This Man is Dangerous!

Moqtada al Sadr's role in the new Iraqi government is disturbing:

Sadr not only controls the largest bloc within the Shiite alliance; he is also the head of a paramilitary organization, the Mahdi army. In this respect, his position is identical to that of Hitler, before he came to power. Hitler, on the one hand, had the Nazi party, a tight-knit organization that was happy to use the parliamentary system in order to bring about the destruction of the Weimar Republic, and thus to end the parliamentary system itself. On the other hand, Hitler also commanded his own paramilitary organization, the famous "brown-shirts" of the SA, whose membership, at its height, may have included between three to four million young German toughs, whose usefulness to the success of the Nazi Party Hitler himself repeatedly stressed. They were invaluable in their ability to intimidate and threaten anyone who seriously opposed the Nazi party.

I've asked again and again and again and again and again why is this dangerous two-time insurrectionist still alive? He is our enemy and he will be a thorn in our side until he is dead. He threatens all we have accomplished and hope to accomplish in Iraq. And he complicates any action against Iran.

My only hope is that we are watching him and his people and will finally sweep him up on the eve of our move against Iran's mullah regime.

If we don't get him first, Sadr and his "green shirts" will strike a blow against us again.

Time on Target

the Telegraph (via Austin Bay) reports we are planning for a massive air assault on Iran's nuclear infrastructure:

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic's nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme.

"This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," said a senior Pentagon adviser. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

A massive blitz does not mean that this would be the only assault and it would be over in hours. Even in a campaign lasting weeks, you'd want to opening salvo to take advantage of the element of surprise and pave the way for following sorties.

Nor does this imply that we won't try for a lesser siege-like strategy designed to provoke the Iranians into irrational actions that then give us the pretext to unleash an aerial blitz.

Whatever we do, the end state should be a revolt that overthrows the mullahs. Remember the main lesson of the Iran-Iraq War: don't assume you can teach true believers "a lesson" and expect them to mend their ways. When we take action, we must destroy the mullah regime.

Vanguard of the Proletariat

The Chinese military is generally obsolete. Only a fraction is being trained up to modern standards:

Most of the Chinese armed forces are decidedly low tech, but several hundred thousand troops, an elite within the 2.1 million man force, are being groomed and equipped to show how China can fight high tech warfare.

This leads many to conclude that China is not a threat to us, with our across-the-board excellent military. Or a threat to China's neighbors with their generally top grade equipment.

I don't think that it is safe to assume that only several hundred thousand top quality troops, representing perhaps 15% of the total force, are not a threat since the remaining 85% are low tech.

One, several hundred thousand troops could well prove enough to destroy enemies of a lesser stature than ourselves.

Second, and more importantly, do not become confused about the ability of the excellent fifteen percent to drag along the other eighty-five percent.

In September 1939, only a tiny fraction of Nazi Germany's army was made up of the new panzer formations and motorized infantry. The vast majority of Germany's army was little-changed from 1918 and was composed of green troops in the hastily expanded army. Yet this army of largely foot-mobile infantry and horse-drawn artillery achieved the first victory in blitzkrieg spearheaded by the few mobile units using new methods of warfare (well, new to that generation anyway). And the equipment the German panzer units was actually rather obsolete rather than being first-rate.

Half a year later, the Germans did it again to the French and a little over a year later, to the Soviets. And in every case the panzers were but a small force in a horse-drawn infantry army.

China's fifteen percent will be better trained and better equipped than the 1939 or 1940 German armies.

So don't discount what the PLA fifteen percent can do to an enemy in the right circumstances.

What the?

Did the British Defense Minister John Reid just say this in a press conference in regard to allied solidarity in Afghanistan?

Even yesterday in the north when our Norwegian colleagues cameunder attack, then people came to support them, including British forces, Swedes, Japs and others. I think that's another example of how via commonbonds working together we can achieve a lot more than we do as individualnations.

Japs? What is this? Fawlty Towers? For Pete's sake, don't mention the war!

Do hope it is a transcription error.

What Will Awaken?

