war - Robert Maguire on Diigo

14 Dec 09

5 more annotations...
- In Medieval times, gun manufacturing was something of a covert occupation because artisans with the specialist metalwork and pyrotechnical skills tended to keep the knowledge secret. So the formulae for explosive powders and the like were passed on by word of mouth to trusted apprentices and colleagues rather than being written down.
- Philipp Mönch was a master gunsmith and most likely employed by the Elector Palatine of the Holy Roman Empire (SW Germany). His 'Kriegsbuch' obviously displays much more than just cannon and rifle designs.
- Specialisation was a loose concept back then and it was probably customary for anyone working with weapons to be part-engineer, part-architect, part-metalworker and part-carpenter.

Can We Eliminate Violent Conflict? | The Progressive Realist

progressiverealist.org/...-we-eliminate-violent-conflict - Preview

US politics reference bolton war humanity conflict conservatives republicans statistics

BOLTON: He says we have to acknowledge the hard truth we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. Well, no kidding. You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.
For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence.
1 more annotations...

10 Dec 09

The Obama Doctrine and the Nobel Prize | The Progressive Realist

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US politics reference nobel price obama style obama doctrine war waronterror exceptionalism

Obama's Nobel acceptance speech -- essentially a second escalation speech -- is perhaps the most articulate expression of The Obama Doctrine we've seen yet. It was a lengthy defense of American military intervention from World War II to Desert Storm, and a forceful justification of the escalation of troop levels in Afghanistan. It was a stirring defense of human rights, and an indictment of violence and extremism. Obama at once dismissed the idea of a military solution for problems of hunger and disease, while justifying military intervention on humanitarian grounds. He venerated Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., while asserting that "as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone." Obama conceded that "war itself is never glorious," but nevertheless argued that "the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace." The president again repudiated the use of torture and advocated for engagement with repressive regimes, citing Iran, Burma, and North Korea by name. While "engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation," Obama said, "the promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone."
It was an unapologetic assertion of American exceptionalism, all while tying that exceptionalism to actual American behavior.
2 more annotations...
- But much of the president's rhetoric on human rights felt hollow. "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend," he said. By that standard, we've lost ourselves. Obama has repudiated torture, but has left the other hallmarks of executive overreach -- from indefinite detention without trial or charge to warrantless surveillance -- largely untouched. He has refused to hold anyone accountable for the lawbreaking and human rights violations of the past, opting instead to "look forward."
- In this speech, Obama said "Even those of us with the best intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us." For liberals, that may be the lesson of the first year of Obama's presidency.

09 Dec 09

On Funding Wars - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...on-sacrifice.html - Preview

politics US doublestandards palin reference war waronterror wwii war tax conservatives republicans

Second World War
sacrifice
for their country
5 more annotations...
- many Americans gave what little money they had to buy the war bonds
  that funded it all
- Sarah Palin, today.
- Really? A tax on national defense?
- They don’t need
  a new “war tax” to fund a strategy for victory in the war zone.
- Sarah Palin, two weeks ago.

03 Dec 09

Matthew Yglesias » The Think Tank Arm of the Military-Industrial Complex

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thinktanks military industrial complex US politics military war

the observation that many of the think tank experts brought on to television or op-ed pages to opine about the merits of an Afghan surge were in fact part of the team that designed the surge.
Some think tanks do not disclose donor names (but if you look at the name of endowed chairs for scholars, you can figure out who is paying some of the bills). Big defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing — also contribute to many of the defense-oriented think tanks, although getting specific amounts is tricky
1 more annotations...
- We here at Danger Room are not trying to knock the these think tankers — some of them, like Biddle, Cordesman and Exum, are as smart as they come. We’re as fond of quoting them as anyone. But it’s also worth asking who pays the piper.

01 Dec 09

PolitiFact | Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

"This is a lot of money," liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Nov. 30, 2009. "And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into a war and cut taxes."
Generally, we found, taxes and wars have followed a fairly predictable pattern: taxes rise during wartime and then come back down in the years afterward.
7 more annotations...
- We'll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.
  
  During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.
  
