"National Security" As A Talisman to Ward Off Inconvenient Claims

Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former Pentagon and NSC staffer, now at the Center for a New American Security, has a a must read essay about how those of us in the national security establishment have created an environment in which Trump is allowed to use claims of  "national security" as a magic word to avoid scrutiny on questionable actions.  The most recent example, is the Supreme Court's upholding of the Trump Travel Ban in Trump. v. Hawaii.  Despite the fact that "a long list of bipartisan national security, intelligence, and military officials agree" that there is no national security justification for the travel ban, the Supreme Court upheld it:

It’s just bigotry disguised as national security, the Twitter-verse said Monday. How could the Supreme Court endorse it?

And there’s the rub. The Supreme Court goes out of its way to not rule on the boundaries on the president’s national security prerogatives; Justice Roberts notes, in his majority opinion, that “our inquiry into matters of entry and national security is highly constrained” and its expertise is limited. What constitutes a national security justification for deference to the executive is historically out of the hands of the judiciary and instead the remit of the national security community itself. While the despicable policies of the Trump administration are on its own conscience, its path was partly cleared by the good intentions of national security professionals, themselves.

Why does the national security community need to take responsibility?  According to Loren, our own actions have created an environment in which these claims can't be questioned:

Natsec professionals never meant to build a smirking priesthood that avoids questioning of its actions, but we did. Every conversation we halted with an “I know more than you, national security, you realize” laid the groundwork for avoiding close scrutiny of our actions. Every email we overclassified for convenience. Every policy we didn’t trust to the general public. Every airstrike we refused to acknowledge. Every security theater we performed at airports. Every new agency we mustered some half-hearted excuse to create. Every covert program we developed to avoid the absence or inconvenience of congressional authority. Every detainee we kept from receiving basic rights. Every former servicemember or official who parlayed their rank into a gig as a cable news national security or military analyst despite lacking any experience or training in analysis. Every partial release of intelligence to support our preferred narratives. Since 9/11 we’ve made everything about national security and national security about everything, a well-intentioned impulse to close ourselves off from threats and the smallest risks. Yes, we worked hard to protect the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic, but weren’t quite clever enough to prophecy someone like Trump would take our precedents and stretch them to the max.
 We drank our own Kool-Aid, believing toughness meant inscrutability and the American people didn’t deserve to know what we knew. We claimed “national security” as a means to avoid explanation and transparency, believing that even a minor check weakened the credibility of our profession, until the parameters of national security became so flabby and insecure as to absorb Trump’s “religious animus.” We share the blame for this.
 President Trump has made national security justifications a staple of his practice of policy, a craven sort of politics that makes us less safe and demands loud condemnation. But the national security community created the environment in which such arguments would be heard with a straight face.

Read it all here. 

  

America's Unique Experience With War

Franz-Stefan Gady wrote an essay a few months ago that I think merits careful consideration.  His point is that Americans have experience war very differently than other countries around the world.  As a result, this makes us perhaps too eager to use armed force:

True to George W. Bush’s mantra “We’ll fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” U.S. troops have fought in the faraway mountains of North Korea, the rice paddies of South Vietnam, the rolling hills of Bosnia, the snowy tops of the Hindukush, and the urban jungle of Baghdad, places foreign and far away to most Americans. During that time period, not a single American battlefield defeat, and there were a few, resulted in American civilians taken prisoner or American towns razed.

This unique American experience of war is first and foremost the result of a combination of geographical distance — the United States is protected from any threats of land invasion by two oceans — and the preponderance of American military might — the United States was and remains the world’s strongest military power. The most salient feature of what one may call the American Way of War is not only superior technology or massive firepower but geographic distance. America’s wars for the past hundred years have been fought thousands of miles away from American soil, scarcely exposing American territory to danger (with the exception of the ever-looming nuclear threat) and shielding Americans from many of the terrible consequences of war.

