Obama plans for leaner US military in historic strategy shift

Given the significance of this latest development in the US administration, a large number of outlets feature detailed summaries of announcements made yesterday by President Obama and Defense Secretary Panetta. The Guardian provides some of the best coverage from a UK perspective:

President Barack Obama has unveiled plans for America's military future, outlining a historic shift towards a smaller and leaner force that will focus on China and move away from large-scale ground warfare that has dominated the post-9/11 era.

Obama became the first president to announce a strategy change directly from inside the Pentagon – a theatrical gesture designed to underline the significance of the shift. Mindful of the dangers of displaying any weakness over national security in an election year, Obama said he was determined to maintain US military supremacy around the world, but he admitted that the review involved a move to "smaller conventional ground forces" and the removal of "outdated cold war-era systems".

The immediate incentive for the change in tack, set out in a Pentagon strategy paper, is the fiscal crisis and the Congress-led drive for spending cuts. Currently, the Pentagon is under orders to slash $487bn from the resources it had expected to receive over the next 10 years, and those cuts could rise to close to $1tn if Congress fails to reach agreement on alternative reductions by January next year.

Details of the impact of the cuts on military deployments and systems will gradually be rolled out in upcoming budget announcements. For now, Obama and his main advisers, the defence secretary Leon Panetta and general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, stuck to the highlights.

Among the casualties of the new-look military will be the two elements of the military that have formed the kernel of American global might over the past decade: the army and the marine corps. But with the Iraq war over and US commanders struggling to draw back from Afghanistan, that emphasis on the long-term massive ground mission is seen as fading as a priority, and both will face reductions in personel likely to involve tens of thousands of troops from the current Army numbers of 570,000.

There will also be a move away from the decades-old mantra of US military planners that America must be capable of fighting two wars at any one time. "The two-war paradigm has been an anchor in the way we think about the future. That paradigm is a residual of the cold war," Dempsey said.

That is likely to be siezed upon by Republicans as evidence that the Obama administration is damaging US capability around the world. Obama anticipated that criticism, saying: "Yes our military will be leaner, but the world must know the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats."

For good measure, he added that the defence budget would continue to be larger than it was at the end of George Bush's term, and larger than the military spending of the next 10 countries put together.

"Make no mistake, we will have the capability to defeat more than one force at any time," Panetta concurred.

The dream of a modern military based on speed and stealth rather than overwhelming ground force has long been desired by military strategists. Donald Rumsfeld made a move towards it in the opening months of the Bush era, but was thrown off course by the 9/11 attacks and the angry US reaction to them in Afghanistan and then Iraq.

Now the Pentagon hopes to get back on that track, with new strategic goals and ambitions. Top of that list, the review has concluded, will be the emerging powers of the Asia-Pacific region amid mounting Pentagon concern about China's growing naval power and investment in high-tech weaponry.

"All trends are shifting to the Pacific. Our strategic challenges will largely emanate out of the Pacific region," Dempsey said.

In terms of the fighting force itself, the increasing reliance on technological warfare is certain to be extended, with the unmanned drone as its centrepiece. Critics on the left are likely to focus on that aspect as evidence of the Obama administration's disrespect for international law and civilian lives.

Panetta said: "As we reduce the overall defence budget, we will protect and in some cases increase our investments in special operations forces, new technologies like unmanned systems, space and in particular cyberspace capabilities and in the capacity to quickly mobilise."

Panetta and Dempsey both recognised that cuts in the strength of US troops would carry security risks. But they said the risks were preferable to doing nothing.

Panetta issued a clear and yet unspoken challenge to the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that has led resistance to the administration's budget plans. He said that if Congress continued along its path towards a further $500bn in defence cuts in January, the country's national security would be in jeopardy and there would be demoralisation within what he called a "hollowed" military force.

Nuclear powers plan weapons spending spree, report finds

The Guardian has the story:

The world's nuclear powers are planning to spend hundreds of billions of pounds modernising and upgrading weapons warheads and delivery systems over the next decade, according to an authoritative report published on Monday.

Despite government budget pressures and international rhetoric about disarmament, evidence points to a new and dangerous "era of nuclear weapons", the report for the British American Security Information Council (Basic) warns. It says the US will spend $700bn (£434bn) on the nuclear weapons industry over the next decade, while Russia will spend at least $70bn on delivery systems alone. Other countries including China, India, Israel, France and Pakistan are expected to devote formidable sums on tactical and strategic missile systems.