  The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.
- It's worth noting, however, that during all of those wars, the war expenses were much larger than today, relative to the size of the economy.
- The one notable exception is the Kennedy tax cuts, which took effect in 1964. The conflict in Vietnam stretched from 1959 to 1975, but when the Kennedy tax cuts were implemented, the Vietnam War did not have much of an impact on the U.S. budget. Within 18 months, when the tax cuts were in full bloom, the United States was spending plenty in Vietnam.
- But many argue the Kennedy tax cuts shouldn't count in Krugman's example because they came at a time when the United States did not anticipate the escalation of the war that followed.
- "The Kennedy tax cuts were proposed, and then adopted by Congress, before the Vietnam war was a big expenditure item,"
- It was not until 1968 that the Johnson administration proposed the surtax to help pay for the Vietnam War. ... Still, the Vietnam era surtax went into effect within five years of major spending on that war. We are now more than eight years into the 'war on terrorism,' and we’ve had only tax reductions; no tax hikes."
- "Traditionally countries raise taxes to pay for wars, then cut taxes by a portion of the amount raised once peace descends," agreed J.D. Foster, senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
  
  But Foster noted two caveats. One, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 came during a jobless recovery period after a recession. And the economic stimulus package championed by Obama includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years -- also in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our Uni-Polar Moment - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...our-unipolar-moment.html - Preview

politics US military eu war power taxes

Other countries, not merely in western europe, have relied upon US
protection so heavily that they are now largely incapable of making
large-scale interventions themselves. They need the Americans. One
consequence of this is that when the Americans actually ask for help
there is not much their allies can usefully offer. This strengthens the
American view that the US is having to shoulder too much of the burden
itself. There's something to this.

30 Nov 09

For 50 Years, Nuclear Bomb Lost in Watery Grave : NPR

www.npr.org/...story.php - Preview

nuclear weapons US georgia politics oceans environment war military Dod coldwar health

Lost nuclear bomb found - PPRuNe Forums

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nuclear weapons US georgia politics oceans environment war military Dod history

An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.

21 Nov 09

The greed of the generals (II): two questions | The Best Defense

ricks.foreignpolicy.com/..._the_generals_ii_two_questions - Preview

profit military generals US politics war waronterror military industrial complex tommy franks

Also,
another friend points out that one of the dangers of this whole
"mentoring" this is that if you are not careful, you wind up bringing
in people who simply reinforce existing prejudices, instead of
challenging them. For example, just how well mentored was Gen. Tommy R.
Franks in his mishandling of Afghanistan in 2001-02 and then in his
bungled invasion of Iraq in 2003? (And while we're on the subject of
money, who remembers that Franks charged a group $100,000 to help them raise money for wounded vets-and that it later turned out that the group only delivered 25 percent of its funds to its supposed beneficiaries?) WWGMD?

20 Nov 09

YouTube - Ron Paul agitates Jim Baker over War Powers during hearing 03/05/2009

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ronpaul war powers politics executivepower war law constitution jim baker

17 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Criminals and Warriors

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...criminals-and-warriors.php - Preview

US politics waronterror ksm law war glory terrorism crime murder

but if you have to put the whole thing in either the “crime” box or the “war” box, there’s a pretty strong case for erring on the side of crime.
In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people.
2 more annotations...
- What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder.
- Insofar as possible, we want to drain anti-American violence of the aura of glory. And that means by-and-large treating its perpetrators like criminals.

11 Nov 09

» A Sixty-Eight Year Old Code - Entropic Memes

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intelligence war US cryptology code espionage spying WWII photo

4 more annotations...
- The date is July 24th, 1940. The place, the New York City Field Office of the FBI. The memo, from Director Hoover, is short and cryptic:
  
  CLEARANCE AUTHORIZED FOR FOLLOWING MESSAGE: “DUNN SAYS FOUR BATTLESHIPS AND TEN DESTROYERS OF TEXAS CLASS GOING TO CARIBBEAN TO SCOUT FOR ENGLISH WITH SIX HUNDRED RESERVE OFFICERS AND SIX HUNDRED ENLISTED MEN.”
  
