Last week, China abruptly withdrew its permission for the USS Kitty Hawk and two minesweepers to make a port visit to Hong Kong. China explained the decision as a protest against the US decision to sell advanced Patriot missile batteries to Taiwan.

In amongst all the diplomatic wrangling, I found PACCOM Commander Adm. Timothy Keating’s reaction amusing:

They suffered no damage,” Keating said. “But this is a kind of an unwritten law among seamen that if someone is in need, regardless of genus, phylum or species, you let them come in. You give them safe harbor. Jimmy Buffett has songs about it, for crying out loud.”

I’m in a big push right now, so blogging has taken a back seat. Hopefully I’ll be back by mid December.

Folks probably already know this, but Zenpundit has a shiny new home. Make sure to update your RSS readers and blogrolls.

Chet Richards has a blog.

Required reading for the mil-strat blogging community. For example, without it, I wouldn’t have found out about this footage of Boyd.

Very cool for the WWII crypto buff crowd (H/T Schneier).

A neat nugget:

Tony Sale, who led the 14-year Colossus re-build project, said it was not clear whether the wartime technology or a modern PC would be faster at cracking the codes.

“A virtual Colossus written to run on a Pentium 2 laptop takes about the same time to break a cipher as Colossus does,” he said.

A point that often gets overlooked by the layman. Software is great, but if you really want to optimize on speed, you have to deal with hardware. During the 1990s, for example, a researcher built a dedicated DES-cracker machine to demonstrate the vulnerability of DES.

A powerhouse FAS blog post on American nuclear planning prompted some thinking. I’ve hardly finished, but here are some pieces with which I’m puzzling.

First, the regarding the relative role of regional strike plans and national strike plans:

The 26-page declassified document, an excerpt from a 123-page STRATCOM briefing on the production of the 2003 strategic nuclear war plan known as OPLAN 8044 Revision 03, includes two slides that describe the planning against “regional states.” The first of these slides lists a “series of [deleted] options” directed against regional countries with weapons of mass destruction programs. The planning is “scenario driven,” according to the document. The majority of the document deals with targeting of Russia and China, but virtually all of those sections were withheld by the declassification officer.

The names of the “regional states” were also withheld, but three images used to illustrate the planning were released, and they leave little doubt who the regional states are: One of the images is the North Korean Taepo Dong 1 missile; another image shows the Libyan underground facility at Tarhuna; and the third image shows a SCUD B short-range ballistic missile. The SCUD B image is not country-specific, but the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center report Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat from 2003 listed 12 countries with SCUD B missiles: Belarus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Vietnam and Yemen. Five of these were listed in the NPR as examples of countries that were “immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies…setting requirements for nuclear strike capabilities”: Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria.

The inclusion of regional nuclear counterproliferaiton strike options into the national (strategic) war plan is a new development because such scenarios have normally been thought to reside at a lower level than the national strategic plan, which has traditionally been focused on targeting of Russia and China.

Moving beyond retaliatory to preventive strikes:

The regional strike plans also found their way into the draft Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations (Joint Publication 3-12), which was under preparation within the military at the time Revision 03 was created. Yet the doctrine showed that planning went beyond retaliation and included preemptive strikes. The second draft from March 2005 listed five scenarios where use of nuclear weapons might be requested:

• To counter an adversary intending to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S., multinational, or allies forces or civilian populations;
• To counter an imminent attack from an adversary’s biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy;
• To attack on adversary installations including weapons of mass destruction, deep, hardened bunkers containing chemical or biological weapons, or the command and control infrastructure required for the adversary to execute a WMD attack against the United States or its friends and allies; [this was probably the “target base” in OPLAN 8044 Revision 03]
• To counter potentially overwhelming adversary conventional forces;
• To demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary WMD use.

I’m intrigued by parallels to Eisenhower’s decision to rely on nuclear forces to avoid the need for a costlier conventional arms buildup. If 21st Century nuclear strategy is moving beyond seeing our nuclear forces as a tool for narrowly deterring major war with another nuclear power, mining the extended deterrence experience of the Eisenhower administration will offer a great deal of benefit.

Friedman offers some interesting analysis of the Iranian dimension of current trends in Iraq:

Adm. William Fallon’s interview with the Financial Times — in which he went out of its way to downplay the American military threat to Iran — was not given by accident. Fallon does not agree to interviews without clearance. The United States was using the interview to telegraph to Iran that it should not have undue fear of an American attack.

The United States can easily turn up the heat again psychologically, though for the moment it has chosen to lower it. By doing so, we assume Washington is sending two messages to Iran. First, it is acknowledging that creating a predominantly Sunni government is not its first choice. Also, it is rewarding Iran for the decline in violence by the Shiite militias, which undoubtedly required Tehran to shift its orders to its covert operatives in Iraq.