For several countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Israel and France, nuclear weapons are being assigned roles that go well beyond deterrence, says the report. In Russia and Pakistan, it warns, nuclear weapons are assigned "war-fighting roles in military planning".

The report is the first in a series of papers for the Trident Commission, an independent cross-party initiative set up by Basic. Its leading members include former Conservative defence secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Liberal Democrat leader and defence spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell and former Labour defence secretary Lord Browne.

There is a strong case, they say, for a fundamental review of UK nuclear weapons policy. The Conservatives in Britain's coalition government say they want to maintain a Trident-based nuclear weapons system. However, they have agreed to a "value for money" audit into a Trident replacement as four new nuclear missiles submarines are alone estimated to cost £25bn at the latest official estimate. The Lib Dems want to look at other options. The paper, by security analyst Ian Kearns, is entitled Beyond the United Kingdom: Trends in the Other Nuclear Armed States.

Pakistan and India, it warns, appear to be seeking smaller, lighter nuclear warheads so they have a greater range or can be deployed over shorter distances for tactical or "non-strategic" roles. "In the case of Israel, the size of its nuclear-tipped cruise missile enabled submarine fleet is being increased and the country seems to be on course, on the back of its satellite launch rocket programme, for future development of an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM)," the report notes.

A common justification for the new nuclear weapons programmes is perceived vulnerability in the face of nuclear and conventional force development elsewhere. For example, Russia has expressed concern over the US missile defence and Conventional Prompt Global Strike programmes. China has expressed similar concerns about the US as well as India, while India's programmes are driven by fear of China and Pakistan.

Pakistan justifies its nuclear weapons programme by referring to India's conventional force superiority, the report observes.

In a country-by-country analysis, the report says:

• The US is planning to spend $700bn on nuclear weapons over the next decade. A further $92bn will be spent on new nuclear warheads and the US also plans to build 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines, air-launched nuclear cruise missiles and bombs.
• Russia plans to spend $70bn on improving its strategic nuclear triad (land, sea and air delivery systems) by 2020. It is introducing mobile ICBMs with multiple warheads, and a new generation of nuclear weapons submarines to carry cruise as well as ballistic missiles. There are reports that Russia is also planning a nuclear-capable short-range missile for 10 army brigades over the next decade.
• China is rapidly building up its medium and long-range "road mobile" missile arsenal equipped with multiple warheads. Up to five submarines are under construction capable of launching 36-60 sea-launched ballistic missiles, which could provide a continuous at-sea capability.
• France has just completed deployment of four new submarines equipped with longer-range missiles with a "more robust warhead". It is also modernising its nuclear bomber fleet.
• Pakistan is extending the range of its Shaheen II missiles, developing nuclear cruise missiles, improving its nuclear weapons design as well as smaller, lighter, warheads. It is also building new plutonium production reactors.
• India is developing new versions of its Agni land-based missiles sufficient to target the whole of Pakistan and large parts of China, including Beijing. It has developed a nuclear ship-launched cruise missile and plans to build five submarines carrying ballistic nuclear missiles.
• Israel is extending its Jericho III missile's range, and is developing an ICBM capability, expanding its nuclear-tipped cruise missile enabled submarine fleet.
• North Korea unveiled a new Musudan missile in 2010 with a range of up to 2,500 miles and capable of reaching targets in Japan. It successfully tested the Taepodong-2 with a possible range of more than 6,000 miles sufficient to hit half the US mainland. However, the report, says, "it is unclear whether North Korea has yet developed the capability to manufacture nuclear warheads small enough to sit on top of these missiles".

Iran's nuclear aspirations are not covered by the report.

FP: The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict

Robert Kaplan has published an article in the Special Report section of the current edition of Foreign Policy magazine, exploring the potential for conflict within the South China Sea...

A far-reaching, determinedly Realist overview of the developing situation.

This issue of Foreign Policy also includes a link to an evocative photo-essay entitled "Tour the South China Sea". Take a look!

Think Again: War

Foreign Policy magazine this month features a thought-provoking article that asks us to "Think Again" regarding war... Suggesting that "World peace could be closer than you think". Author Joshua S. Goldstein aids the process by repeating commonly-held beliefs regarding war in the modern world, before calling each immediately into question by holding up contradictory facts (excerpt follows):

"The World Is a More Violent Place Than It Used to Be."

