LWOP Sentence For Zapata Murder Upheld On Appeal

The Colorado Court of Appeals has upheld the convictions of a man charged with first-degree murder and other counts in what prosecutors said was the bias-motivated killing of a transgender Greeley woman.

Allen Andrade of Thornton was convicted in 2009 of deliberately beating 18-year-old Angie Zapata to death with a fire extinguisher in 2008 after learning she was biologically male. Defense attorneys argued Andrade had planned to meet Zapata for sex and snapped after learning she was born male.

From here.

Adrande was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. His main appellate arguments, an argument that the jury should have been giving an instruction mitigating his criminal culpability because he was drunk, and seeking to suppress the murder weapon from evidence, were mundane. My post from the day that he was convicted on April 22, 2009, is found here.

Given the fact that Adrande had at least three prior felony convictions in his fourteen years of adult life, and was charged as a habitual offender and was taped making a telelphone call from jail admitting to the killing (albeit arguably with a lower level of intent), made a confession to police (albeit arguably with a lower level of intent), and was arrested in possession of Zapata's stolen car, 32 year old Adrande would have gone to prison for 40 years to life, and also faced the 24 year sentences on other charges that he received, even if the appellate court had reversed the first degree murder conviction. He was convicted of a hate crimes charge, but given his first degree murder and other convictions, any appellate issues he could have raised related to that conviction wouldn't have mattered because they would have constituted harmless error at their worst.

The August 11, 2011 opinion of the Colorado Court of Appeals in case 09CA1310 People v. Allen Ray Andrade, was unpublished. It appears that the case was argued on the basis of the briefs with no oral argument in the case available in the Colorado Court of Appeals online archive of oral arguments.

Andrade could make a discretionary appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court, could make a state level collateral attack on his conviction after that, and could bring a federal habeas corpus petition after that according to strict procedural limitations. But, given the lack of a death sentence, the lack of a right to counsel for collateral attacks, the lack of a credible claim that he was not the one who killed Zapata, his long criminal history, and the weakness of his arguments on direct appeal and the weight of the multiple damning pieces of evidence against him, none of those efforts are likely to be successful. There is a good chance that he won't even bother with further appeals, although he does have nothing else to do for the rest of his life. And, Adrande is extremely unlikely, given the fact that he was not sentenced to death, has a long and serious criminal record, and there is no doubt that he was guilty of some serious crimes this time around, that he will ever receive executive clemency.

American Criminal Justice: Cheap, Final, Harsh and Fast

In practice, it is astoundingly unlikely anywhere in the United States, in the state or the federal system, that someone who is convicted of a crime and not sentenced to death, whose conviction is affirmed on direct appeal, will not have that conviction later overturned or will have that sentence commuted.

I'll also restate a note that I made in a previous post:

The speed with which very serious criminal cases like this one progress is notable. The murder took place on July 15, 2008, and was discovered two days later. Thirteen days after the murder was discovered, there was an arrest. Pre-trial dismissal for lack of evidence was ruled out less than two months after the discovery of the body.

The trial was completed, the jury convicted, and the sentence imposed on April 22, 2009, nine months and one week after the murder was committed, and less than nine months after he was arrested. The direct appeal of right was resolved yesterday, fifteen months and twenty days after he was convicted, and thee years and twenty-seven days after the murder was committed. For all intents and purposes, the criminal justice system is now done with this case and he is the Colorado Department of Corrections' problem until he dies.

The sentence is rarely this long, but the general timeline in this case isn't unusual for a serious violent felony. Not every criminal case is so swift, but a very large share of all criminal convictions do result from arrests very shortly after the crime is committed and are based on convictions after trials where the evidence is overwhelming or guilty pleas, which move cases even faster. The constitutional right to a speedy trial rarely makes headlines, and isn't something most people are even aware of, but it has a pervasive effect on the pace of criminal proceedings in the United States.

Also, while the exact number will probably never be determined, the marginal cost of this criminal justice system of investigating and litigating this case to trial was almost nil, as most of the people involved, the police, DA who prosecuted the case, the judge and court clerks who handled the case, and the defense lawyers in the case, are on the public payroll on a salaried basis, and even if the personnel costs for everyone involved was prorated on an hourly basis, this case probably cost less to investigate and litigate through an appeal than a typical serious automobile accident that results in some injuries but not a death or a six figure contract dispute. All of the investigation and litigation costs combined for all parties were probably less than the costs associated with nine months of pre-conviction incarceration.

Of course, incarcerating this murderer for the rest of his life will cost the people of the State of Colorado something on the order of a million and a half dollars in today's funds after adjusting for inflation, and the State of Colorado probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars incarcerating him before his most recent conviction on prior felonies and no doubt, for juvenile offenses as well.