He points to several specific aspects of the American experience of war: American civilians has shielded American civilians from the horrors of military conflict, our military and civilian infrastructure has not been destroyed,  we have a "snapshot" view of deployments "where men and women are exposed to war for short time periods and rotate in and out of a combat zone without developing an understanding of the specific nature of the unfolding conflict, and our decisionmakers "often emphasize the changing character of warfare (how wars are fought) over the “constant” nature of war (chaotic, unamenable to human control, bloody, and catastrophic)."

This, Gady argues has consequences for our decisions to use force:

As a result of the four distinctions outlined above, American policymakers and military leaders, despite continuously waging war, paradoxically have a more “benign” and “cleaner” understanding of war, contributing to what I call the “War Gap.” Almost by definition, war for Americans now denotes conflict in a faraway country where only American troops and foreign combatants and civilians are killed. No American homes are ransacked or bombed and no foreign occupational regime (if only temporarily) is imposed. American citizens remain physically removed from mayhem and death. This is in stark contrast to the European, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern experience of war in the same context.

 . . . 

 A pernicious effect is that war, without an adequate understanding of its closely lived complexity and horror, appears more manageable to U.S. policymakers. As a result, American decision-makers are more prone to advancing military solutions over other options than leaders in other advanced democracies. Additionally, a more technological prosecution of war offers the illusion that policymakers have more choices during a military conflict than they actually obtain. Lost is the insight that the only real freedom to devise policy pertaining to a military conflict is before the outbreak of any hostilities.

Read it all here.  Clearly, we have had some attacks on our homland--Pearl Harbor and 9/11 being the best examples, but it is certainly true that our experience of war differs qualitatively from those in other countries.  What do you think? Do we use military power as a result? 

A Primer on the Proposed "Space Force"

Last week, President Trump spoke to the Space Council and announced his direction to the Department of Defense to create a new military service--a "Space Force"--to join the current Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.  In reading lots of commentary on this proposal, it was clear to me that most Americans are really not understanding what this is all about.  The purpose of this post is to offer a primer on the idea, and to express my own views.  (By way of background,  I was involved with our Nation's Space military operations while serving as Air Force General Counsel, and currently serve on the Board of the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit federally funded research and development corporation that advises the Air Force and Intelligence Community on technical issues involving operations in space.)

The most important thing to understand about President Trump's announcement is that he is not proposing to "militarize" space--instead, the proposal is to reorganize how the Department of Defense organizes existing (and future) space operations,  The United States military is already heavily dependent on space operations.  We use satellites to detect missile launches and thereby provide early warning of nuclear attacks.  The GPS satellite constellation provides essential position information for military forces (and many of our our weapons).  Communications, which are essential for command and control of our global military forces, largely occurs over satellites.  And spy satellites provides critical intelligence information that is used for both strategic and tactical decisions.  It is safe to say that neither our intelligence community nor our military could do their job without our space assets.

And it is also worth emphasizing that our Nation also relies heavily on space for many non-military applications as well--GPS, weather, entertainment and communications.  Most of our point-of-sale payment systems would not work without space.

For many years, space was not really a contested environment.  We launched our highly sophisticated (and stunningly expensive) satellites into orbit (low earth orbit, high elliptical orbits, and geostationary equatorial orbits) with little concern that an adversary could take them out.  That is no longer the case.  And it the fact that space is now a contested environment that has led to proposals to create a separate space force.

While all of the services have at least part of the Department of Defense Space mission, the Air Force has the lion share of the responsibility.  Through its Space Command, the Air Force is responsible for developing the architecture for the satellite constellations, acquiring satellites and their ground-based communication systems, launching the satellites,  and then operating the satellites while in orbit.  A newly arising mission is the make sure that our space assets are resilient, and capable of surviving in a wartime environment against emerging Russian and Chinese capabilities.  And because space is also an increasingly crowded environment, the Air Force Space Command is also responsible for keeping track of every item in space near Earth.