No way. The early 21st century seems awash in wars: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, street battles in Somalia, Islamist insurgencies in Pakistan, massacres in the Congo, genocidal campaigns in Sudan. All in all, regular fighting is taking place in 18 wars around the globe today. Public opinion reflects this sense of an ever more dangerous world: One survey a few years ago found that 60 percent of Americans considered a third world war likely. Expectations for the new century were bleak even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their bloody aftermath: Political scientist James G. Blight and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested earlier that year that we could look forward to an average of 3 million war deaths per year worldwide in the 21st century.

So far they haven't even been close. In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

Armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific kinds of mass destruction. Today's asymmetrical guerrilla wars may be intractable and nasty, but they will never produce anything like the siege of Leningrad. The last conflict between two great powers, the Korean War, effectively ended nearly 60 years ago. The last sustained territorial war between two regular armies, Ethiopia and Eritrea, ended a decade ago. Even civil wars, though a persistent evil, are less common than in the past; there were about a quarter fewer in 2007 than in 1990


If the world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that's because there's more information about wars -- not more wars themselves. Once-remote battles and war crimes now regularly make it onto our TV and computer screens, and in more or less real time. Cell-phone cameras have turned citizens into reporters in many war zones. Societal norms about what to make of this information have also changed. As Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has noted, "The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence," so that we see today's atrocities -- though mild by historical standards -- as "signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen."

The lengthy article proceeds to question the following assertions:

• "America Is Fighting More Wars Than Ever." (Yes and no).
• "War Has Gotten More Brutal for Civilians." (Hardly).
• "Wars Will Get Worse in the Future." (Probably not).
• "A More Democratic World Will Be a More Peaceful One." (Not necessarily).
• "Peacekeeping Doesn't Work." (It does now).
• "Some Conflicts Will Never End." (Never say never).

Definitely worth a read and a ponder - an opportunity to develop fresh perspective on this important topic.

Nature: El Niño tied to civil conflicts in tropical countries

An interesting summary of recent research published in the journal Nature has appeared today in an article inside Ars Technica Nobel Intent section:

Political conflicts are extremely complex, and we almost never understand all the factors that are involved in their timing, the course they take, and their eventual outcome. In this week’s Nature, a paper suggests a new variable to consider: the climate. According to researchers from Columbia and Princeton, there is good evidence that global climate variations can play a role in the onset of civil conflicts.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, known as ENSO, is a climatic pattern that repeats about every 5 years. Variations in water temperatures and air pressure in the Pacific Ocean cause El Niño years to be warm and dry, while La Niña years are cooler and wetter. These oscillations are felt most strongly in tropical countries, while mid-latitude areas are much less affected.

The authors of the study hypothesized that these cycles might play a role in the onset of civil conflicts. Although some research has been done on the correlation between climate and conflict, methodological difficulties and inconclusive results have caused lots of confusion. Climate studies are difficult because there is no Earth we can control to experiment with; we are stuck examining global patterns with few controls. However, in this study, ENSO provides a convenient experimental setup: volatile El Niño years provide a “treatment” group, while calmer La Niña years serve as a control.

175 countries were included in the dataset, including 93 tropical countries that are highly prone to the effects of El Niño and 82 other countries that are weakly affected by ENSO. Countries were classified as experiencing "conflict onset" in a given year if more than 25 people had died as a direct result of a new political dispute between two groups. Conflicts from 1950 to 2004 were included. Then the researchers calculated the annual conflict risk (or ACR) for both the tropical countries and the weakly affected countries. The ACR is the probability that a randomly selected country from the group experienced conflict onset in a particular year.

For the countries that aren’t highly affected by ENSO, such as Greece, Afghanistan, and Sweden, the ACR was about 2 percent in both El Niño and La Niña years, indicating that these climate cycles are unlikely to affect civil conflict in these countries. However, the ACR for tropical countries such as Australia, Sudan, and Trinidad doubled during El Niño years, increasing from 3 percent to 6 percent. From their analyses, the researchers concluded that the ENSO cycle may have affected 21 percent of civil conflicts since 1950.