If the death penalty had been sought and secured, it probably would have cost the State of Colorado more in additional litigation costs and death penalty implementation than it would save in incarceration costs from his premature death, or at least wouldn't have saved very much. It is also worth recalling that death sentences are overturned much more often than murder convictions. For example, the results in all the cases that produced post-conviction reversals of death sentences that were finally resolved between April 1973 and 2000, 54 cases were retried and produced a death sentence on retrial, 223 led to a murder conviction with a sentence other than the death penalty, and 22 cases ended with a determination that the defendant was not guilty of a capital crime. Thus, more than twelve out of thirteen death penalty sentence reversals ultimately kept a capital murder conviction in place, and some of the one in thirteen cases where a capital murder conviction was itself reserved still left some serious felony conviction in place rather than leading to a finding of outright innocence of any crime (the cases where there is a chance of innocence on all counts due to factors like mistaken identity or police frameups are the ones groups like the Innocence Project prioritize).

Deprived of any hope of release, little meaningful activity to carry out in prison, convicted of a sex related crime, and marked with a long track record of violent offenses, one can expect that Andrade will start his prison career at a very high security level and stay there, and that he will not be a model inmate.

One would like to think that people serving long prison sentences provide some benefit to society while they are there apart from staying out of the lives of law abiding citizens while they are incarcerated, although our system of criminal justice certainly doesn't make that a priority and is perfectly happen to simply waste and right off any contribution that incarcerated people could make for the most part.

For all the twists and turns of the criminal justice system that make headlines and feature in crime fiction, reality is that the vast majority of criminal prosecutions produce convictions for something, that a minority of cases go to trial and a minority of those cases that are appealed are reversed on direct appeal, that it is fairly unusual for even a criminal sentence to be reversed on appeal, and that executive clemency is almost non-existent. Also, the percentage of people who escape from incarceration in a state prison is infinitessimal, and is even smaller in the case of prisoners in the highest security environments who have committed serious violent crimes (a large share of all escapes are walk aways from community corrections facilities, work release programs or minimal security facilities housing the least serious offenders). And, convicting someone of escape once they are rearrested, given the availability of prison records, DNA evidence, fingerprints, photographs and so on, is little more than a formality.

By the time the police make an arrest and a prosecutor files charges the probable future is usually very clear, and the vast majority of the time that there is a conviction it sticks. And, it is done very cheaply.

Pretty much the only way to have a reasonable chance of escaping some punishment for a crime is to not get arrested in the first place, and of course, that usually is what happens.

Why point all of this, which is obvious to those familiar with the system except politicians, for the most part?

First, there has been a lot of criticism that the Warren revolution in constitutional criminal procedure has made it easy to escape punishment from the criminal justice system. The reality is that there isn't much merit to that assertion. People who are arrested for serious crimes are usually convicted of something and usually get long prison terms if they have criminal records and committed really serious crimes, indeed, longer terms than anywhere else in the world pretty much.

Second, there has been a strong conservative movement to cast doubt on the capacity of the criminal justice system to handle terrorism suspects. But, there is extremely little evidence to suggest that it is not an effective way to punish them and there is considerable evidence to show that the due process protections and fairness of the criminal justice system, relative to more draconian approaches proposed to deal with terrorism, is better at preventing incapacitation of one terrorist from causing future terrorist acts inspired by action taken against the first terrorist. The claimed need for deprivations of civil liberties is premised on the incapacity of the civilian criminal courts to secure convictions and impose long sentences for terrorist acts which is simply not supported by experience in these cases.

READ MORE - LWOP Sentence For Zapata Murder Upheld On Appeal

Norway's Tragedies

A couple of observations about Norway's horrible tragedy.

1. Not all terrorists are Muslim. This fellow was more of a conservative nationalist, more Timothy McVeigh than Osama bin Laden.
2. Bombs are not inherently more deadly than guns. The bombing killed seven. The shooting, from a single gunman, killed sixty-eight.

READ MORE - Norway's Tragedies

College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

When I graduated from college, I went straight to law school, and from law school, straight to a home that my wife and I shared with no one else but our cat.  I've never moved back in with my parents and neither did my brother after he graduated from college, nor did either of our spouses.  But, this pattern is increasingly rare. 

A new survey discussed by Time Magazine finds that 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents after graduating from college.  The iconic modern American twentysomething is comic strip character Dustin, who spends days looking for jobs and nights at home with his parents, and his undead television comedy counterpart "George" (played by Ellen Muth) in the series "Dead Like Me," both of which presciently debuted before the current economy made their protagonists' experiences so routine.  What is driving the trend?

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Failure to launch, is no longer the exception.  It is the norm in the current economy.  This also helps to explain why more and more young twenty-somethings are deferring getting married and having kids.  Household formation rates are at record lows.  We are experience the baby boom in reverse.

The particularly troubling part is that missteps at the beginning of a career often have a disproportionate impact on a person's entire work life.  If this is really just a temporary bump in the road, it isn't that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but this may be a far more serious case of a nascent lost generation.  When the economy picks up again, that big businesses and professional firms that would have hired people from the last few crops of college graduates to entry level jobs that put those hires on a path to high end careers are likely to hire almost entirely from the most recent crop of new graduates, rather than trying to locate promising talent that was missed in the prior years when hiring was stopped or slowed.  Even for those new graduates who wash out of their plum first jobs a few years later as firms winow out all but the most talented prospects whom they promote, not starting off at a plum job may make the difference between being able to pay off students loans in five years and being able to pay off student loans in twenty years.