Several members of Congress, most notably, Mike Rogers of Alabama and Jim Cooper of Tennessee, have argued that the Air Force is not paying sufficient attention to the space mission.  And by not "paying attention," I think they really mean that the Air Force is not allocating enough resources to the space mission.  The concern is that the Air Force prioritizes aircraft such as the F-35 and the new bomber over needed investments in space. The New York Times has a good article today that describes this argument.  President Trump has apparently agreed with Rogers and Cooper, despite the fact that Congress itself resoundingly rejected the argument earlier this year.

So what do I think?  While I think our nation needs a new and more innovative focus on the problem of providing resilient space operations in a contested environment, I don't think that a separate space force will help us get there.

First, I was deeply involved in Air Force and Department of Defense budgeting decisions from 2009 to 2013, and I did not see an Air Force that ignored the space mission in order to fund the space mission.  It simply did not happen.  In addition, during my tenure at the Air Force, I saw leaders of the Air Force Space Command, such as General Willie Shelton, raise the concerns about a contested space environment only to see their proposals rejected as too expensive by the Department of Defense leadership (not Air Force leadership) and by the General Accountability Office space experts.  While the Department of Defense has changed its tune since 2014, in my view, the Air Force is not the reason we now play catch up to the Chinese and Russians.

Second, while the space mission is vitally important, from a manpower point of view, it is really too small to justify an entirely new military service.  Air Force Space Command, for example, has about 22,000 military members and 9,000 civilians.  A new Space Force would likely have no more than 30,000 military members and perhaps 10,000 civilians.  Given the entirely new infrastructure that would need to be created--a recruiting command, a training command, a space staff and a civilian secretariat (not to mention the inevitable Space Academy and Space Band)--this  seems too small a force to justify an entirely new military service.

So what should we do instead?  Quite frankly, much of what needs to be done seems to be underway: we need to change how we design and deploy satellites so they are more resilient, we need to reform the acquisition process so we can respond more rapidly to emerging threats, and we need to train airmen, soldiers, marines and seamen to fight through interruptions in space assets.  While I don't think a new Space Force necessarily makes sense, it may make sense to create a new Combatant Command devoted to space military operations just as we created a separate Cybersecurity Combatant Command.  (My caveat here is that Strategic Command now has the joint space mission and General John Hyten, the former Commander of Space Command, is the best strategic thinker we have ever had on space issues).

In short, when you think "Space Command", don't think of manned and armed space craft of science fiction lore.  And don't even think about Death Stars or weapons in space directed at targets on Earth.  It is instead simply a proposal about how we best organize how the military organizes space assets.  While there are certainly ways we can improve how we organize this mission, a "Space Force" is the wrong approach.

Measuring the Real Contributions of Our NATO Allies

The Spring, the world was aghast when Trump attacked our NATO allies and questioned the value of the NATO alliance.  I explained why Trump was wrong in this long post.

The focus of the debate is on whether our NATO allies are carrying their weight--are they spending enough on defense.  In particular, Trump focused on those countries that were not meeting their target of military spending at two percent of GDP.  The problem with this focus on the two percent target is that it really doesn't do a good job of accurately reflecting the real contribution of each ally.  Greece, for example, more than meets this target with 2.46% of GDP, but this is largely a reflection of a grossly inefficient operations and not its military value.  Other countries spend far less, but their real contributions in overseas operations has been far more.

My favorite example is little Denmark (at only 1.17%), which has been a major contributor to NATO operations worldwide.  Elizabeth Braw has a very good analysis of the true contributions of our NATO allies at Defense One:

Take a glance at NATO’s defense spending statistics, and Denmark looks like a mediocre member. Last year, the Scandinavian country spent 1.17 percent of GDP on defense, far below NATO’s 2-percent benchmark. But a closer look at the country’s military deployments reveals a rather different picture: Denmark is, in fact, a NATO starlet. Members’ contributions to alliance missions matter as much as their defense spending. We should encourage them to be more like Denmark.