A challenge in attempting to send messages like this is that you hope you and your adversary understand each other well enough to competently operate your respective ends of the telegraph. Assuming, of course, that you both want to communicate in the first place…

Iran in particular has little interest in giving the United States a graceful solution unless it is well compensated for it. On the other hand, for the moment, Tehran is cooperating. This could simply be another instance of Iran holding off before disappointing the United States, or it could mean it has reason to believe it will be well compensated. Revealing that compensation — if it is coming — is the next turn of the wheel.

Friedman maintains that the possibility of a grand bargain hasn’t completely dissapeared. Given the murky nature of US-Iranian dealings, I wonder how soon we’d find out if such a deal were made.

From AE over at Simulated Laughter:

As Younghusband notes, North American security thinking is, in a large part, a search for the “next big thing.”

In this case, however, COIN is the current big thing. It was never the Next Big Thing ™. Had it actually become the Next Big Thing during the 1990s, OEF and OIF would have looked alot different.

First, during the 1990s we were told that there wasn’t enough risk of stability operations and COIN missions to justify tailoring our budget to them.

Then, circa 2004, we were told that these operations in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t last long enough for procurement to have any effect on them. We’d just have to carry on with what we had.

Now we’re warned that we’ve already done too much on these OOTW missions - we’ve been neglecting our conventional warfighting compentencies! We have to get back to rebuild our conventional force after the procurement holiday we took for OEF and OIF.

What I find troubling in this progression is the time lag between operational adaptation (in terms of tactics, training, and doctrine) and acquisitions priorities. Budget priorities lagged too far behind actual strategic shifts, leaving us playing catch up. This mismatch between budgetary plans and strategic assessments drives Kaplan’s pendulum swings.

Adaptation will be an inescapable part of our strategic planning, due to our status quo role. Innovative adversaries take our strategic posture as a given and then search for vulnerabilities to exploit. Even when we forecast accurately and successfully adapt to it, we simply have created a new environment (which, since there is no free lunch, will have its own vulnerabilities).

The Robert Kaplan article that kicked this all off discusses a number of frightening asymmetric scenarios. The specific scenarios will change, but these sorts of nightmares will always exist because our adversaries are intelligent actors who look for advantages. The proper response is not to attempt to address every potential danger, but rather to bring budgets and strategies into greater alignment, reducing the momentum that causes overcompensation for past strategic errors (investing in thousands of MRAPs, for example, is likely an example of such overcompensation).

Sometimes insurgent groups manipulate news coverage through effective propaganda.

Other times, they take a more direct approach:

“I received an anonymous call last month,” said Ahmed Salah Salim, a senior producer for Shabelle, whose shows include one with the roughly translated title “Peace Way.” “He said, ‘You can’t present programs against us,’ and I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘You will know if you keep doing what you are doing.’ “

Shy and Collier [1] point out that when assessing the popular appeal of an insurgent movement, it is usually difficult to separate the genuine appeal of the group from the tacit support it gains through threat and intimidation. Status quo forces have a predisposition to blame threats for all of an insurgency’s popularity. In the case of Somali, however, such a perspective might not be far from the truth.

These days, it is potentially a life-or-death decision whether to report such basic information as the number of civilians killed in a gunfight. Talk-show hosts realize they may be putting their lives at risk to air a program on good governance.

[1] Peter Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, Ch. 27, John Shy and Thomas Collier, “Revolutionary War,” pp. 815-862.

Fascinating article about Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s highly controvertial (and highly successful) game theoretic prediction models.

The New York University political science professor has developed a computerized game theory model that predicts the future of many business and political negotiations and also figures out ways to influence the outcome. Two independent evaluations, one by academics and one by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, have both shown that about 90 percent of his predictions have been accurate. Most recently, he has used his mathematical tools to offer approaches for handling the growing nuclear crisis with Iran.

An article from Good goes into more detail regarding the derivation of that 90% accuracy rate:

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

A key element of his models process is the careful interviewing process used to construct the computer model. Without any further reading, my hypothesis is that it is Bueno de Mesquita’s skill in conducting these interviews that truly sets his approach apart from others. After all, the established fields of decision analysis and facilitation have demonstrated the benefit of augmenting expert assessments with intelligent questioning. At its best, this is what consulting can offer.

What effect could such an approach have on larger policymaking?

[Bueno de Mesquita] has just launched and is the director of NYU’s Alexander Hamilton Center. “The mission for the center is the application of logic and evidence to solving fundamental policy problems. Not to a bipartisan solution, but to a nonpartisan solution.”

I definitely have to learn more about Bueno de Mesquita. If any readers have further reading to augment the below references, they’d be most welcome.

Additional reading:
-Bueno de Mesquita, B. 1997. A decision making model: Its structure and form. International Interactions 23:233-251.
-McGurn, W. 1996. We warned you. Far Eastern Economic Review 159 (June 13):68.