For bright new college graduates, their prospects are not totally crushed.  The current bought of unemployment is probably cyclic.  When the economy comes back, there will be jobs and it is always better to be in the job market with a college degree than to be without one.  But, jobless new graduates are left in a particularly frustrating position.  While commentators like David Brooks wants to call them lazy, what can they do?

It’s difficult to argue that they need to go to college, because they did. It’s difficult to argue that they can’t move to new jobs (unlikely to be homeowners) or suffer high health care costs (doesn’t health care reform allow employers to push their health costs onto their parents’ employer?). Unless we think that the graduating class of 2008 is fundamentally worse than the graduate class of 2006 I don’t see a technology problem.

Also for fun, the graduating classes post-Recession have increasingly large student debt loans, which should lower the reservation wage they’ll accept due to liquidity pressures. So the idea that everyone 20-24 is on vacation is harder to accept compared to earlier years.

New college graduates emerging out into the world this year are no more, and no less than unlucky.  They should have been born a few years earlier or later than the year that I graduated from high school, but they weren't.

We can hope, at least, that this will be merely a temporary circumstance.  But, it isn't impossible that this trend will endure.  For example, one of the major forces driving Islamic terrorism in the world is the existence of an immense class of unemployed college graduates across the oil rich states of the Middle East and North Africa.  Indeed, the suicide of a once too often discouraged college graduate in Tunisia was the spark the set off the wave of revolutions that have dislodged or tried to remove authoritarian regimes across tthe regime.  Similarly, this phenomena has been the norm in Japan ever since it experienced its housing bubble collapse triggered lost decade, long before the financial crisis, and it has defined a whole generation since then.  There is not obvious end to that trend on the horizon in Japan.

READ MORE - College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

Friday News Dump

In Colorado

* Colorado's unemployment rate in February, of 9.1%, is the highest the state has experienced since the Great Depression and above the national rate of 8.9%. The oil bust of the early 1980s brought the rate to its previous peak of 8.8%. Also, unemployment estimates for Colorado over the last couple of years turn out to have been greatly understated, since the census revealed that the population figures used in making the original unemployment predictions were too low in high unemployment areas. Colorado's record lowest unemployment, since 1976, was at the turn of the millenium when it dropped to a little under 3%.

State officials have blamed migration to Colorado and the decision of many people who have given up looking for work to return to the workforce. Still, the fact that unemployment is climbing, rather than falling, long after the "recovery" in GDP terms has been underway, is discouraging. Unemployment is alawys a lagging indicator, but the employment situation has been worse and longer lived in the current employment recession than any since the Great Depression.

* Despite an immense state budget deficit, House Republicans in Colorado are still proposing large new tax cuts, in excess of $60 million.

* Colorado's proposed state budget will include more cuts to the Fort Logan psychiatric hospital, continuing a trend of decreasing mental health hospital capacity. The current cuts would close a juvenile ward that current houses an average of a dozen inpatients. The Joint Budget Committee argues that private facilities in the state offer the same services at a lower price and can handle another dozen patients.

In Other State Legislatures

* Both houses of Wisconsin's state legislature has passed a bill ending collective bargaining for public sector workers in Wisconsin's state and local governments. Republican Governor Walker has promised to sign the bill, which he championed. Naturally, the bill received voted only from Republicans, and a few Republicans broke ranks to join with Democrats in opposing it. Protests continue in Madison, with farmers set to encicle the state capitol with tractors next. Public opinion in Wisconsin has shifted decisively away from the Republicans and towards President Obama and the public employees unions in Wisconsin as a result of the union fight. Recall efforts are underway targeting a number of legislative anti-union Republicans, although it isn't clear if these will make the ballot or have a realistic chance at succeeding. Similar efforts are making progress in other Republican controlled states.

* The Governor of Illinois signed a bill abolishing the death penalty in that state, appropriating the funds that would have been used for death penalty litigation to a trust for murder victims, and pardoned the fifteen people on death row there. Illinois is the 16th state in the United States to abolish the death penalty.

* Kentucky has joined the list of states addressing state budget shortfalls with sentencing reforms, particularly with milder sentences for non-violent drug users.

Kentucky . . . became the latest to make the shift when Gov. Steve Beshear signed into law a measure increasing spending on rehabilitation programs and intensive drug testing. The law also reduces penalties for many drug offenses and may allow some traffickers and users of smaller amounts of drugs to avoid prison.

Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are among those that have pending bills to reduce penalties for drug offenders, in some cases by directing defendants into treatment programs. Similar laws have taken effect in South Carolina, Colorado and New York in recent years. States have maintained stiff penalties for more-serious drug crimes.

While the changes are part of broader belt-tightening efforts, they also reflect a growing belief among state lawmakers that prosecuting drug offenders aggressively often fails to treat their underlying addiction problems and can result in offenders cycling in and out of prisons for years — a critique long voiced by groups that advocate in favor of defendants' rights. . .

