, and it has faced strict state of emergency restrictions on political activity for a very long time, but despite those limits, a vigorous civil society has developed. Many of Egypt's senior military officers, through exchanges begun after the Camp David accords in 1979, have spent time in the United States mingling with American military officers. The protests that brought down the regime were facilitated, in part, via Facebook and were triggered by widely available news coverage on networks like Al-Jazzeria, of the uprising in Tunisia.

One party rule may have seemed like a pretty good idea at the time when it became the norm in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere across the non-monarchies of the region. It may even be that truly democratic parliamentary democracy was an unrealistic expectation at that point. One party rule was working in the Soviet Union and China, and it wasn't yet clear that the leaders of the one party states would themselves be entrenched indefinitely. But, by the time that Tunisia set off the current round of democratic uprisings, this form of government had been discredited after decades of experience in newly independent nations around the world. Muslims in Turkey, Albania, Iraq (and before that, Iraqi Kurdistan), Palestine, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan and Iran were all trying to conduct at least partially democratic government with at least intermittent success. Certainly, the notion of a Muslim nation with a parliamentary democracy was no longer considered an oxymoron.

What Next?

The Egyptian Army's best model may be Turkey, where the military sees itself as the guarantor of a secular, democratic state and has been successful more often than not.

I expect that the civilian constitutional order that comes into being in Egypt won't be a very creative one. The Army and civil service will probably continue uninterrupted. The restrictions on civil liberties imposed via "emergency rule" during Mubarak's regime will end. The existing non-democratically selected President and parliament of Egypt will probably remain, but with multi-party democratic elections (modeled on the proportional representation systems found in most of the world rather than the two party single member ditrict system of the United States) and somewhat different respective powers.

What About Israel?

Egypt and Jordan have both committed to making democratic reforms, although the extent of these reforms in each nation is still in flux. This may make the time ripe for rethinking the relationship between the Israel, the Palestinian territory of Gaza, and the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, each of which have weak civilian elected self-government.

Revelations from Wikileaks show that Israel is not really interested in a peace deal with the Palestinians, rather than the other way around as conventional wisdom had long held. What Israel does need is a guarantor that the Palestinian territories won't be used as based of operations for attacks against it. Prior to the latest reforms, Israel has relied on Jordan and Egypt to be neutral towards it and prevent undue smuggling across the border, and the monarchy and dictatorship in these nations respectively have not made them very attractive regimes to the Palestinians. But, should Jordan and Egypt become successful functioning democracies, there may be room for a win-win-win solution if the West Bank merges with Jordan and the Gaza Strip merges with Egypt.

Jordan and Egypt both have regimes that are more competent than either of the Palestinian territories, and hence more able to suppress attacks against Israel from those territories than the current regimes in Palestine, and Jordan and Egypt both have more of an interest in doing so than the Palestinian territories standing alone. As democracies that actually work, Palestinians may now find their neighbors more desirable political entities to be a part of than their own marginally democratic and incompetent locally elected governments. Links to these nations would make possible the levels of trade that would allow the West Bank and Gaza to have functioning economies; something that is impossible in embargoed international aid supported states. Also, Jordan may be better able to negotiate Israeli withdrawal from its West Bank settlements and better able to protect that territory from further Israeli encroachment than a semi-sovereign autonomous Palestinian government within Israel. Jordan and Egypt would each gain territory and people, the classic measures of sovereign clout. Also, from an Israeli perspective, while Middle Eastern historical memory may be long, an end to a distinct Palestinian political entity recognized on the international scene may eventually defuse Palestinian nationalism - a generation from now, the children of today's Palestinians may seem themselves as Jordanians and Egyptians respectively.

Some Recent History of Coups

Military coups, which is what the events in Egypt amount to so far, however, characterized, are neck and neck with elections as the most common means by which countries secure new leaders in most of the world. Sometimes they support popular uprisings against dicators, sometimes they suppress democratic governments.