The results are remarkably robust; the researchers repeated the analysis with various types of statistical models and with different ENSO indices, and their conclusions remained the same. Furthermore, the results held up even when high-conflict countries were excluded from the dataset, and when other variables, such as a country's age structure, income growth, and agricultural reliance, were included in the analyses.

Two additional findings were particularly intriguing. Many of the conflicts affected by ENSO are particularly deadly recurring conflicts. By changing the requirement for the length of "peaceful periods" between conflicts, the researchers found that the relationship between ENSO and large conflicts decreased. Additionally, low-income countries were the hardest hit by El Niño years, indicating that poorer countries are particularly sensitive to ENSO patterns.

Although the relationship between ENSO and civil conflicts is quite clear, the reasons behind this correlation are still not understood. Warm, dry El Niño years might decrease agricultural output, stressing a country’s resources and increasing food prices. ENSO patterns affect the frequencies of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and cyclones, which put countries at risk for upheaval. Extreme conditions can also cause psychological stress and alter human behavior. Finally, ENSO is a widespread phenomenon, and may cause suboptimal conditions on a large scale.

 In order to use the results of this study to predict or alleviate conflicts, we need to better understand the mechanisms driving the relationship between climate patterns and political conflict.

Civil wars, of course, have been the primary mode of fighting globally since the 1960s at least.... This research may help to illuminate one other aspect of underlying motivations and triggers for this type of conflict.

Wired: Gadhafi’s Loose Weapons Could Number a ‘Thousand Times’ Saddam’s

Wired Magazine's Danger Room section reports today on the perils that might potentially be lying out in the Libyan Desert, now that Gaddafi has been removed from power:

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi spent decade piling up a huge stash of weapons like a crazy old lady hoarding cats. Ironically, rebel forces looted his arms depots to turn Gadhafi’s missiles and guns on their old master. But the ease with which the rebels were able to arm themselves points to their next massive problem: securing those weapons before they fuel a lethal insurgency or flood the global arms bazaar.

It’s a concern familiar to those who watched Iraq’s insurgency evolve. Saddam Hussein, like Gadhafi, amassed a vast array of conventional weaponry for defense against enemies both foreign and domestic. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, looters made off with tons of explosives from unprotected military arsenals, making arms available to a brewing insurgency. With the end of Gadhafi’s rule seeming nigh, arms control and human rights experts are paying close attention to the security of the country’s weapons stockpiles, fearing they could end up in the hands of a pro-regime insurgency or other militants outside the country.

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, has spent time on the ground in Libya during the uprising. He tells Danger Room that “weapon proliferation out of Libya is potentially one of the largest we have ever documented — 2003 Iraq pales in comparison — and so the risks are equally much more significant.”

Many in the West worry about the remnants of Gadhafi’s chemical-weapons program and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles. However, Bouckaert says it’s Libya’s vast arsenals of low-tech gear like artillery shells and Grad missiles that are most likely to be fashioned into insurgent weapons, such as improvised explosive devices. The Libyan military certainly has plenty of them. Only a few months into the war, thousands of 122-mm Grad rockets were found stashed in abandoned bunkers in eastern Libya. “If Gadhafi loyalists decide to mount an Iraqi-style insurgency, they have access to a thousand times the explosives that the insurgents in Iraq had,” says Bouckaert.

Libya’s mines are also useful as weapons in a possible post-Gadhafi insurgency. Precise estimates of just how many mines Gadhafi’s forces have accumulated over the years are hard to come by. For their part, rebels estimate that pro-Gadhafi forces have already laid tens of thousands of the device to halt rebel movement.

Human Rights Watch has documented a number of different types of mines in Gadhafi’s stash. Libyan military forces have scattered Type 84 Model A anti-tank mines near Misurata. A particularly nasty weapon, the Type 84 can be loaded into 122-mm rockets, which scatter them across a wide area. On the ground, its magnetic fuse detects vehicles overhead and when detonated, fires a shaped metal charge upward. Amnesty International has also found T-AB-1 (AP) mines used in the area. The anti-personnel mines are mostly made out of plastic — meaning they’ll be hard to find with metal detectors.
In April, the representatives of Libya’s rebel movement, the Transitional National Council, pledged not to use land mines and to destroy any that came into its possession. But enforcing that pledge in a post-Gadhafi Libya will require coherence and discipline across the coalition of rebels — something that has at times proven difficult for the fractious grouping.