The state measures mark a sharp retreat from the war on drugs, which gathered steam in the 1980s and '90s with mandatory-minimum and three-strikes prison sentences that resulted in some drug offenders being locked up for decades. Drug arrests nationwide climbed from about 580,000 in 1980 to about 1.6 million in 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Although some states started rethinking drug punishment before the recession, many more states have come on board in the past two years. In 2007, Texas began shifting more drug offenders away from prison, which helped hold down the inmate population. The changes cost $241 million, less than half what the state anticipated it would have spent to build three new prisons.

* Ohio's criminal sentencing commission has released a new report on the causes of that state's prison overcrowding problem. According to the report, "recent growth in Ohio’s prison population — even with mandatory sentences and scores of bills that increase penalties for particular offenses — is not driven primarily by intake (although it is a factor). It’s largely fueled by increases in inmates’ average length-of-stay."

* Connecticut voters in a survey favored the decriminalization of marijuana (79% favor medical marijuana and 65% favor decriminalization), legalizing Sunday liquor sales (65%), and reinstating the death penalty (68% up from 59% in 2005 after a high profile murder). But, majorities there don't favor allowing grocery stores to sell wine or liquor. Connecticut currently has a death penalty but its legislature is considering repealing it.

* Connecticut last year joined a list of states that automatically treat some teens under the age of eighteen as adults in the criminal justice process; New Hampshire changed its law in 2008. Similar proposals are pending in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The only other state that automatically tries some teens under the age of eighteen as adults is New York State. Budget savings and increased sensitivity to the distinctiveness of juvenile offenders has prompted the changes. For example, a recent study found that:

[I]nmates in adult facilities (surprisingly) give better reports than youth in juvenile facilities on several measures (including criminal activity and victimization), they also fare much worse on other measures. Importantly, the inmates in adult facilities report substantially and significantly greater rates of PTSD and mental illness symptoms, and are much more likely to be afraid for their safety, compared to those in juvenile facilities.

Colorado never had a law that automatically tried older teens under the age of eighteen as adults, but did give prosecutors the authority to directly file many serious criminal charges against older juveniles as adults without court approval; that authority was recently narrowed by Colorado's General Assembly.

* California is building a new death row prison at a projected cost of $356 million, as a partial response to federal prison overcrowding litigation in the state, in which inmates have been successful on the merits, but not seen many results.

California has 713 inmates awaiting execution. . . . By comparison, Florida ranked second, with 398, and Texas was third at 337. . . About 700 condemned men are confined at San Quentin, north of San Francisco, in facilities built to hold 554, according to the Corrections Department’s website. (Nineteen women face execution and are held in Chowchilla, a prison in the Central Valley.) On average, the men are likely to spend 17 years in the aging cell blocks, according to the prison system. . . . Since 1978, when California reinstated capital punishment, 53 condemned inmates have died from natural causes while on death row. Eighteen committed suicide and 13 were executed. Six died from other causes.

Other Domestic News

* Long Island Republican Congressman King has launched hearings in the House Homeland Security Committee into the radicalization of Islam, over objections that this amounts of a McCarthyistic inquiry that is singling out a single religion that may incite further terrorist sentiment against the United States.

* In Skinner v. Switzer, the U.S. Surpeme Court found, in a narrow 6-3 decision, that a Section 1983 civil rights suit by a death row inmate (as opposed to a habeas corpus suit) was not procedurally barred by prison litigation reform statutes. The inmate challenged an interpretation of a Texas law that prevented him from securing post-conviction access to DNA evidence in his muder case that might implicate another suspect (now dead). The court ruled in his favor because DNA testing itself does not necessarily lead to the setting aside of his conviction, as it could show that he is guilty or be inconclusive (and hence is not duplicative of habeas corpus relief), and does not violate the Rooker-Feldman doctrine because while a "state-court decision is not reviewable by lower federal courts . . . a statute or rule governing the decision may be challenged in a federal action"). The ruling also provided yet another case where heightened pleading standards in federal civil litigation were held not to bar a straightforward lawsuit brought by a prisoner.

* Excessive federal child pornography laws continue to produce absurd results:

In the spring and summer of 2006, Eric Rinehart, at the time a 34-year-old police officer in the small town of Middletown, Indiana, began consensual sexual relationships with two young women, ages 16 and 17. One of the women had contacted Rinehart through his MySpace page. He had known the other one, the daughter of a man who was involved in training police officers, for most of her life. Rinehart was going through a divorce at the time. The relationships came to the attention of local authorities, and then federal authorities, when one of the girls mentioned it to a guidance counselor. Whatever you might think of Rinehart's judgment or ethics, his relationships with the girls weren't illegal. The age of consent in Indiana is 16. . . . Rinehart got into legal trouble because one of the girls mentioned to him that she had posed for sexually provocative photos for a previous boyfriend and offered to do the same for Rinehart. Rinehart lent her his camera, which she returned with the promised photos. Rinehart and both girls then took additional photos and at least one video, which he downloaded to his computer.

In 2007 Rinehart was convicted on two federal charges of producing child pornography. U.S. District Court Judge David Hamilton, who now serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, reluctantly sentenced Rinehart to 15 years in prison. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentences, Hamilton wrote, his hands were tied. There is no parole in the federal prison system. So barring an unlikely grant of clemency from the president, Rinehart, who is serving his time at a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania, will have to complete at least 85 percent of his term (assuming time off for good behavior), or nearly 13 years.