In Mali, the Danish armed forces have a 62-troop C-130 Hercules detachment. They have 199 troops in Iraq and have smaller groups elsewhere, including Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base and Kosovo. Next year, Denmark will boost its contribution to NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia from five troops to 200, and it’s about to increase its Afghanistan force to 150 men and women. Currently, 702 Danish troops are on foreign deployment, 389 of them on NATO missions.

Or look at Norway, which similarly does not qualify for NATO’s Two Percent Club: it spends 1.56 percent of its GDP on defense. But Norwegian special forces played a crucial role in Afghanistan and are now involved in the fight against ISIS. Norway also has 200 troops in NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania, and troops in, among other places, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

. . .

Yes, the U.S. goes the extra mile for Europe, for example, by stationing some 30,000 Army soldiers here. But farther from the spotlight, so do countries like Italy, Denmark and Norway. Such overachievers should get credit for their efforts just as two percent spenders do. But praise is not enough. NATO shouldn’t have to rely on a few overachievers to assemble and run its missions. Much like the residents of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, all NATO members should be above-average contributors.

Read it all here. 

Time for a Little Humility about Military Intervention

I have been watching the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War with great interest.  One of the themes of the series is that many of the initial decisions to escalate the War were made in good faith, but were disastrous just the same.  One of the lessons of Vietnam is that we need to be much more humble about what military power can achieve.

To be clear, we can point to many successful uses of military power--even when judged many years later.  Our intervention in Kosovo seems to have stabilized the Balkans.  Our defense of Kuwait in the first Gulf War achieved its objective of restoring Kuwait to power.  Heck, even the intervention in Mali to defeat the Islamist forces who took over that nation seems to be a success.

Why were these engagements successful?  Perhaps it was because our political objectives could be satisfied by military lessons, and we did not need to engage in hubris about changing "hearts and minds."  Our other recent interventions, however, have not been as successful.  Indeed, most of been unmitigated disasters that made the world a less safe place.

Robert Kaplan has an interesting post at the National Interest blog about this issues:

The people I know who supported the Iraq War genuinely intended the human-rights situation in Iraq to be improved by the removal of Saddam Hussein, not made worse through war and chaos. The group of policymakers who supported the Libya campaign genuinely thought that by toppling the regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi a humanitarian catastrophe in Benghazi would be averted and the country as a whole would benefit. Instead, Libya collapsed into anarchy with many more thousands of casualties the consequence. The people who supported an early intervention to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, or at least limit the suffering in Syria, genuinely thought they were in both the moral and strategic right. And they might actually have been correct. Since there was no intervention in this case, the results of one remain an unknowable.

.  .  .. In all three cases, both sides have had at least some claim on our sympathies, however partial, even if we have disagreed with them. There were the interests of the state and its many limitations on one hand, and the interests of humanity on the other. Of course, the interests of humanity can in quite a few circumstances coincide with the interests of state. But it cannot do so all the time, or else we would be intervening everywhere, and that would not be sustainable. And yet just because you cannot intervene everywhere does not mean you cannot intervene, consistent with your interests, somewhere.

In ancient tragedy, as Hegel notes, the truth always emerges. What, then, is the truth about humanitarian intervention in the Muslim Middle East? The truth is that American power can do many things, but fixing complex and populous Muslim societies on the ground is not one of them: witness Iraq and Libya. But in the case of Syria, where a humanitarian and strategic nightmare has ensued without our intervention, it behooves us to treat each crisis individually, as sui generis. For intervening in one country might be the right thing to do, while it may be the wrong thing in other countries.

Read it all here.  I remain skeptical that intervention in Syria would have been a wise decision, but Kaplan's larger issue rings true--we need to judge each situation individually before using military force.  And in doing so we must be more humble about what military intervention will accomplish.  At the very least, we need to consider what we must do after we win the initial battles.

Was the Vietnam War Winnable?