  HOOVER
- What you see here is a photo that never should have been allowed to be taken, and one which provides an amazing, one-of-a-kind glimpse into the world of WWII espionage and counter-espionage. As far as I can tell, what is shown in this picture is an FBI agent in New York encrypting a message, passed from “DUNN” - Duquesne - through Sebold, prior to transmitting that message to Germany via shortwave radio. Unlike yesterday’s photo, which was clearly staged, this appears to be real cryptology at work. Even the message is most likely real: it refers to the Neutrality Patrol undertaken shortly before the outbreak of war.
- What I think is really cool, though, is that the photo also shows the agent’s worksheet:

Educate boys, or they'll go to war | FP Passport

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education youth statistics demographics middleeast africa youth bulge violence war conflict reference

A World Bank research
paper posted today finds that countries with a high proportion of young
males with low levels of secondary education are significantly more conflict-prone.
"youth bulges"
5 more annotations...
- Sub-Saharan Africa, as "the
  continent with the largest youth cohorts and the lowest levels of male secondary
  education, scoring on average nearly 30 percentage points lower than the world
  average."
- In Syria,
  for example, males 14 years old and younger make up nearly 20 percent of the
  population. Only 39.1 percent of secondary school-aged students are enrolled in
  school, making it the 101st lowest-ranking country of 135 surveyed. In the long run, Syria is facing
  declining oil production and rapid population growth - a recipe for violent
  unrest.
- The policy implications are clear. Programs that focus on
  primary education, like the U.N.'s Education
  for All and Millennium
  Development Goals
- must
  be more support for programs like the World Bank's own Secondary
  Education in Africa initiative.
- The total cost of a secondary education in Kenya is estimated at $6,865.
  A 2007 Oxfam report
  found that on average a "war, civil war, or insurgency shrinks an African economy
  by 15 percent," and conflict causes the continent to lose about $18 billion a
  year. You do the math.

02 Nov 09

David Ignatius - David Ignatius on mixing hard and soft tactics in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009103002862.html - Preview

US politics afghanistan war military waronterror culture strategy

Hikmatullah, a tall Pashtun farmer dressed in turban and white cloak, looks slightly bewildered as a U.S. Army officer offers him tea and bread and questions him about what he wants from life.
Can these pleasant, tea-drinking American soldiers really be the same people who are assaulting Taliban fighters in this region of eastern Afghanistan?
11 more annotations...
- Even as U.S. forces show a gentler side with their new stress on people-friendly counterinsurgency, they continue to conduct devastating attacks on the enemy.
- this reality is not well understood back in America.
- counterterrorism approach
- counterinsurgency strategy
- The fact is that U.S. forces are doing both missions every day and night -- and indeed are becoming increasingly effective at each one.
- But there's a danger: A strategy that combines stroking your friends and pounding your enemies runs the risk of sending mixed messages.
- the soft approach -- a "population-centric" strategy
- (The problem, alas, is that the Kabul government is distant and corrupt.)
- Assisting him will be the first wave of the "civilian surge" promised by President Obama -- representatives of the State and Agriculture departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, reporting to a regional coordinator for "stabilization operations." The plan is for nearly 400 U.S. civilians to be working on aid projects across Afghanistan by year-end -- all, no doubt, drinking the requisite three cups of tea.
- The mission, basically, is to make it very dangerous to be a Taliban operative -- and thereby shift the balance of intimidation in this war. The SOF warriors are also targeting the networks that produce the roadside bombs killing coalition troops.
- "It's like all the instruments in an orchestra," says a U.S. military commander of the different parts of the battle plan. "You have to know how to play them together."

29 Oct 09

Global Warming Could Create a Legion of 'Climate Terrorists' : TreeHugger

www.treehugger.com/...-legion-climate-terrorists.php - Preview

climate terrorism terrorism climatechange environment politics waronterror war conflict

One man who has made such a consideration is Dr. Greg Austin. The provocative piece he wrote for New Europe called Climate Terrorists: They Will Come is especially foreboding. Austin notes that 40% of the world lives in tropical areas, where even incremental rises in temperatures can have disastrous effects.
Developing nations comprise the vast majority of these tropical states, many of which have exploding populations, a growing youth bulge, and increasing problems with hunger and health.