Then there’s Gadhafi’s higher-end weapons — including some that keep U.S. homeland-security experts awake at night. Libya is home to plenty of man-portable air-defense systems, or ManPads, which terrorists tried to use in 2002 to shoot down an Israeli passenger plane. Some newer, higher-flying missiles like the SA-24/Igla-S have also been spotted in Libyan military hands. But as Danger Room pal Eli Lake reports, the bulk of Libya’s arsenal is comprised of older, first-generation systems like the SA-7. They may not be the most-frequently used system in the event of an insurgency, but they are particularly worrisome in the wrong hands.

Fortunately, possession of a ManPads missile, alone, isn’t necessarily enough to take down an airliner. ”While the basic operation of a ManPads is fairly simple, using them effectively is not.  It requires some training and knowledge of the system’s capabilities,” says Matt Schroeder, director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists. That applies especially to older missiles like Libya’s SA-7s. Moreover, Schroeder adds, the missile systems have a shelf life, after which they begin to degrade. They could also malfunction if Libya’s military (or subsequent owners) haven’t stored or handled them properly.

Unfortunately, the scale of Libya’s man-portable missile arsenal could offer illicit users a number opportunities to successfully hit an aircraft if no one secures the weapons. Africa Command chief Gen. Carter Ham (.pdf) told the Senate in April that Libya held “perhaps as many as 20,000″ ManPads missiles at the outset of the war.

Libya is still home to the remnants of its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, though Gadhafi officially abandoned his efforts along those lines in 2003. Western officials are now worried about the security of a remaining 11 metric tons [12 U.S. tons] of mustard agent and 500 to 900 metric tons [550 to 990 U.S. tons] of uranium yellowcake still located in the country near Tripoli, according to the Associated Press’ Kimberly Dozier and Douglas Birch.

For the moment, though, talk of post-Gadhafi violence is slightly premature, insofar as Moammar is still around, and rebel control of Tripoli remains contested. Moreover, Bouckaert says that some of Gadhafi’s larger conventional-weapons stockpiles are still in control of regime forces in Sirt and Sabha.

Nonetheless, experts advise that common sense steps like a weapons-buyback program that exchanges cash for loose arms could help mitigate the proliferation threat. Even in the event a pro-Gadhafi insurgency doesn’t develop, Libya’s arsenals could still cause trouble by making their way to terrorists and insurgents in the region. Some reports already claim Libyan rockets have already been smuggled to terrorist groups in Egypt and Gaza.

Guardian: Counting the Cost of the 9/11 Wars

The global conflicts that have raged since 9/11 have seen no clear winners but many losers – at least 250,000 people have been killed ....

Jason Burke, South Asia correspondent for The Guardian, presents a lengthy extract from his new book The 9/11 Wars (published 1 September) today:

If, just over a decade ago, you had looked north through binoculars from frontline Taliban positions 30 miles north of Kabul, you would have seen an old Soviet-built airbase, little more than a cluster of ruined buildings, rusting metal stakes, a single battered jeep and no serviceable aircraft at all on the scarred strip of concrete shimmering in the Afghan sun. The group of scruffy Taliban fighters in filthy clothes who manned the makeshift trenches on the heights above it would probably have served grapes and tea to you as they did to the rare reporters who visited them.

If you had come back just a little later, say in the spring of 2002, you would have seen a startling difference. With the Taliban apparently defeated, the airstrip had become the fulcrum of a build-up of American and other international forces in the country that would continue inexorably over the next years. The feverish activity of the bulldozers, tents, jets and helicopters gave a sense that something extraordinary was happening. But its exact nature was still very unclear. Now, after a decade of conflict, a base the size of a small town has sprung up around the airstrip.

No soldiers at the battle of Castillon in 1453 knew they were fighting in the last major engagement of the hundred years war. No one fighting at Waterloo could have known they were taking part in what turned out to be the ultimate confrontation of the Napoleonic wars. The first world war was the great war until the second world war came along. Perhaps inevitably, then, the ongoing, interlinked and overlapping conflicts that have raged across the globe during the 10 years since 9/11 are currently without a name. In decades or centuries to come historians will no doubt find one – or several, as is usually the case. In the interim, given the one event that, in the western public consciousness at least, saw hostilities commence, "the 9/11 wars" seems an apt working title.