A few months back Mark Moyar, the director of the Center for Military and Diplomatic History, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, arguing that the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies could have won the war.  He actually makes a strong case.  The best response, however is from Robert Farley.  While agreeing with much of Moyar's analysis, Farley makes a fundamental point:  while the war might indeed have been winnable, the benefits of continuing the fight were not worth the cost:

In 1972, American political leadership made the overdue decision that any benefit of further contribution to Vietnam was outweighed by costs in material, in national dissensus and in international reputation. This leadership came to the conclusion that maintaining the U.S. commitment to Europe, North Asia and the Middle East was vastly more important to the struggle against the Soviet Union than continued fighting in Southeast Asia

Continuing the war would have incurred other costs. Hanoi’s conquest of South Vietnam was violent and brutal, killing thousands and forcing many others to flee as refugees. But continuing the fight against the North surely would also have been brutal, especially if it had involved direct coercive measures against Hanoi. Efforts to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have led to heavier fighting in Cambodia and Laos.

Finally, it’s worth putting the broader strategic context on the table. The Sino-Soviet split demonstrated conclusively that the “socialist bloc” was nothing of the kind; communist states could disagree with one another in violent ways. Ho Chi Minh and his successors may have been, as Moyar points out, “doctrinaire Communists,” but Vietnam itself invaded another communist state in 1977, and went to war with one of its erstwhile patrons in 1979. The U.S. “loss” of Southeast Asia had no noticeable effect on the broader strategic balance between Moscow and Washington, a conclusion to which the Europeans had come at some point in the late 1960s.

Read it all here.  What do you think?

Letting Weapons Make The Decision to Kill

We are living in an age of machine autonomy.  We have autonomous cars on our highways already, and there are some who believe that driverless cars will be the rule, and not the exception, within the decade.  As machine learning grows in sophistication, many are asking some fundamental questions about autonomous weapons:  Should they be allowed?  Should they be developed?  Should we support an international treaty to ban them?

These are all great questions, but by and large, the discussions about them ignore some subtle, but important distinctions.  For example, should our answer be different if the weapon at issue is purely defensive?  Our Aegis (ship-based) and  Patriot (land-based)  anti-missile defense systems must react quite quickly to missiles fired against US targets, and therefore have a fully autonomous mode.  In most cases, this would mean only that a machine killed another machine (and saved human lives in doing so), but they could also kill incoming enemy fighter planes as well.  Acceptable?  What about "smart missiles" that are programmed to only hit a particular type of enemy ship--are we uncomfortable when they are sent into the battlefield to make the actual kill decisions?  The next generation of ship-to-ship missiles will likely have this capacity.

Marine JAG officer Lt. Col. Alan Schuller has an outstanding post at Just Security that takes all of these issues to a new level.  He looks at the issue of autonomous weapon systems through the prism of international law, but drill downs on a real fundamental point--at what point are machines really making kill decisions:

But consider the hypothetical case of an unmanned submarine that was granted the authority to attack hostile warships after spending days, weeks, or even months without human interaction.  Suppose the submarine was programmed to independently learn how to more accurately identify potential targets.  The link between human decision-making and lethal kinetic action gives us pause because it is attenuated.

As such, when some commentators speculate about future AWS equipped with sophisticated AI, they ascribe decisions to machines.  But even advanced machines do not decide anything in the human sense.  The hypothetical submarine above, for example, was granted a significant degree of autonomy in its authority and capability to attack targets.  Even if the system selects and engages targets without human intervention, however, it has not made a decision.  Humans programmed it to achieve a certain goal and provided it some latitude in accomplishing that goal.  Rather than focusing on human interactions with autonomous weapons, commentators’ inquiries should center on whether we can reasonably predict the effects of an AWS.

 He argues that allowing autonomous weapons on the battlefield whose decisions we do not guide in such a way that they are predictable is an abrogation of the responsibilities of military commanders under international law.  But he also argues, that as long as the weapons are guided by humans and that the weapon will, with some certainty, operate under the decisions made by humans, we should not be concerned if the human actions are temporally removed from the final kill decision:

Let’s explore why a blanket requirement of human input that is temporally proximate to lethal kinetic action is unnecessary from an IHL standpoint.  An anti-tank land mine may remain in place for an extended period without activating.  Yet, such systems are not indiscriminate per se.  Indeed, if future land mines were equipped with learning capacity that somehow increased their ability to positively identify valid military objectives, this could potentially enhance the lawfulness of the system.  As such, the analysis of the legality of an AWS will turn in large part on whether its possible to reasonably predict the target or class of targets the system will attack.  The determination will depend on the specific authorities and capabilities granted to the AWS.  If the lethal consequences of an AWS’ actions are unpredictable, the decision to kill may have been unlawfully delegated to a machine.