* An NPR executive resigned after remarking in a secretly recorded conversation that the Tea Party was full of racists, despite the fact that this is true.

* Oil prices are rising on Mideast turmoil.

* Blockbuster, the dominant player in the storefront video rental market, reached an agreement with its creditors to be auctioned as a business to the highest bidder, rather than having its assets liquidated. Netflix, video on demand, and kiosk video rentals have destroyed its profitability. The chain, which grew dramatically through acquisition of competitors, also probably simply had too many stores for the market's demand and hasn't been able to shutter them fast enough. For example, in Denver at 6th Avenue and Grant Street, it once had two stores less than a block apart - both are now shuttered.

* Department store H&M has decided to open up stores in greater Denver, with the Saks location at the Cherry Creek Mall which is closing likely to be one of them.

Abroad

* Japan has had two major earthquakes in the last week. One was magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale, and the last night there was an 8.8 magnitude quake that also gave rise to a Tsunami that reached as far as Hawaiii this morning and will be experienced as far off as Peru. The first Japanese quake produced only minimal damage. The current one killed about a hundred people and led to considerable property damage in a few industrial areas mostly from the tsunami waves rather than the earthquake itself. Similar magnitude earthquakes in Iran, Indonesia and Haiti have produced massive loss of life and long term devistation, but Japan's earthquake conscious building codes and better prepared people prevented the damage from being greater. A smaller earthquake in China this weak produced loss of life and property damage comparable to that experienced by last night's massive quake.

* Civil war continues to rage in Libya and France has recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of the country; NATO nations remain reluctant to intervene militarily there. Egyptians will vote on amendments to military proposed amendments its constitution this month to prepare for prompt democratic elections that will transfer power from a military council to civilians. Protestors in Jordan have complained that a new prime minister is stalling on proposals for political reforms, using the fact that the country's 32 political parties are too fragmented to produce quality elections; the main democratic reform that has been demanded is to shift control of the executive branch from the king to a prime minster selected by parliament. Police in a predominantly Shi'ite part of Saudi Arabia shot five protestors at a small demonstration; protests in the absolute monarchy have been muted compared to elsewhere in the region - in part because Saudi Arabia is more repressive and in part because the current Saudi King is popular with majority Sunnis in the country.

* The Daili Lama in Tibet proposed on the anniversary of the day of Tibet's failed 1959 bid to free itself from China, to transfer political power of the government in exile to elected leaders, leaving himself and his successors as spiritual leaders only. Proposed succession to his position is currently unclear as he has also proposed reforms to the traditional approach rooted in the notion that he is reincarnated. China remains officially outraged at any talk of Tibetan independence, or the notion that Taiwan is not part of China. China is also cracking down in an effort to prevent the Jasmine revolution of the Middle East from spreading to it.

Medicine

* A drug to prevent the spread of M.S. has worked in a mouse model. A mouse model of a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease and damage from minor strokes in the brain has also been successful. A new drug to treat lupus has come on the market. Progress has been made in developing a new class of anti-malaria drugs based on a chemotherapy drug.

READ MORE - Friday News Dump

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

Pakistani Politics Still Violent

"A Pakistani government minister who had said he was getting death threats because of his opposition to a controversial blasphemy law was shot to death Wednesday.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Cabinet in Pakistan, where 95 percent of people are Muslim. He served as the government’s minister of minority affairs....

The Taliban claimed responsibility. “(The) assassination of Bhatti is a message to all of those who are against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman."

Two months ago, a governor of a Pakistan state — Salman Taseer — was murdered for the same reason.

From here.

How do you run a democratic civilian government when senior government officials who take positions on issues (never mind waiting around to see how the political and legal process resolved the dispute), that somebody else in the system doesn't like, are routinely murdered or executed?

It has been this way for a long time. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, after which the first President, Iskander Mirza declared martial law and discarded the constitution, which lead to his removal from office in a coup by General Ayub Khan, the same day, October 7, 1958.

Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan's People's Party became President after a democratic election on December 20, 1971, was replaced in a coup in July 1977, and was executed for complicity in a 1974 political murder on April 4, 1979.

President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane exploded in August 1988. Suffice it to say that it certainly sounds like suspicious circumstance.

Benazir Bhutto (the late Zulifikar Ali Bhutto's daughter) became Prime Minister in 1988, was removed by the President based on corruption charges August 1990, returned to power October 1990, and was removed for more corruption charges November 1996.

A coup removed the civilian regime entirely over dissatisfaction with the decisions on military matter being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 12, 1999, and the leading General Pevez Musharraf declared himself to be President on June 20, 2001. Between then and 2007, he survived four assassination attempts.

More than 140 people died in a suicide bomber's unsuccessful attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned for President after eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, and she was successfully assassinated December 27, 2007 after a political rally, in which the leaders of the regime of Pakistan in power at the time is accused of being complicit.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari lead the Pakistan Peoples Party to an electoral victory Febraury 18, 2008, and after street protests and a threatened impeachment, General Musharraf stepped down in August, and Zardari was sworn in as President.