Victor Hanson thinks the Europeans are waking up to the threat of jihadi Islam to their way of life. He thinks they will quietly begin to support our efforts:

Here is what we can probably anticipate. First will come a radical departure from past immigration practices. Islam will be praised; the Middle East assured that Europe is tolerant—but very few newcomers from across the Mediterranean let in.

There will be continued public furor over the American efforts in Iraq, but far greater secret efforts to coordinate with the United States—in everything from isolating the Assad regime in Syria to rethinking missile defense. For the past three years the post-colonial Europeans have wished the Americans to learn their imperial lessons by failing in Iraq. Yet it may well be that many in private will now wish us to succeed, if only in the hopes that such Middle East democracies will be less likely in the future to turn loose their mobs to burn European embassies and threaten their citizens.

We won’t see much public condemnation of Hamas, but more likely quiet efforts to pull the plug slowly on subsidies for such terrorists. The Europeans praised Arafat, then learned that he was singularly corrupt. Nothing disturbs a European more than to be swindled and damned as immoral in the process. Subsidies to Jew-hating Hamas terrorists only ensure both.

Europe will still talk about bringing Turkey into the fold of the West, but de facto is horrified at the thought that millions of a religion that empowers so many to go berserk over a few cartoons might soon comprise the most populous nation of Europe. I doubt any European diplomat will invest any political capital at all in restarting in earnest Turkish/European Union talks.

We can also look forward to more bizarre pronouncements such as Jacques Chirac’s warning about the French nuclear deterrent. In point of fact, Europe has no real defenses against a 9/11-like attack. They know it. So do the terrorists.

This would be comforting, if true. But is it?

First of all, as much as I'd like to belittle the French, France's nuclear option is not an idle threat:

France is upgrading the warheads on its ballistic missiles to make them more accurate, and more capable to making a deliberate EMP attack. This is a new tactic, for EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) has long been seen as just another nuclear weapons effect. EMP destroys electronics. That's because a nuclear explosion generates such a powerful surge of electromagnetic energy that the tiny circuits in modern electronics are damaged or destroyed. Thus France could, if it was threatened by, say, Iran, launch one or more nukes. Each one would detonate high over Iran, high enough so that the explosion would not harm anyone on the ground (aside from putting some radiation into the upper atmosphere), but turn most of the electronics in Iran into junk. If the explosion was placed in the right spot, damage to electronics in neighboring countries would be minor.

And as a military historian, Hanson knows well that the weapons available are not nearly as important as the culture that wields those weapons. If Europe resolves to fight, the carnage that Europeans have inflicted in bloody swaths across Europe and the globe could return.

It is possible that the Europeans will decide to wage war quietly and calmly. But given the continent's history, I don't assume that the Europeans don't have some serious mass atrocities within themselves if they believe they are pushed too far. And if understanding the Moslems of Europe and appealing to them to assimilate doesn't work, the remaining option gets very ugly:

Eventually the Europeans will have to choose between surrender and harsher options. Will Bosnia and Kosovo be the models the Europeans will follow in desperation as the alternative to surrender? I don't think the Euros are so permanently soft after five decades of easy life under our protection that they have forgotten centuries of brutal ruthlessness. The Europeans turned the Moslems back inside Europe itself at Tours and Vienna, and expelled them from Spain. They are capable of doing so again.

And this time the US won't come to the rescue of Moslems under assault. Unlike our past military actions to save Moslems, we won't intervene to save Europe's Moslems. We wouldn't want to provoke Moslem anger by doing so, eh? Ingratitude for past efforts will suppress any sympathy we have. Continued terrorism will lead us to at least remain quiet as Europe goes about its dirty work.

I dread this outcome.

And it could get worse. If the Europeans go postal to remove a threat from their midst that they cannot convert into good Europeans, this long war could become a war of civilizations after all:

Losing is not an option. Moslems need to carefully consider whether they wish to indulge the wishes of a violent jihadi minority to spark a war of civilizations between Islam and the West.

Right now we have a choice of winning strategies and we've decided to win by saving Islam from its violent minority. Should our casualties grow too high and should the wider Moslem world remain too detached from fighting the terrorists, we can always decide to fully exploit our power to win the old fashioned way--by destroying our enemies.