Moreover, future military commanders may need to address threats that are too numerous and erratic for humans to respond.  For example, China is allegedly developing unmanned systems that could operate in swarms to rapidly overwhelm a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group.  In order to address such threats, future forces will likely need scalable options to fight at “machine speed.”  If a commander is forced to rely on affirmative human input in order to use force against each individual threat, the battle may be over before it has begun.

Read it all here.  You can read some of my earlier posts on autonomous weapon systems here, here and here.

How to Handle a National Security Crisis

Loren DeJonge Schulman, who spent much time in the Situation Room while on the NSC staff, has a wonderful and often funny piece at Defense One that gives advice to the current NSC staff about what they need to do in a crisis.  Aside from quite practical advice (get some sleep,  eat more than M&Ms, and the classic "no fighting in the war room"), Loren offers some true insights.  Here is a sampling:

Think, patiently. The most chaotic, unplanned NSC meetings can feel like a good midwestern family trying to decide on a restaurant for dinner: “What do you want to do? I dunno, what do you want to do?” National-security demi-god Phil Zelikow laments the decline of sophisticated policy development with the kind of nostalgia usually associated with first loves, wistfully recalling a time when “Arguments and choices were carefully noted and clearly communicated to those who needed to know. Relevant factual assumptions—about foreigners or our own side—were rigorously tracked.” Without such preparation, and the effort to get it on paper, meetings—even urgent meetings—are totally pointless. But quality staffwork does not spring fully formed from the heads of the folks in charge. Analysis takes time, and thoughtful analysis takes more time, requiring a trust in experts echelons below the bigwigs at the table—and all of this is a good thing. Critics have rightfully noted that there can be too much of a good thing; extensive “problem admiration” in the Obama administration launched a thousand frustrated op-eds and Cabinet tell-alls. But Zelikow reminds that policy options are generally matters of life and death and deserve slow and deliberate attention

Especially in the war room. Prayers for patience are most needed when turning toward the Pentagon. Seeking military options from the Department of Defense is a delicate dance involving a sea of acronyms, a continuous escalation ladder of “your boss will need to call my boss,” and a civil-military philosophical battle that sounds like a chicken-and-egg debate conducted solely in acronyms. Even with an abundance of former and current senior military officials in senior national-security roles, marriage counseling advice is needed to at least smooth the relationship between White House and DOD officials. Open communication, being straight about needs and limitations, and giving one another time (as military planning takes about three months more than the two hours you are anticipating) are key to minimizing mutual feelings of mutiny. As is giving CENTCOM a heads up when you’re considering a strike on Syria.

You really need to read the entire article.  It is a fun read, and the essay is quite insightful.

On the Realities of Drone Warfare

One of my frustrations has been the grossly distorted dialogue on the use of drones, or remotely piloted aircraft.  Much of the public discussion is grossly misleading.  I even wrote a chapter in a book making the point that remotely piloted aircraft are just a different platform for military action and that the ethical and legal issues are really no different than that of piloted aircraft.

I was therefore pleased to see an excellent description of the reasons for the public disconnect by U.S. Air Force Major Joe Chapa at the War on the Rocks blog.  Chapa's main point is that those who write about drones really don't know what they are talking about, and that those who have actual experience with drones don't speak out.  The article is rich with examples of how incorrect information about drones has perpetuated as a result.  He gives many examples, but I especially appreciated that he addressed one of my pet peeves:

For instance, in her 2013 book, Drone Warfare, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin claims:

In 2003, the Defense Department developed a new computer program… The dead show up as blob-like images resembling squashed insects, which is why the program was called “Bugsplat.” Bugsplat also became the “in-house” slang referring to drone deaths.