This, of course, just includes the highlights, without mentioning assassinations and assassination attempts on lower level figures, and a constant low level parade of other political killings and suicide bombings. For example, seven more famous political assassinations in Pakistan can be found here (many of which are discussed with more narration here.) I've also omitted multiple wars, some still in progress today. The separation of Pakistan from India was not bloodless. One bloody civil war split Bangladesh and Pakistan into separate countries in the 1970s. There have been wars with India over the Kashmir and out of general mutual antipathy. There have been subnational insurgencies and violent counterinsurgencies in the country's "frontier provinces" since 1958, and one of them is in progress right now.

Xe Services, which is currently embroiled in revelations related to the arrest of a U.S. CIA contractor who used to work for them, was accused in 2009 of having conducted political assassinations of its own without Presidential approval. This is in addition to the many Presidentially authorized CIA assassinations of people believed to be involved with the Taliban, mostly with drone deployed missiles, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress following 9/11.

Pakistan is not Yemen. It is a developing country with a viable middle class and more than a hundred million people, with one of the oldest histories of civilization in the world, and a substantial GDP, that has nuclear weapons, not a sparsely populated poor nation in the middle of a desert. In theory, it is a nation of Muslims who have a lot in common with each other in a "nation-state" sense.

Even without any new provocations, it would take a lifetime just to settle the scores for all the political killings that have occurred so far. A simple change of President pursuant to election results in the ordinary manner, without assassinations, impeachments or coups, that takes place in the United States every four to eight years, most of the time, is almost unprecedented in Pakistan.

As much as we can become concerned with minor happenings in Pakistan, the very basics of orderly, peaceful civilian government of any kind seem elusive.

READ MORE - Pakistani Politics Still Violent

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?

Monday Miscellany

* Last week, Glendale's animal rights terrorist, thirty-four year old Walter Edmund Bond, got five years in prison for burning down the sheepskin factory (and a $1.2 million restitution judgment together with three years of supervised release) following a guilty plea, despite the fact that he was utterly unapologetic and taunted the victims as he spoke prior to receiving his sentence. No physical injuries to people were caused by this or her other fires, but the business, which was not insured, was destroyed.

"In a society that honors money over life, I am honored to be a prisoner of war," Bond said. As Bond raged in the heavily guarded courtroom — at one point saying he wanted Livaditis to "choke on everything you earned" — a member of Livaditis' family cried in the audience. . . . [He] told Judge Christine Arguello that he has no remorse for the fire, which he has said he lit under the banner of the radical Animal Liberation Front, or ALF. . . . [The judge said] he would face additional prison time if he didn't keep up with restitution payments. Bond told Arguello he would not willingly make the payments. . . . Bond also has prior arson convictions that had nothing to do with animal-rights issues. Holloway said Bond was convicted in Iowa in 1996 for lighting a pentagram on fire inside a church convicted again in 1997 in Iowa for setting fire to a building, an incident that killed a family's pet. . . .

Bond's speech today stood in contrast to statements his lawyer made on his behalf last month in a court filing seeking to get Bond a reduced sentence of less than four years. In that filing, attorney Edward Harris wrote that Bond had renounced "burning the businesses of those who offend his principles. . . . Mr. Bond ... now believes that the better course of action is to limit his advocacy to speech and writing," Harris wrote.

That sentiment was not evident during Bond's speech, as he called affiliating with the ALF, "the proudest and most powerful thing I have ever done." Bond, who has identified himself at times in online writings as "ALF Lone Wolf," addressed part of his speech to "my vegan sisters and brothers" and encouraged them to keep up their campaign.

About a dozen of Bond's supporters sat in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing. . . After the hearing, many of the activists, some of whom traveled from across the country to attend, said they supported Bond's statement.

The willingness of federal prosecutors to accept such a lenient plea bargain may have something to do with the fact that he faces two more counts in Utah that will add to the total time served before his release. This conviction will impact his criminal history for the next convictions under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. U.S. Attorneys in Utah will also, no doubt, consider his statements at this sentencing in considering what plea agreements they are willing to reach with him.

Still, it is hard to imagine someone who claimed that he did this in the name of Islam, instead of animal rights, receiving a similarly light sentence. When someone who is deeply repentant can be sentenced to 30 years in prison for sending $3,500 to an Islamic organization that engaged in both terrorist and non-terrorist activities funded by petty fraud under a law that had never before been enforced, it is hard to see why someone with a prior criminal arson record he burns down a shop and has no remorse for the act should receive a lighter sentence.

* There seems to be some evidence that fructose (one type of dietary sugar) encourages obesity more the glucose (another type of dietary sugar).

* Genetic evidence has led biologists to reclassify a few species of worms called Acoels and Xenoturbella, that had previously been seen as a missing link between invertebrates with radial symmetry (anemones, jellyfish and sponges, for example) that use the same body opening to ingest food and excrete waste, and animals with bilateral symmetry that have a separate mouth and anus (earthworms, snails, insects, sea urchins and vertebrates, for example), since these worms have bilateral symmetry but a single body opening to ingest food and excrete waste. The genetic evidence suggests that rather than being a missing link, the Acoels had an ancestor that has bilateral symmetry and both a mouth and anus, but lost the anus in later convergent evolution. They turn out to be more closely related to the vertebrates and sea urchins than to other bilateral animals by several different genetic measures.