I won't sleep well at night if we have to decide to destroy our enemies utterly to avoid defeat. But the alternative of defeat is no alternative. Not to me and I imagine not to a majority in the West. How we win depends on the Moslem world.

That scares the hell out of me.

And if the most whacked of the Moslem world (that's Iran under the mullahs, by the way) gets nuclear weapons that can reach Europe, EMP nukes will be the kindest nuclear option the Europeans will turn to.

When you apply the electricity to the corpse of European resolve, we just don't know what will awaken and get off the table.

Have a nice day.

This They'll Defend?

As I've been flogging of late, I don't know why we assume that the mullahs' hellbent pursuit of nuclear weapons is so popular inside Iran. Conventional groupthink has it that the people who now fear and hate the regime will learn to stop worrying and love the bomb. Does this love of nukes not seem just a little strange to you?

Not all Iranians seem to assume this conventional wisdom is true:

National Review Online: What do the Iranians you know think of Iran's nuclear program?

Amir Abbas Fakhravar: The regime is trying hard to tell to everybody that the nuclear activities are like the nationalization of oil 50 years ago. They are telling the world that this is somehow a national interest and that it's something the people want. But it's not like that at all. I'm very much speaking on behalf of the students and the youth that I'm in contact with, and nobody thinks about it like that. We are lacking elementary necessities, schools, hospitals. These are the things we think of as our national interests, not the nuclear program. If this nuclear technology were something coming out of the minds of our own people, and promoted by our own people, we would say O.K., this is by all means our national interest. But it was a technology smuggled in from the borders of Pakistan by people working through A. Q. Khan's network. What I hear from the students, the youngsters who are 70 percent of Iran's population, is that if this were such a national thing, why did the regime spend 18 years hiding it from us? Only two or three years ago we found out that [the regime] was spending billions and billions of dollars in oil revenue on this technology instead of on our basic needs.

NRO: One argument we hear in the West against confronting Iran, whether through sanctions or through military action, is that doing so will make the regime more popular with the Iranian people — that it will actually strengthen the regime.

Fakhravar: Please don't ever say that the people of Iran are going to have resentment or anger in their hearts toward America or Western countries for doing this. That is 100 percent false. To see this, all you need to do is contact some Iranians inside the major cities. Just send your journalists to interview the people in the streets and ask them. It was Saturday [February 4] that the people here found out that Iran was going before the [U.N.] Security Council, and there was celebration all over Tehran. I heard from my own family, the families of my friends, that it was one of the busiest days of the year for the pastry shops — that people were buying pastries and cookies and candies in the streets of Tehran and going to each other to celebrate. They think we have nothing to lose and everything to gain with action that, no matter how long the time period, leads to the downfall of this regime. If you overthrow the regime, we will welcome you with open arms and open hearts. People are counting the minutes for this regime to be over and gone.

The mullahs have every incentive to want us to believe that the people will rally around the mullahs if we attack or pull down the regime. Why should we peddle this theory, too?

We cannot let Iran under the mullahs go nuclear. Don't let the supposed latent nuclear nationalism of the Iranian people stop us from protecting ourselves from the craziest of the crazy possessing the most deadly weapons known to man.

Heartless and Mindless

In the battle for hearts and minds in the Long War, we don't need this:

Apparently, Ann Coulter called Muslims "ragheads" at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend. How stupid, pathetic, and unnecessary. Coulter can often be sharp and funny - especially when attacking certain liberal sensibilities - but these comments crossed the line.

Yesterday, in Saudi Arabia, Al Gore told a crowd at the Jeddah Economic Forum that after September 11, Arabs in America had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable." This strikes me as a grotesque mischaracterization of what happened in America after September 11.

Now ask yourself: between the asinine comments of Gore and Coulter, who's done more harm to the cause of the United States?

Stay focused on our actual jihadi enemies and stop trying to make the entire Islamic and Arab worlds our enemy!

But I don't believe we need to even try to decide which statement harms our cause more. Coulter tries to get Americans to believe all of the Arab Islamic world is our enemy. Vice President Gore is apparently trying to get the Islamic and Arab worlds to believe this, too. Each is immensely harmful to our war effort and each ties in nicely with the efforts by thugs and thug regimes to use the Danish cartoon incident to make the Long War a war of civilizations.