.  .  .

Only a few authors have gotten it right. Bugsplat was software that depicted the expected blast and fragmentation pattern of the various air-to-surface weapons in the U.S. inventory. But it wasn’t that “the dead” were depicted as squished bugs. People were not depicted at all. The software was developed to show how urban terrain would impact the blast and fragmentation pattern of a given weapon on a given target. The “splat” was about patterns, not people. To take one simple example, dropping a 500-lb, GPS-guided GBU-38 onto an open field would generate a significantly different blast and fragmentation pattern than dropping a GBU-38 onto a house with some windows and an open door. This software can incorporate diverse structural elements and produces a graphic image of the pattern in which some rays would protrude further from the center (e.g., where an open door stood) than others (e.g., where the windows were) and others would be even more stifled (e.g., by the concrete walls with no windows). The resulting image looks like a bug splat on a windshield. Benjamin’s interpretation is believable but not accurate. And each time her description is reflected and propagated in the literature, the accuracy and legitimacy of the ethics debate suffers another blow and the divide between military practitioners and the interested citizens for whom they fight gets a little wider.

.  .  .

A sociologist, anthropologist, or social psychologists might, even with this better understanding of the software’s purpose, contend that the insensitive name belies animosity toward the enemy, suggesting that one wants to crush one’s enemies like bugs. Whether, or the degree to which, military members (and their civilian counterparts) view enemy fighters and the foreign citizens among whom they hide in this way is a discussion worth having, but not under the dim light of an incorrect etymology. There are two facts that are almost never cited alongside the “bugsplat” references. First, the purpose of the software has always been to better understand the precise effects of the weapons in order to reduce collateral damage and civilian casualties. Second, this “Bugsplat” software was renamed “Fast Assessment Strike Tool-Collateral Damage (FAST-CD)” more than a dozen years ago (2003). Filtering one’s view of how military personnel approach war through the outdated naming conventions of software engineers sidesteps the important questions that ought to be the subject of serious investigation. And yet, the misconception persists and has become endemic in the public mind.

Read the entire article here.

A Centrist Blowout in France: What is Next?

The electoral phase of the French Centrist Resolution is now over, and the victory is pronounced.  A party that did not even exist a year ago has not only taken the Presidency, but has also taken at least 355 of the 577 seats in the French Assembly.  About half of the new majority are total newcomers to politics.  The other half are former members of the two traditional parties--Socialists and Republicans.

So what comes next for President Macron and his large Assembly majority?  The first clear priority will be labor reform.  France has a traditionally inflexible labor law in which large labor unions negotiate wages and conditions for an entire sector of the the economy.  This means that a brand new start up is stuck with the deal negotiated with its dominant competitors.  This is in contrast to the German and Scandinavian (and US model) where labor negotiations are done on a company-by-company model.  Macron want to move to the German and Scandinavian model.  He is already in negotiations with the major French labor unions, and the large majority will give him leverage to move in this direction--particularly since some French unions favor this new model.  Nonetheless, expect a season of strikes on this issue.  Macron's success in the elections, however, will help him weather the inevitable strikes and street demonstrations.

Other reforms include an attention to the French budget (some cuts and tax cuts are likely in the works), while some enhancements to some social services.

Longer on the horizon, Macron wants to reform the EU itself.  This will include proposals that have met with significant German resistance in the past--such as a common budget and a common Finance Minister--and will require success on the domestic front first.

Probably the most interesting question is whether we could ever see such a political revolution in the United States.  I think not.  There are numerous features in the French political systems that helped pushed this result: a Parliamentary system that has long had more than two parties, and the use of a runoff system that allowed Macron to turn 40% support in the voting public into 60% share of the Assembly.  Finally, this result would never have happened with the extraordinary (and surprising) political talent of  Emmanuel Macron himself.

What do you think?