News broke yesterday that the U.S. military has suffered, and is continuing to suffer, the worst, and most significant wartime security breach in living memory. Apparently, insurgent groups in Afghanistan using portable satellite dishes and online programs have hacked into the surveillance network feeds of America’s Predator drones. I wish I could say this was a surprising, unprecendented event. But unfortunately, its not. It’s part of the growing trend of the U.S. losing the IT war to, well, to everyone.
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Well, not a lot is known at this time. What we are sure of: 12 people dead, 30 or more wounded, including the gunman, tentatively identified as MAJ Nidal Hassan, a psychiatrist who had just received deployment orders to Iraq and was not happy about it.
According to the limited information available on MAJ Hassan, he is the son of Jordanian (or Palestinian, or “a town near Jerusalem”) immigrants, grew up in Virginia, and joined the military out of high school against the wishes of his parents. He appeared to have quite the successful career prior to apparently going crazy and killing a lot of people.
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Afghanistan has been back in the news lately, along with a bunch of discussion of the supposed “return of MacArthurism” - check McChrystal’s speech, not the one Q&A segment, and the whole thing is pretty much pro current policy -but the one thing I haven’t heard anyone talking about is how we’re just setting ourselves up to make the exact same kinds of mistakes we’ve made before.
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Continued from this post.
The new neo-classicist economic theories now in vogue in D.C. (circa the 1980’s) rested on a couple of key principles in order to work. 1) Investor and management interests could be properly aligned. 2) A mostly free market would function the same as a truly free market. 3) In order to support #2, all markets should be de-regulated as much as possible. 4) Free markets are always the most efficient way to allocate any resource. 5) People are willing to accept the downside and losses of risk when it goes bad. 6) People are rational economic actors. 7) Everyone will always have optimal information.
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Don Ayala was sentenced today to a $12,500 fine and five years’ probation. He should have gotten more, including time in prison. For those who don’t know who Don Ayala is, he’s the Human Terrain contractor who executed a prisoner in Afghanistan last September. While the facts of the case are not in dispute by anybody, including Mr. Ayala, what should have been done about what he did is very much so.
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I was unsurprised, annoyed, saddened, and relieved when I saw this story from Danger Room scroll across my RSS reader this morning. Unsurprised, because this kind of nonsense is what “elite tactical units” excel in. Annoyed that it actually made it to the planning phase. Saddened that someone did a totally half-assed job of leaking it in an attempt to circumvent the kill order on the mission, and relieved that a real adult looked at this in time and vetoed it.
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I was reading this post by Justin Fox over at Time.com when I came to a sudden realization: the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve are fighting a guerrilla war against the banks and financial institutions. I know this seems like a crazy idea at first blush. I know there’s absolutely nothing in that post that works as a catalyst for that kind of intellectual leapfrog. I know that despite the fact that both disciplines liberally borrow verbiage from each other, the conduct of business and war have much less in common than one would suppose. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a strikingly accurate analogy.
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That’s the point made by Slate’s Fred Kaplan in his latest article. I knew the overpriced piece of junk wasn’t doing much during the conflict, but it’s pretty crazy to realize we’ve been at war now for 7+ years and the thing hasn’t flown a single combat mission.
What’s even more staggering is that the Air Force wants to buy another 194 of these things (we already have 187). They cost around $350 million apiece. That’s $65 billion total. When I think about how undermanned and underequiped we were in Iraq, about convoys full of soldiers riding in vehicles with welded on iron plating on the sides, that just pisses me off. Guys are dying and have died because of lack of sufficient equipment and numbers, and we’re spending $65 billion on this!? The stupid birds don’t even fight!
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Just to give you some advance warning, this is going to be one of those “tricky” posts where you get hit with a surprise ending that you won’t see coming because the description is set up like that.
Socialized medicine and “government run health care” are some of those scary anti-American words and terms you hear bandied about whenever anyone talks about reforming the health care system here. They must be pretty scary because that’s the only way I can see a system that spends more per capita than anywhere else on the planet to return worse results than almost any other industrialized nation. So here’s a story about a “socialized, government run” system. Try and guess what it is before the big reveal at the end.
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From Danger Room comes news that the Navy may or may not (but probably did) issue a research directive to begin design and construction of an underwater drone craft. The main problem with undersea vehicles is air, both for the crew and for the engines. In modern manned submarines this is taken care of by the ships’ nuclear reactors. Nuke power probably isn’t an option for an unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV?) but we do have some historical non-nuclear designs to fall back on for technology examples.
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