* Old teeth found at an archeological site in Israel suggest that there may have been modern humans in the Levant much earlier than prior finds have indicated, perhaps even shortly after the evolution of modern humans in Africa:

Excavated at Qesem cave, a pre-historic site that was uncovered in 2000, the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern humans, Homo sapiens, which have been found at other sites is Israel, such as Oafzeh and Skhul -- but they're a lot older than any previously discovered remains.

"The Qesem teeth come from a time period between 200,000 -- 400,000 years ago when human remains from the Middle East are very scarce," Quam said. "We have numerous remains of Neandertals and Homo sapiens from more recent times, that is around 60,00 -- 150,000 years ago, but fossils from earlier time periods are rare. So these teeth are providing us with some new information about who the earlier occupants of this region were as well as their potential evolutionary relationships with the later fossils from this same region."

Teeth are the prime sources for ancient DNA because the enamel shields them from outside conditions, leaving open the possibility that it might be possible to analyze the DNA of hominins much older than any other ancient DNA ever recovered. Even results limited to mtDNA could shed light on whether the modern humans finds in the Levant are ancestral to modern Eurasian, or a "dead end" as their apparent absence from the Levant for tens of thousands of year suggests might be the case. But, the rare teeth have value whole, and the ancient DNA inside could easy be degraded and provide no useful information, so the decision on whether scientists should try to analyze them in destructive testing for ancient DNA is a difficult one.

* One feature that is surprising absent from library cataloging software (at least in Denver) and online book purchasing sites (like Amazon) is an easy way to bring up all of the books and other media that are part of the same series and arrange them in order. This is particularly annoying when several volumns of a series are written by different authors (common in non-fiction and sometimes seen in tribute works to deceased authors). Even more annoying, however, is the effort of publishers like Little, Brown and Company's paperback offerings, where I have seen it done, to deliberately obscure the fact that a book which is one of the middle books of a series has books that come before it in the series on the book cover. I understand the desire to sell more books, but in general have a low opinion of marketing approaches that seek to capitalize on consumer ignorance rather than by letting them know more about the product.

* Marginal Revolution is a blog that is increasingly attracting my attention as a source of interesting and timely tidbits. So is Truth on the Market (which is more academic).

* Most recently, the latter blog brings the sad news that Borders, I book store that I saw rise from its humble beginnings as a wonderful independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan while I was in law school, is going bankrupt. Borders was acquired by Detroit area based Kmart to revive its Walden Books chain, one that I liked to describe as a book store for people who don't really like books that based on shopping malls. The book stores were spun off from Kmart, which went bankrupt and was merged in the same group with Sears, another retail chain that had jumped the shark but had valuable real estate holdings. Borders was a delightful book store, but expanded too fast with non-bookstore exeecutives, failed to gain a strong foothold into the online world, and tried to hard to meld a chain oriented towards intellectuals and one oriented towards non-intellectuals that was ill fated. I personally think that the role of a lack of online initiatives at Borders which has been played as a "death of books" scenario distorts what really went wrong with Borders, which can just as easily be understood as a lesson in the limits of the economies of scale.

* The Democratic Leadership Council (and its deceptively named think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute), a conservative leaning organization within the Democratic Party, is dead. It has run out of money and is suspending its operations. While the DLC has been more Clintonian than outright Blue Dog conservative, it has earned a great deal of ire from the progressive elements in the Democratic party anyway. The 2012 election was a blow to its core constitutency, as right leaning Democrats favored Republicans over Democrats, although the Democratic party still has a much bigger tend than the Republicans politically at the moment. Also, the DLC has simply lacked much of a coherent vision.

* Arizona is talking about bringing counterclaims in the federal suit to invalidate its anti-immigration law on pre-emption grounds alleging that Arizona has incurred fiscal harms as a result of non-enforcement of federal law by federal officials. The claim is frivilous as a matter of law and a nearly identical suit was promptly defeated in the courts in Colorado when Attorney General Suthers was directed by the legislature in a special session to bring such a suit. But, the political grandstanding continues to outweigh the legal good judgment of the officials making the legal move.

READ MORE - Monday Miscellany

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

Friday Links of Interest

* Colorado's incarceration rate for women (93 per 100,000 population) is the third highest in the United States after Oklahoma (134 per 100,000), and Texas (98 per 100,000). The national average is 69 per 100,000. "In 2004, [Oklahoma] imprisoned more than 10 times as many women per capita as Massachusetts or Rhode Island."

* Microsoft's customer support website chronicles the ire of people who have had Bing hijack their systems.

* "[H]ow many offenders sentenced under the old 100-1 crack guidelines (and the amended version applicable from 2007 to 2010) would benefit from retroactive application of the new 18-1 crack guidelines that the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act produced"?