People need to get a grip.

UPDATE: Opinion Journal (via Real Clear Politics) describes this long war of winning hearts and minds quite well. The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are only the most visible and kinetic part of the long war with the jihadis:

The military can't win the Long War on its own. To defeat bin Ladenism, Americans must use every institution at their disposal--including the State Department and United Nations--to put pressure on those who spread the ideology of terrorism while not being timid in making the hard decisions necessary to confront rogue regimes. Iran cannot be allowed to build nuclear bombs, because it is a terror sponsoring state. Likewise Syria must be compelled to behave like a civilized country. Hamas won the Palestinian elections, but its leaders cannot be accepted by Western countries until they renounce terrorism and their desire to wipe Israel off of the map.

The Quadrennial Defense Review points out that the U.S. now has a window of opportunity to shape the world to bolster American security. Undercutting bin Ladenism now, before it gains the strength that Nazism and communism once had, will be much easier before another superpower (presumably China) emerges. America's long-term security depends on it.

It isn't all car chases and pyrotechnics, people. We have much to do. I wrote of our multiple lines of attack in this war in the days following September 11th, though in truth I did not yet consciously foresee the revolutionary quality of the struggle that was thrust upon us that clear morning:

The war America is embarking on will be fought on several fronts. Part will be quietly carried out and some aspects will be open. All avenues must complement the others. This will be necessary because the enemy is bifurcated. One part, the main enemy, is the amorphous network of terrorists bound together by their hatred for the United States. It is incomprehensible to them that a just God would grant such material, cultural, and military power to a nation the terrorists regard as corrupt and evil. The second part is composed of the states that in one degree or another, from hosting or rhetorical support to active planning and action, support the primary enemy. Each facet of the enemy demands a different approach and the various instruments of our power must be used precisely to achieve our objectives. No mere lashing out blindly will bring us victory.

But I felt the depths of the war very strongly.

And the likes of Coulter and Gore when they spout off with idiotic comments will make the war longer and the results uncertain.

Expel Iran

Iran is going nuclear, and we are fooling ourselves to believe that somehow we can find the magic carrot that will persuade the mullahs to give up their quest for nuclear weapons.

This is just aggravating:

A day after Iran's president warned that the country might withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if international pressure escalated, the Foreign Ministry issued an assurance today that Iran was still committed to the treaty.

"We are committed to our commitments within the N.P.T.," a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Assefi, said during his weekly press conference, the IRNA news agency reported. "But we cannot accept that the treaty is used as a political instrument."

"The agency and other parties should not block roads to Islamic Republic of Iran and should solve the case in the framework of the regulations," he was quoted as saying.

Why are we engaged in a dance with Iran over whether they will remain a member of the International Atomic Energency Agency? They are clearly not in compliance and in pursuit of a nuclear weapon regardless of the precise status of their commitment to IAEA commitments.

Expel Iran from the IAEA. Be done with this pretend pull and tug that is only designed to buy time for Iran to go nuclear.

The Enemy's 'Body Count' Fallacy

I've repeatedly argued that enemy body counts are not the way to measure our success in the war in Iraq.

The New York Times reports that enemy attacks continue to rise in Iraq even after lulls.

But this focus on attacks is as misleading as a focus on enemy body counts would be. Both can be used to argue for victories even as both statistics are meaningless metrics for success. Indeed, I specifically warned against assuming that escalating violence means we are losing. Any war escalates if it goes on long enough. Winning and losing is independent of that factor as each side throws more resources into the fight.

What is important in regard to the attacks is that the attacks are failing to have any effect other than inflicting death, maiming, and misery:

True, there are peaks and valleys in the number of attacks. What is not reported when these supposed surges take place is the failure of most of the attacks. The bombings and shootings have not adversely affected operations, they have not disrupted our logistics, nor have they resulted in the enemy gaining one inch of territory. More importantly, they have not hindered the desire of the Iraqis to continue on with everyday life, despite the attempts of the terrorists to target innocent civilians. Yet, the intensity and constant reporting of every negative occurrence in Baghdad would lead one to believe that we have walked into the shadow of death from which there is no return.