Coups have been the norm for Egypt's neighbors not fortunate enough to have monarchies. Libya's current leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi seized power in a coup in 1969 and is still in power there. Syria's Baath party took power in a 1963 coup, in a regime that installed Hafez al-Assad as President in 1971, a post he continued to hold until his death in 2000 when his son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him and remains in power today. In Sudan, a revolutionary council declared independence and installed Gaafar al-Mimeiry as President until he was replaced in a 1985 coup, followed by a 1986 democratic election, followed by the 1989 coup that installed its current leader General Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir. Algeria won independence in 1962 with a democracy that lasted until a coup in 1965 that installed Houari Boumedienne who ruled until his death in 1978. Demonstrators with Army support backed a coup in Ethiopia that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, with succession handled via coups and uprisings until Ethiopia's first multi-party general elections in 1995. Iraq's King Kaisal was killed in a 1958 coup, after which the Baath party gradually gained control' Saddam Hussein became President as the Baath party leader and ruled Iraq as a dicator from 1979 until 2003 when he was deposed in the U.S. invasion.

Coups aren't so far in the past even in Europe and the developed countries of Asia.

Portugal has a military coup in 1974. Spain has had continous democratic government only since 1977 and had a coup attempt that was put down by King Juan Carlos in 1981. Greece had a coup in 1967 and Cyprus had one in 1974. Turkey had coups in 1960 and 1980 and the military remains a powerful political force there, primarily as a guarantor of secular government. The military attempted to remove Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup in 1991, which was foiled with the help of Boris Yeltsin.

South Korea's initial authoritarian leader, Dr. Sygnman Rhee, installed in 1948 was forced out by an uprising in 1960 which was followed by a 1961 coup that installed General Park Chung Hee who retained power until he was assassinated by the chief of the Korean CIA in 1979 when a military coup installed General Chun Doo Hwan, the head of military intelligence, and he ruled until pro-democracy demonstrations in 1987 pushed him to conduct democratic elections that installed his ally Roh Tae Wood. Chun and Roh were convicted of mutiney, treason and corruption in 1996, after Roh was replaced in a new election in 1993, but were pardoned in 1997.

Indonesia won independence in late 1949 and elected President Sukarno in 1950; he suspended parliament in 1960, made himself President for life in 1963, thwarted an attempted coup in 1965 and was forced out by the Army in 1967 when General Suharto took power and ruled for the next thirty one years. Protestors ousted him in 1998, and his Vice President ran democratic elections that installed a successor in 1999. The new President was impeached for corruption and incompetence in 2001 when Megawati Sukranoputri, the daughter of Sukarno became Indonesia's President. She was replaced by a retired general, Susilo bamabang Yudhoyono in a democratic election in 2004. Indonesia's two successive democratic elections makes it arguably one of the most democratic predominantly Muslim nations in the world.

Bangladesh, after securing independence from Pakistan in 1971 had a coupl in 1975, an unsuccessful coup that caused the death of the incumbent President in 1981, and a military backed caretaker government in 2007, interspersed with democratic elections.

After being separated from India in 1947, Pakistan had a coups in 1977 and 2001 which put president Musharraf in place, after which he ruled until a threat of impeachment by parliament led by his assassinated political opponent's widower (who herself was the daughter of the President who was outsted in the 1977 coup and executed by that regime in 1979) ousted him in 2008.

Of course, the historical record makes clear that many coups, even when fueled by popular uprisings, do end up evolving into new dicatorships, even if ratified in genuine democratic elections the first time around. But, given that the alternative had been a likely transfer of power to Mubarak's son in an emerging monarchy, it is a risk that it is worth Egyptian's effort to take.

READ MORE - A New Era In Egypt

Drones, Robots and the Next War

Drones (i.e. unmanned vehicles that are remotely operated) and robots (i.e. computer controlled machines) are just on the verge of radically transforming the way that the United States conducts wars.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles



MQ-1 Predator

The Pakistani side of the War on Terrorism is being carried out mostly by the CIA via armed drones similar to the MQ-1 Predator above which uses Hellfire missiles similar to those mounted on the U.S. Army's AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships (which are large enough to destroy a tank), and has purported led to the death of thousands of Taliban and terrorist group leaders and operatives, but also to significant numbers of deaths of innocent civilians, particularly family members of targets. A less powerful and lighter version of the guided missile, designed to allow more missiles to be fired with less collateral damage, called the Viper Strike, is also in use.

Drones in advanced stages of development promise to take on far more roles than the relatively primitive drones like the Predator (and several similar drones such as the MQ-5 Hunter) do today.