28 Oct 09

Is a McDonalds-less Iceland now vulnerable to attack? | FP Passport

blog.foreignpolicy.com/...eland_now_vulnerable_to_attack - Preview

iceland mcdonald's US conflict war friedman commerce peace trade economy economics

27 Oct 09

Korea Aerospace Reveals Combat UAV Studies | AVIATION WEEK

www.aviationweek.com/...story_channel.jsp - Preview

korea military drones KAI technology war

26 Oct 09

Climate change and warfare: Cool heads or heated conflicts? | The Economist

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm - Preview

agriculture climatechange US politics conflict war warfare production history trade technology industrial revolution

The chart shows the correlation between the number of conflicts and the average temperature during most of the second half of the millennium, the period for which the data are best. Until the mid-18th century, this correlation is continuously and significantly negative (the line remains close to the 95% confidence level, suggesting there is only one chance in 20 that it is an accidental, random effect). In other words, lower temperatures mean more wars. Then, suddenly, the negative correlation vanishes. The line goes into positive territory, but not enough to be statistically meaningful. The inverted correlation between temperature and conflict has therefore disappeared.
3 more annotations...
- They argue that the reason the relationship between warfare and cold vanishes in the mid-18th century is that this is the moment when the industrial revolution began
- These developments meant farmers could often produce reasonable yields during colder weather—and even when they could not, long-distance trade provided a buffer against crop failure. Meanwhile, the growth of cities and non-agricultural occupations meant there was money to buy such traded crops.
- The lesson, rather, is that the way to minimise the likelihood of climate-induced conflict in the future is to continue the process of crop improvement (for example, by taking advantage of the potential of genetic engineering) so that heat- and drought-tolerant varieties are available; to make farmers aware of these new crops and encourage their use; and to promote free trade and non-agricultural economic development. That way people will have no cause to fight, and tyrants no excuse to stir them up.

23 Oct 09

On Drones | Center for a New American Security

www.cnas.org/...drones.html - Preview

drones afghanistan war culture military exum politics waronterror

I really think drone strike can be part of an effective, integrated CT and COIN strategy, but they cannot substitute for such a strategy, and I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it's been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that it is now overly focused on killing high-level al-Qaeda targets rather than gathering intelligence and that b) it's trying to justify and defend its budget through what it can claim is a successful program.
My worries have always centered around how the attacks are perceived on the ground, so it has been frustrating to read careless readers of our argument mistakenly assume we agree with open-source reporting out of Pakistan. To the contrary. I focus on Pakistani press reports because, in a war of perceptions, I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.
2 more annotations...
- We are all slaves to culture, and I worry that a combination of a background in the light infantry, an upbringing in East Tennessee, and a classical education leaves me repulsed by the very idea of remote-controlled war. Mayer mangled another quote of mine (again, insignificantly), when I said, “As a classics major, I have a classical sense of what it means to be a warrior.” As I recall, I asked that more as a question and included a "maybe" somewhere in there. But maybe I do in fact have a cultural predisposition against drones. I know that undermines my other arguments somewhat, but I feel I should be honest with the readership about my own potential biases here.
- our enemy like the humans in the Terminator movies, hiding below ground for fear of our technology.
  
  "Yeah," Pete wisely asks, "but weren't the humans the heroes of those movies?"

Robert Maguire's Library tagged war → View Popular

BibliOdyssey: The War Book

Can We Eliminate Violent Conflict? | The Progressive Realist

The Obama Doctrine and the Nobel Prize | The Progressive Realist

On Funding Wars - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Matthew Yglesias » The Think Tank Arm of the Military-Industrial Complex

PolitiFact | Krugman says Bush was first president to lead country into war and cut taxes

Our Uni-Polar Moment - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

For 50 Years, Nuclear Bomb Lost in Watery Grave : NPR

Lost nuclear bomb found - PPRuNe Forums

The greed of the generals (II): two questions | The Best Defense

YouTube - Ron Paul agitates Jim Baker over War Powers during hearing 03/05/2009

Matthew Yglesias » Criminals and Warriors

» A Sixty-Eight Year Old Code - Entropic Memes

Educate boys, or they'll go to war | FP Passport

David Ignatius - David Ignatius on mixing hard and soft tactics in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

Global Warming Could Create a Legion of 'Climate Terrorists' : TreeHugger

Is a McDonalds-less Iceland now vulnerable to attack? | FP Passport

Korea Aerospace Reveals Combat UAV Studies | AVIATION WEEK

Climate change and warfare: Cool heads or heated conflicts? | The Economist

On Drones | Center for a New American Security

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