Simliarly, killing lots of the enemy would be meaningless if the enemy was disrupting logistics, gaining territory, hindering progress in economic, political, and military realms even as we killed more and more of them.

Ultimately, the real metrics of victory will progress and then attacks by the enemy will decline.

Desert Two

Ahmadinejad may have fond memories of his youth taking over the American embassy in Tehran, when an ineffective rescue mission fell apart at Desert One, but the sequel is unlikely to be the same. Secretary Rice is warning Iran to behave:

Rice, speaking from Washington on ABC television's "This Week," said Iran, in particular, should be urging its citizens to remain calm — not encouraging protests against Western embassies.

"If people continue to incite it, it can spin out of control," she said of the protests. Last week, demonstrators in Iran attacked the Danish, French and Austrian embassies with stones and firebombs.

So Iranian attacks on Western embassies may will spin out of control for Iran and give us the excuse we need to overthrow the mullahs and undo our mistake of nearly thirty years ago when we failed to snuff out the mullah regime at its birth. You know, I thought we'd have to apply pressure on the Iranians to do something stupid. And they are going ahead and doing something stupid on their own, it seems.

Seize embassies once, shame on you. Seize embassies twice, and we've got all the excuse we need to destroy your regime.

Aiming High

The Marines are looking for a mid-century ability to drop a squad of highly trained killers anywhere on the planet in two hours via a quick space flight (via Strategypage):

In July 2002, the Marine Corps released a Universal Needs Statement that defined the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion (SUSTAIN) concept that, if successful, will give the US a “…heretofore unimaginable assault support speed, range, altitude and strategic surprise” capability. SUSTAIN is an RLV that will carry a squad (13 men) into space and land it anywhere on Earth within two hours with, among other requirements, “flexible launch on demand… to any orbital inclination.”

According to the needs statement, SUSTAIN is required because the US has virtually no ability to respond rapidly to current intelligence. This means that if there are strong indicators that a major terrorist leader is hiding in a particular village, it will take anywhere between 12 to 48 hours before the US military could launch an attempt to capture or kill him. To put it another way, intelligence information can move at the speed of light but commando forces, no matter how good, can only move at the speed of a C-17 or other transport aircraft.

As I noted earlier, the Air Force should aim to be our space force rather than try to vainly compete with unmanned aircraft for current missions supporting troops. It seems that the Marines are already aiming high and unless the Air Force wants to be limited to a bunch of ballistic missiles and some base security forces, they need to aim higher than the Marines.

Why God Gave Us JDAMS: Pt. 7

Carryining water for Iran's mullahs, Axis of El Vil charter member Hugo Chavez runs interference for his masters in Tehran:

Chavez, a sharp critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, gave no evidence for his allegations. Chavez frequently refers to Bush as "Mr. Danger" and has accused him of being "the greatest terrorist in the world."

"He thinks of himself as the owner of the world and now they are making plans to invade Iran, and plans against Venezuela too," Chavez said in a televised speech.

Standard stuff. But was this his best shot? I mean, really, "Mr. Danger?" This doesn't even rise up to Cindy Sheehan's low standards of rhetorical quality. Did she teach him nothing when she came a callin' recently?

Hugo Chavez was told by his Iranian mullah-masters to jump, but unfortunately he failed to ask how high. That was really over the top. Are his supporters really impressed with this level of 2nd grade insulting?

But Hugo did have one pearl of wisdom, though he intended to apply to Britain's Prime Minister Blair:

"He's the madman's unconditional and subordinate ally, and now he also came out shooting against us."

What's that called? Projection?

Blunder?

Via the Weekly Standard is this piece on our mind boggling failure to examine all sites inside Iraq for WMD.

David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, looked for WMD sites in Iraq after we toppled Saddam, and says that we ignored vast numbers of suspect sites because they were too difficult to get into:

Mr. Gaubatz's new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group's search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration's main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer.

The new information from the former investigator could also end up helping the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which recently reopened the question of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to be concealing between 1991 and 2003.

Said Mr. Gaubatz:

"Before we can say there is no WMD in Iraq, we must first look. I have no doubts WMD was and is still in Iraq."

Me too. I'm still waiting for Conventional Wisdom 5.0 on Iraq's WMD.