RQ-170

Some of the new drones, such as the flying wing reconnaisance drone called the RQ-170 shown above, utilize the same stealth technology that makes the planes invisible to radar that is found in the recently retired F-117 Stealth Fighter, the B-2 bomber, the F-22 fighter and the F-35 joint strike fighters which are currently being tested prior to entering military service.

Modifying the Air Force RQ-170 to drop "smart bombs," perhaps in places where there are anti-aircraft weapons that would make the mission unsafe for a manned fighter aircraft and radar systems that would make a non-stealth aircraft vulnerable, would be only a minor upgrade for which proof in principle already exists from the MQ-1 Predator. Indeed, in a simple mission to drop a bomb on a target, it wouldn't even have to be remotely controlled and could fly autonomously to its launch area, drop its bomb and return, without being vulnerable to having its telecommunications link to its human operator severed at a key point in the mission.



X-47

An experimental prototype of an unmanned stealth fighter plane intended for use on aircraft carriers and about the same size as existing carrier based F-18s, shown avove, has made its first test flights without a hitch.

All of these drones offer a variety of military advantage over manned warplanes. Weight doesn't have to be devoted to an ejection seat and life support systems for the pilot, and can often be smaller than a similar sized manned aircraft. A drone isn't limited by a pilot's need for food, water, bathroom breaks or the need to get up and stretch. The extra weight can translate into more payload or longer range. They can handle g forces in aerobatic manuevers that would cause a human pilot to pass out or at least be too distracted to be optimally alert. Drones can take a risk and get closer to a target to identify it better or increase its accuracy if needed. If it gets shot down, no American Airman dies, and operators as a result can accumulate their skills despite being sometimes shot down, a classic problem with fighter pilots who rarely have more than a handful of actual battles in their careers. Drone operators don't have to be located anywhere near harm's way, and can work in shifts (many current drone operators for drones in Pakistan do their work from Utah). It is easy to train operators with simulators without causing wear and tear to the real expensive thing. You can wrap a drone in plastic wrap in a warehouse until you need it without having to incur maintenance costs associated with training time until it is needed. The quality control difference between a 1% failure rate and a o.1% failure rate matters far less in a drone than in a manned aircraft and the last little bit of realiability is by far the most expensive part. Drones are cheaper than manned aircraft of comparable capabilities. There is every reason to believe that air refueling will be possible -- this function is already automated to some extent. Automated takeoff from a known airfield shouldn't be a problem either, although landings may require remote control by a drone operator.

In addition to the fact that the aircraft itself would be cheaper, it is much cheaper to train an drone (aka UAV) operator than it is to train a pilot of a manned fighter aircraft.

Today, a manned aircraft pilot completes undergraduate and graduate pilot training programs. The service spends more than $2.6 million to train a fighter pilot. Training for an airlift pilot, relatively speaking, is far less — about $600,000. . . . [The UAV training program starts with the manned pilot training program] “eliminating 20 unnecessary weeks of the current undergraduate pilot training program, deleting unnecessary graduate training on other aircraft,” and adding an eight-week UAV undergraduate course and 12 weeks of UAV graduate training. The cost . . . a little more than $135,000 per [UAV] pilot. . . .

Predator and Reaper flight hours have jumped in the past three years. Predator flights nearly doubled last year, according to the Air Force. UAV orbits over Iraq and Afghanistan — or around-the-clock combat air patrols — have gone from 11 in 2007 to 33 in 2009. Plans call for 50 CAPs by 2011.

Air Force leaders had to temporarily assign manned aircraft pilots to handle the higher number of flights. In 2008, 161 fighter, bomber, tanker and cargo pilots flew Predators and Reapers, the two UAV models. . . . “Developing a UAS-specific career path and eliminating unnecessary training will reduce costs by more than $1.5 billion with aviation fuel savings alone accounting for about $180 million."

There are missions for which remote control, rather than autopilot use of drones will be required (although even then, the planes can travel on autopilot to the immediate vincinity where they will carry out a combat mission). Pursuing moving targets on the ground, missions where it is necessary to look at the target before firing to confirm that it is the intended target, and air to air combat (i.e. dog fights), all involve this kind of situation.