12,835 offenders sentenced between October 1, 1991, and September 30, 2009 (fiscal years 1992 through 2009), would be eligible to receive a reduced sentence if [the new sentencing guideline] were made retroactive. If these offenders were to receive reduced sentences . . . the dates on which they would be released would span more than thirty years....

Based on [additional] assumptions, the average sentence reduction for all impacted offenders with sufficient information to perform this analysis would be 22.7 percent (or 37 months, from 163 months to 126 months). Table 6 shows that 7,612 offenders (76.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of 48 months or less. Conversely, 286 offenders (2.9%) would receive a sentence reduction of more than 10 years.

A more modest adjustment to the crack sentencing guidelines in 2007 was applied retroactively. "The 2007 reduction benefited over 15,000 crack prisoners, though the amount of sentence reduction was only around 2 years of imprisonment."

The federal corrections budget would be reduced by about $1 billion if the sentencing guideline change mandated by the Fair Sentencing Act was made retroactive.

* Mohamad Hammoud was the first man convicted of charges including material support for terrorism after 9/11 (he was the first man charged under a 1996 law that makes it illegal to give money to designated terror groups and was found guilty and sentenced shortly after 9/11). He was sentenced to 155-years in prison "for smuggling cigarettes and sending $3,500 of the profits to Hezbollah." This was reduced this past January by Judge Graham Mullen on the grounds that this was "grossly disproportionate." But, the new sentence for the man who has served about ten years in prison so far is 30 years in prison after the original sentence was reversed on appeal. Thus, "the 37-year-old from Lebanon will spend an additional two decades in prison, then likely be deported." Hammoud plans to appeal the new sentence as well.

His attorneys wanted Hammoud to walk out of the courtroom with a sentence of the more than 10 years he already served. . . They contend he sent the money to a wing of Hezbollah that helps provide Middle Eastern communities with clean water and good housing, not the military wing labeled terrorists by the United States government for numerous attacks on Israel. . . . defense attorneys brought up more than a dozen cases in which people got sentences much shorter than Hammoud, including sentences of only a few decades for defendants that provided actual weapons and hundreds of thousands of dollars to terrorist organizations. "This is a case where people get seven years, eight years," Hammoud's attorney Stanley Cohen said.

From here.

* Twin studies, surprisingly, show a strong hereditary component to adolescent crime victimization:

[G]enetic factors explained a surprisingly significant 40 to 45 percent of the variance in adolescent victimization among the twins, while non-shared environments (those environments that are not the same between siblings) explained the remaining variance. But among adolescents who were victimized repeatedly, the effect of genetic factors accounted for a whopping 64 percent of the variance.

The study's author surmises that "genetically influenced traits such as low self control affect delinquent behavior, and delinquents, particularly violent ones, tend to associate with antisocial peers."

* Low prices of consumer electronics in the U.K. have caused criminals to shift from committing burglaries to muggings where small, high value items like iPods and laptop computers are stolen.

* High IQ people of modest means are considerably less likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden, while low IQ people from affluent families were more likely to get higher education in Minnesota than in Sweden. Higher education is free in Sweden to students with good grades and test scores, but money is still a barrier to these students in the United States.

Notably, Harvard and several other Ivy League schools have instituted sliding scale tuition arrangements so that they can continue to admit the most qualified applicants regardless of means. For example, Harvard limits tuition to 10% of the first $180,000 of family income and has ceased including student loans in undergraduate financial aid packages.

* Tree ring data from Mexico released last year showed that a "large ancient drought previously confirmed for the Southwest of the United States is shown to have extended into central Mexico (1149-1167 AD)."

[It] also provides the first independent confirmation of the so-called Terminal Classic drought, a megadrought some anthropologists relate to the collapse of the Mayan civilization. This decades-long dry period had been previously determined by analysis of lake and basin sediments in other areas of Mexico and the Caribbean. . . [The data] narrowed the event's timing to 897-922 AD and confirmed that it had a wider geographical impact than previously thought, extending into the highlands of Central Mexico, where other classic period cultures were located.

This parallels recent 2500 years of paleoclimate data from Europe that also shows a strong link between the major upheaval in European civilization in the last couple of thousand years and climate trends.

At times of social stability and prosperity, like the rise of the Roman Empire between 300 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., Europe experienced warm, wet summers ideal for agriculture. Similar conditions accompanied the peak years of medieval Europe between 1000 C.E. and 1200 C.E. . . .

In the 3rd century C.E. . . . extended droughts matched the timing of barbarian invasions and political turmoil. Around 1300 C.E., on the other hand, a cold snap combined with wetter summers coincides with widespread famines and plague that wiped out nearly half of Europe's population by 1347. . . . In eras of prosperity, more trees were cut down for building and fuel, yielding more samples in the archaeological record. At other times, like the years after the Black Death and the so-called Migration Period between 300 C.E. and 600 C.E. when the Roman Empire was overwhelmed by tribes pushing in from the east, the number of wood samples dwindles to nearly nothing.

Krugman and Brad DeLong, meanwhile, have recently noted an interesting article from 1970 on the connection between the institutions of slavery and serfdom in Europe and the Black Death. Climate data may elucidate some of the unanswered questions from that analysis.

READ MORE - Friday Links of Interest