And if these allegations are true, they will certainly qualify as a major blunder in the conduct of the war. And one with a lot more credibility than most of the non-mistakes we've been accused of committing.

Liberty Corps Program

This story about two American deserters who fled to Canada prompted a thought. (Ok, pipe down on the sarcasm--I mean another thought and not my first. Bloggers are so rude sometimes...)

Anyway. We already have non-citizens in our military. So this isn't a problem. So shouldn't we pursue this a little harder by actively recruiting abroad?

If we can't get full commitment to fight at our side by more nations, lets get their willing citizens to join us. We already are moving toward seeing our enemies and potential enemies as sub-national entities rather than relying on the the outlook of the old Westphalian system of nation-states as the basic unit of international relations. Why not see our allies and potential allies that way, too?

Since Americans purportedly flee abroad (though our Hollywood types annoyingly remain despite promises) to live in a country more in tune with their beliefs, couldn't we host foreigners who wish to fight for our common freedoms and civilization despite their home governments' disinclination to fight?

This would also be a nice counter to the UN worship that some "citizens of the world" are prone to. Let's welcome Citizens of the West to our shores--and our military. We are in an ideological struggle and it isn't just for the hearts and minds of the Moslem world as we struggle to keep the jihadis from having the Moslem world's support. We need to struggle for the hearts and minds of Westerners so we will defend our common Western heritage.

I mean, Americans before Pearl Harbor enlisted in the Canadian and British forces to fight the Nazis when America was disinclined to fight that threat. And in the Spanish Civil War, International Brigades fought the fascists in Spain. Why couldn't we recruit abroad from people in other countries who want to contribute but whose own governments don't fight? I think we already have some type of program like this in the Philippines as a holdover from our colonial rule. Surely, there are Spanish soldiers getting out of their military who might like to actually take a turn on the ramparts fighting with us. Or other Europeans, or Asians, or Africans, or Latin Americans whose governments either provide small or no support in the field.

This beats any type of program to set up mercenary-type units like our own Gurkhas or anything like that. I once liked the idea as a temporary program but changed my mind. If we can't get sufficient citizens to join, let's get those worthy of citizenship to join. Indeed, I mentioned the idea of doing this in that long post:

We need to rely on our own resources. Sure, perhaps we should step up recruitment for Americans-at-heart abroad and bring them into our military. This would make up for having Europeans-at-heart right here at home who only get worked up over bike path issues. But we would be creating new Americans and not relying on those who fight for pay.

So lets actively recruit abroad. Set up recruiting programs in countries that don't fight with us in the field to avoid stealing from militaries that do fight with us, then expand to nations who support us minimally. First emphasis should be on recruits in countries with advanced modern societies who can be integrated into our military more easily. Call it the Liberty Corps. In the end, American citizens committed to democracy will be in our military. That should be the bottom line.

Heh

Amusing DOD dictionary of terms.

I'm sad that my favorite term "echelon above reality" seems to be obsolete now.

Pity.

Although "deja moo" is great!

Er, What About the Chinese?

So we concluded a cyber-war exercise called Cyber Storm that tested our ability to fight of cyber-attacks on our computer networks by various groups.

Bloggers were one group of attackers:

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.

Indeed. You know, I try very hard to give "ranting" a good name. And then I get slandered and put in the same category as anti-globalization activists and underground hackers. Thanks. I feel a really tough muse coming on over this. Well at least they didn't draw cartoons of us bloggers. That would really get the musing going.

And amazingly enough, nobody in this article mentioned the Chinese who are actually busy little beavers in the cyber warfare area as opposed to bloggers who rant and muse.

But it is bad form to mention actual potential enemies. It might be interesting to read their report using a universal word change of "Chinese" for "bloggers."

Is this fake but accurate, then?

UPDATE: Strategypage notes Chinese activity, including the 2003 Titan Rain incident:

There’s a Cyber War going on between China and the rest of the world. The problem is, there’s enough proof to know that China is behind an increasing number of Internet based attacks, but not enough to call China out on it. It began about five years ago, with an increasing number of very well executed Internet attacks that appeared to be coming from China.