While there are many possible missions of aircraft, reconnaissance and bomb dropping (sometimes in "strike" missions where there is not control of the airspace, and sometimes not) that drones are well suited to carry out have been the dominant missions for U.S. fighter and bomber aircraft. You can list every instance of air to air combat involve U.S. forces since Vietnam in a short blog post, and every instance of air to air combat in the world since then in a long one. With opponents who lack the ability to jam GPS signals and remote control telemetry, there is no reason that drones can't be effective in anti-tank and anti-vehicle warfare -- the missiles mounted on Predator drones were invented for that very purpose.

It may be necessary to have some manned fighter planes and bombers as a hedge against opponents who can jam GPS singles and remote control telemetry, or out of concerns that drone software could be hacked, or to deliver VIP passengers. But, drones seem to be well on track to make it unnecessary to have a manned successor to the F-22 or the F-35. Indeed, an operational version of the X-47 shown in this post may be possible within a few years of the time that the carrier based F-35C variant of the joint strike fighter enters naval service (and the F-35B variant has been put at the back of the line and may enter service around the same time as an operation version of the X-47). There is essentially nothing that a pilot does in a fighter aircraft in the kind of military environment that the United States military has ever encountered in the history of the fighter and bomber aircraft that couldn't be done by a remote operator of a military drone aircraft.

A notable corollary of this development is that it would allow for much lower impact foreign airbases. A drone base could have a skeleton crew to serve as security guards, maintain the fitness of the runway, the hangar/warehouse, the tools, the ammunition and supply stores, and a vacant dorm. The operators would at all times stay safe in the United States. The drones would sit silent in their hangar until actually needed for operations, avoiding the noise and activity that makes military air bases bad neighbors. In the event that tensions were rising in the region of the foreign base, and it looked like it might be necessary to deploy drones from a foreign airbase, drone maintenance technicians could be assembled at a U.S. base and flow in on a day or two's notice to maintain the drones while they were operating. Operates could train on simulators, and from time to time with actual drones, from the safety of U.S. bases.

If a few lukewarm U.S. allies were agreeable to having these kinds of lower impact drone bases on their territory, the distance of any plausible target in the world from the nearest U.S. base would be greatly reduced, making fast response times to threats possible without hypersonic aircraft speeds and the attendant sonic booms.

The drone concept isn't limited to replacing fighters and bombers.

Reconaissance

Reconaissance missions are the main purposes of drones today, and allow U.S. forces to have a bird's eye view of the battlefield that is on the verge of becoming much more comprehensive (follow up link here). Current drones can look at one small spot at a time directly below it; camera systems in development that would be transported by existing drones could look at thirty points at a time in a five kilometer radius circle.

Already, the U.S. has a variety of means to put explosives of almost any desired capacity at any point in the world with extreme accuracy and drone aircraft will only improve this capability - call this omnipotence. The U.S. already basically has the capacity to see any particular point in the world that it wants and this capability is being greatly expanded with drones - call this omnipresence. The next step is to be able to process the incoming flood of data well enough to make sense of what is coming in so that what is seen everywhere can be dealt with as if the U.S. forces were actually present everywhere it can observe something - call this omniscience. But, since the data collection part of this process is something that already exists in the hear and now or is ready to enter operational service in the very near future, the real bottleneck at this point is the data analysis.

However, increased data analysis capacity, either through the brute force of assigning more people to watch the feeds coming in, or through computer image processing, or through a combination of the two, is essentially invisible in war zones. The data analysis can happen can be done by people comfortable offices in the United States and its autonomous image processing capacity can be enhanced with invisible to the user computer software and hardware in some anonymous military server farm.

Airdrops

A Berlin airlift type operation is just a bomb run with a different payload.

Cargo Transports

While military leaders might appropriate be concerned about using drones to transport people, at least apart from high pilot risk situations like medical evacuations in the middle of a fire fight, there is no reason why a UAV wouldn't be appropriate as a cargo plane. Indeed, it would be relatively easy, once the flight software is developed for a drone fighter aircraft, to retrofit existing cargo planes so that they could be operated remotely.

Staffing Impact

It takes about twenty active duty military personnel to keep an aircraft operating in the existing Air Force. And, most of those personnel, the maintenance crews, for example, would still be needed. But, the number of manned aircraft that need pilots could be reduced dramatically in a matter of two or three decades, and maintenace crews would be needed only where drones are being used for actual operations - not for the most part, for training duties.