I guess we didn't name China in the exercise because we still can't call them out on this.

Anvils and Idiots

Iran's top nutcase (and I admit, using this term is much easier than remembering how to spell his name--but we all know who we're talking about here) is using the Danish cartoon imbroglio (hereafter referred to as the DCI) to whip up support for his nutcase regime:

Iran, a predominantly Shiite Muslim country, has seized on the caricatures as a means of rallying its people behind a government that is increasingly under fire from the West over its nuclear program that Tehran says is peaceful but the U.S. and others say is aimed at developing atomic weapons.

Really, this is quite cynical. But Ahmaniafaja;vma!pejrpadad thinks we all must pay for the Danish cartoons:

Iran's hard-line president on Saturday accused the United States and Europe of being "hostages of Zionism" and said they should pay a heavy price for the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have triggered worldwide protests.

What's he going to do, bleed on us? What a card. He can huff but he isn't going to derail our mission to stop his regime from getting nukes.

This is just a pretend outrage campaign by some cynical thugs using some rent-a-mobs playing to the cameras. Oh sure, Moslems will hardly like this any more than most Christians care for some avant garde depiction of some Christian symbol. But like almost all Christians, a somewhat lesser but still overwhelming majority of Moslems are moderate and don't like this awful reaction by a small minority giving all Moslems a bad name.

And don't forget that our friends the Egyptians and Saudis are taking part in fanning the flames of this DCI faux crisis, not just our enemies Syria and Iran.

Clearly, we have classic cartoon humor going on here. It isn't anvils and idiots (as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame stated), but it is laughable.

Don't let the nutballs turn this into a Christian-Moslem fight. We are properly fighting a narrow sub-group of jihadi Moslems. Thugs and near-thugs who will suffer when we beat them are desperately trying to make this a civilizational war to save their bacon--so to speak. But their resort to pretend piety actually makes that an apt description.

Expanding Combat Power

Our Army needs more combat power. Some say we need to add troops. I used to agree but the Pentagon has embarked on a program to use existing troop levels to expand maneuver brigades. This effort is worthy of support before we add new troops.

This Army press conference has a lot of information in it. There is a very useful discussion of the Army and how end strength is hardly the only way to increase combat power. The Army is made up of many components and some can be squeezed or changed or substituted to add new combat units:

We have an end strength that is as follows, and again, as I like to say -- and everything in the Army is a little complicated. It's hard to answer straightforward. But let me try to give you just a second of background, and that is there's three components to the Army. There's the operational Army, which fights the wars. There's the institutional Army that generates the force, and we have this large overhead account -- when you're in neither one of the other, you're in this overhead account called the TTHS, the Transient Trainee Holding Students. It's probably the world's largest overhead account. So those three components add up in FY '04 to approximately 482,400. So that's a baseline that we established in the FY '04.

Our plan -- our strength plan is to grow the operational Army from 315,000 -- which was a subset of the 482,000 -- the 355,000 -- and this is again over the future year defense plan to FY '11 to -- through mil to civ conversion to reduce the number of soldiers in the institutional force by about 30,000 -- from -- which, 110,000 to about 80,000, and then to better manage the TTHS account for about 10,000. So if you look at the bookends, our plan is to start out with 482,400 and in FY '11, because of the dynamics of when you can add and when you can subtract and when you can convert, to end at 482,400. So in the interim years, we're going to grow above the 482,000 because we're going to do the operational Army near term, and we're going to convert the institutional Army long term. So you're going to see an increase and then a slow decrease over the future year's defense. That is the -- so we're going to grow that part of the Army that fights.

Calls to increase our combat units by adding new soldiers ignores that this is not the only way to gain manpower for new units. A common number floated for the past several years is that we need 40,000 more troops.

Well, by reducing the institutional Army by 30,000 and reducing the number of troops not in units for a number of reasons (in jail, in school, in hospitals, and in between stations), we are getting the 40,000 additional troops for combat units (the operational Army) that so many have called for.

Indeed, I've long supported a larger end strength, first calling for 40,000 troops for two new divisions (six brigades); and later, calling for eight separate brigades with the same manpower addition to get the units in action faster. But then I accepted that it would be wise to let the Pentagon try to get the additional combat units through this method.

We are adding nine brigades, remember, to the active component using this method. Deployable units is the bottom line, is it not? What's the harm of first moving troops from unneeded positions or increasing the efficient use of what we've got? If this isn't sufficient, I'll go back to calling for a larger Army.

Anyway, this short description should be on the fingertips of anybody discussing why we should add to the end strength. We should be discussing adding combat power and deployable units, and that is not the same question as adding end strength. At least not yet.

Anti-Submarine Warfare

I recently mentioned that it would be nice if the US Navy built diesel-electric submarines for use in shallow coastal waters. Our nuke boats are great for deep water but in shallow littoral regions, modern diesel-electrics with all the bells and whistles are more effective.

Certainly, such non-nuclear boats are at a severe disadvantage compared to nuclear boats if you are talking about sailing from US bases in the continental United States or even Hawaii to patrol stations. But if you base the subs in distant regions and fly in the crews like the navy does with its smaller ships, you get around the transit problem for routine deployments.

Well, my Jane's email alerts gave me this tidbit:

Taiwan (Republic of China) has accused the US Navy of intentionally sabotaging the sale of eight diesel-electric submarines that the Bush administration promised it in April 2001.

So I head over to the Sub Report and sure enough, they link to a bigger portion of the Jane's report:

A US source close to the programme has confirmed Taiwanese claims and argues that the US Navy feared a revival of a domestic diesel-electric submarine programme that would challenge its traditional use of nuclear-powered submarines.

"The bottom line is that the initiation of a Taiwan submarine programme has tremendous implications for the US Navy - once it gets going, they will not be able to resist the already existing pressure to integrate diesels with AIP [air-independent propulsion] into the navy inventory for littoral warfare. So they have been artful in making it seem like they have supported the president's policy; yet purposely making it such a bitter pill to swallow - what I call 'death by bureaucracy'," stated the source.

That is unacceptable. I'm fine with a debate on the merits of submarines for Taiwan, but when the US Navy is undermining administration efforts to get Taiwan diesel-electrics because they don't want pressure down the road to adopt them, that is ridiculous. Especially when I think that some diesel-electrics for our Navy would be a good idea.

And this related article expands on how the Navy is blocking the proposal--jacking up the price so that sticker shock will motivate the Taiwanese themselves to kill the sub program. Certainly, opponents of the subs seem to focus on that. If we can get the price down, perhaps the debate can properly focus on the merits of what subs can do for Taiwanese defense needs.

Of course, this article answers my puzzled question of why we aren't building diesel-electrics.

Rumsfeld needs to knock some heads together in the Navy and get them in line.

Check Our Own Pulse

Figuring out where Iran has hidden nuclear facilities is a major stumbling block in using force to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. Do we bomb only what we are sure about or bomb everything we suspect? And how do we get those deeply buried facilities?

In remote areas, if we can't penetrate deep enough, we can certainly crumble the entries to seal off whatever is deep in the Earth.

But in densely populated areas we can hardly crater the entire area. Especially if we aren't sure of the target. Anybody want to figure out what our press will do if the Iranians slap a "baby milk factory" sign on the rubble?

Strategypage notes one way that we can overcome those deep bunkers. Check out the EMP bomb:

Britain, which has taken the lead in developing EMP (ElectroMagnetic Pulse) devices, is testing a new EMP warhead with the United States. This weapon is intended for use in cruise missiles or UAVs, for attacks on enemy command and control centers. Some of these operations are in bunkers that are well protected from bombs. But an EMP device could at least damage some of the electronics used in those locations. An EMP warhead would also be useful when the target is surrounded by civilians, an increasingly common tactic with some governments, who know that Western governments are more reluctant to kill non-military personnel.

The Iranians look like they are working on EMP weapons. But we aren't the only nation vulnerable to such weapons. Could this make an aerial campaign more likely to succeed than I'd assumed? After all, we could afford to EMP a suspected target when throwing high explosives around just in case might seem a bit harsh and risk too much collateral damage.

So is all the talk of slow democracy promotion and Security Council resolutions designed to mask a military campaign that most people say could not work? And is the British EMP weapon one of the tools we will use to actually make an attack work?