Unmanned Ground Vehicles



The Black Knight (vehicle)

The drone trend isn't restricted to aircraft. For example, the U.S. Army is testing and evaluating the Black Knight, a prototype light tank that is remotely controlled, not so differently from the remote controlled vehicles you can buy for your kids at Target. It can go as fast as the Army's existing tanks over similar terrain, it has a 30mm cannon and a machine gun, and it can be carried in a C-130 cargo aircraft, unlike existing heavy military hardware like the M1A tank and the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.

A smaller ground drone called the Gladiator, that has been in military service for three years, has a light machine gun and tracks and weighs three-quarters of a ton (think armed, remote controlled riding lawn mowner on steroids). Obviously, this isn't very useful for chatting up locals to determine who is siding with insurgents. But, it provides the kind of firepower that would otherwise require a soldier without the need to hide from income fire or be unduly concerned about IEDs.

Remote controlled ground drones are more prone to getting stuck than drone aircraft and have to contend with the messiness of surface terrain, but are near future possibilities with off the shelf technology for just about any military mission that doesn't involve interacting with human beings. More humble remotely operated vehicles could deliver supplies or have forklifts to move loads around warehouses.

Army efforts to develop unmanned artillery batteries, the Non-Line of Sight missile system component of the "Future Combat System" that has been cancelled after it failed to meet performance test, went over budget and was behind schedule are sidelined for now. But, since the problems were almost entirely a matter of electronic guidance systems and software, rather than the rest of the missile system, it is only a matter of time before the technology can catch up to the mission and be reintroduced into the Army's military arsenal.

The superfast reflexes of robots and computers have already been harnessed in a modified version of the Navy's "Phalanx Close In Weapons System" for Army use that uses bullets shoot incoming rockets and artillery shells identified by its sensors before an operator even knows what is happening. Systems that use lasers rather than bullets to shoot incoming ordiance have been developed and tested, but are so far inferior to the current system which shoots big bullets with little bullets.

An interesting modification of Phalanx that recently entered service with the US Army is the Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar system (C-RAM), which is designed to combat the small mortar and rocket threat. This system grew out of a 2004 request from Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker, who wanted a better means of defending US troops based in Iraq.

The complete C-RAM system networks a ground-based version of Phalanx together with the Army's Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar (LCMR) and Q-36 Target Acquisition Radar (AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder Radar), which detects incoming rounds and determines their point of origin. When C-RAM detects an incoming round, it turns on a set of strobe lights to alert local personnel to take cover, authorizes the modified Phalanx to open fire with explosive bullets to destroy the projectile and dispatches a Hunter UAV equipped with Viper Strike laser-designated munitions to kill whoever fired it. Raytheon is currently (2007) offering a trailer-mounted version of Phalanx as part of C-RAM under the product name of Centurion™. Unlike the naval version, the C-RAM version of Phalanx does not fire solid tungsten penetrators. Instead, in order to reduce the risk of civilian and friendly casualties, this system uses self-destructing explosive bullets.

The first two C-RAM systems arrived in Iraq in May, 2005 and have been reported as having successfully knocked down incoming mortar rounds.

The Centurion unloaded from a cargo aircraft

As in the case of air drones, ground drones aren't very useful as a tool to dispatch people in a war zone. But, for combat and transport roles, particular in asymmetric conflicts (or even "near peer" conflicts) where electronic means of interfering with these military systems aren't available to opposing forces, they have the potentially to replace a large share of the systems current military systems.

The need to have an operator present with a military vehicle or weapon when it is being used in high threat environments could be greatly diminished in the time frame before my grandchildren are of military service age.

Analysis

Suffice it to say that similar unmanned system concepts apply to surface and submarine forces.

A New Era In Conventional Warfare

The net effect of all of this is to make possible a world in which conventional warfare with large military systems of the kind that has dominated every full scale war from World War I to the early days of the Iraq War can be carried out on behalf of technologically advanced countries like the United States mostly by drones and robots that are extremely accurate and capable of managing in conditions unsuitable for soldiers with endurance and patience.

In conflicts with countries that don't have this kind of technology, or advanced electronics that can counter their control systems, heavy weapons systems from tanks to armored personnel carriers to military aircraft to artillery batteries to warships may become all but useless.

Tank squadrons and non-stealth manned fighter wings and surface navy fleets may become as obsolete in conflicts with technologically advanced militaries as the "light brigade" of horse riding cavalry was in the face of machine guns.

The main limitation on the use of military force will be not the capacity to deliver explosive force precisely when and where the military wants to do so, overcoming all static armor systems, but the ability to distinguish rapidly enough between friends, foes and neutrals.

While military planners have portrayed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where heavy conventional military opposition was utterly destroyed in days or weeks, followed by long mopping up counterinsurgency campaigns conducted mostly by infantry with low levels of heavier military equipment providing support, this may become the norm in future wars, at least those conducted against advanced military powers by nations that do not have comparable military technology.

Spy v. Spy: The Red Queen Effect

Of course, the other problem is that proliferation of this kind of technology is much harder to control than proliferation of ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, or navy fleets, for example. The computing power and electronic components necessary to make servicable versions of these kinds of weapons systems are available on a commercial, off the shelf basis. This is the kind of stuff that a bright high school student or undergraduate engineering student can devise with a six figure budget. The copies may not be quite as capable as the original, and may come on line a few years later, but they aren't that far behind.

A terrorist cell may not be able to field a stealth bomber drone, but they may very well be able to put together an ugly hybrid of a radio controlled airplane, a cell phone with a videocamera, and a handgun that can be used as a remote controlled assassination weapon, and a full fledged terrorist organization might even be able to mass produce something like that in some lonely industrial park in Yemen or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Compton, a smuggle crates of them (perhaps with a legal radio controlled aircraft component and an illegal weaponizing upgrade kit distributed separately) all over the world. I can even imagine some U.S. court finding that such a device can be lawfully mass produced and distributed in the United States as a Second Amendment protected right, given that it is made up of components that are protected by the Second Amendment or are lawful, and given free speech rights to discuss technology, even military technology, that is not esoteric.

Similarly, a low budget "cruise missile" with a rocket propelled grenade's explosive as a warhead could transform a somewhat heavier than average small arm into a medium range guided artillery weapon.

A single dud Excaliber artillery round or smart bomb recovered from a battlefield, as the Chinese are believed to have recovered parts from an F-117 stealth fighter shot down in Balkans, could allow a decent engineer to reverse engineer most of the core concepts in the weapon's guidance system while attracting far less notice than an attempt to smuggle nuclear materials to a rogue nation might.

A country like North Korea which has managed with get noticed with very small numbers of very advanced military systems like nuclear bombs, medium range missiles and submarines probably doesn't have the industrial base to do more than the equivalent of throwing a one time punch that gives some other nation a bloody nose. Maybe it could destroy one or two medium sized cities in China or Japan or even the United States or Canada. But, it would then be hopelessly outmatched and obliterated. If its next leader is as crazy as its current one, it might even try to make that happen.

But, a somewhat less isolated and backward country with resticted access to the international arms markets, like Iran or [North] Sudan, could devote the resources necessary to develop a pretty credible military-industrial complex to develop drone and robot weapons systems. The examples of South Africa and Israel illustrates the fact that a nation doesn't have to be very large or have that huge of a GDP to have a quite credible defense contracting industry, making not quite state of the art weapons systems and military vehicles. Indeed, perhaps the best justification for allowing the arms sales of Russia and the United States to foreign nations of questionable character to continue is that this discourages those countries from developing the kind of industrial base necessary to make them domestically.

Exports from these unfriendly arms makers, in turn, could spread worldwide to all manner of regimes that might be quite interested in launching attacks on the United States or its interests or allies remotely. China, even if it backs down from hostile direct action against its neighbors, could prove to be more of an arms proliferation threat to the United State than it is a direct military threat.

Our progress in figuring out how to defend our nation from drone and robotic weapons systems is far less advanced than our capacity to make them. But, simply refraining from developing our own drones and robotic weapons systems won't be enough to prevent other nations from doing so with the technological foundations that are available to all.

Ultimately, the technologies inherent in drone and guided weapons may make the need to invade other nations that don't control access to that kind of military technology the norm, rather than exception that the Afghan war seemed to involve.

READ MORE - Drones, Robots and the Next War