Al-Qaida has failed to achieve most of its key aims: there has been no global uprising of Muslim populations, no establishment of a new caliphate. Nor have changes in America's policy in the Islamic world been those desired by men such as the late Osama bin Laden. Does this mean the west has won the 9/11 wars? It has certainly avoided defeat. The power of terrorism lies in its ability to create a sense of fear far in excess of the actual threat posed to an individual. Here, governments have largely protected their citizens, and few inhabitants of western democracies today pass their lives genuinely concerned about being harmed in a radical militant attack. In July 2010, President Obama even spoke of how the US could "absorb" another 9/11, a statement that would have been inconceivable a few years before.

Despite significant damage to civil liberties in both Europe and America, institutional checks and balances appear to have worked on both sides of the Atlantic. In the face of a worrying militarisation and a commensurate growth in its offshoot, the "security" business, other forces have been strong enough to ensure that liberal democratic societies have kept their values more or less intact. The integration of minorities, always a delicate task, is generating significant tensions but is proceeding, albeit unevenly.

Even though now facing serious problems of debt, America has nonetheless been able to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq, at a total cost of up to a trillion dollars depending on how it is calculated, and a 10-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home. In 2009, American military expenditure was $661bn (£400bn), considerably more than double the total of 10 years previously, but still not enough, as Bin Laden had hoped, to fundamentally weaken the world's only true superpower. In Europe, supposedly creaking old democracies have reacted with a nimbleness and rapidity that few imagined they still possessed to counter domestic and international threats.

In short, western societies and political systems appear likely to digest this latest wave of radical violence as they have digested its predecessors. In 1911, British police reported that leftist and anarchist groups had "grown in number and size" and were "hardier than ever, now that the terrifying weapons created by modern science are available to them". The world was "threatened by forces which would be able to one day carry out its total destruction," the police warned. In the event, of course, it was gas, machine guns and artillery followed by disease that killed millions, not terrorism.

In the second decade of the 9/11 wars other gathering threats to the global commonwealth, such as climate change, will further oblige Islamic radical militants to cede much of the limelight, at least in the absence of a new, equally spectacular cycle of violence.

But if there has been no defeat for the west then there has been no victory either. Over the past 10 years, the limits of the ability of the US and its western allies to impose their will on parts of the world have been very publicly revealed. Though it is going too far to say that the first decade of the 9/11 wars saw the moment where the long decline of first Europe and perhaps America was made clear, the conflict certainly reinforced the sense that the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting. After its military and diplomatic checks in Iraq and Afghanistan, a chastened Britain may well have to finally renounce its inflated self-image as a power that "punches above its weight". The role of Nato in the 21st century is unclear. Above all, though the power, soft and hard, cultural and economic, military and political, of the US and Europe remains immense and often hugely underestimated, it is clear that this will not always be the case.

For many decades, the conventional wisdom has been that economic development around the globe would render liberal democracy and free-market capitalism more popular. One of the lessons of the 9/11 wars is that this optimism was misplaced. A sense of national or religious chauvinism appears often to be a corollary of a society getting richer rather than its opposite, and the search for dignity and authenticity is often defined by opposition to what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as foreign. In some places, the errors of western policy-makers over recent years have provoked a reaction that will last a long time. The socially conservative, moderately Islamist and strongly nationalist narrative that is being consolidated in Muslim countries from Morocco to Malaysia will pose a growing challenge to the ability of the US and European nations to pursue their interests on the global stage for many years to come. This, alongside the increasingly strident voices of China and other emerging nations, means a long period of instability and competition is likely.

American intelligence agencies reported in their four-yearly review in late 2008 that they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to "call the shots". Instead, they predicted, America is likely to face the challenges of a fragmented planet, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions. The previous review, published in December 2004, when George Bush had just been re-elected and was preparing his triumphal second inauguration, had foreseen "continued dominance" for many years to come. The difference is stark. If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the west cannot afford many more victories like it.

If clear winners in the 9/11 wars are difficult to find, then the losers are not hard to identify. They are the huge numbers of men, women and children who have found themselves caught in multiple crossfires: the victims of the 9/11 strikes or of the 7/7 and Madrid bombings, of sectarian killings in Baghdad, badly aimed American drone strikes in Pakistan or attacks by teenage suicide bombers on crowds in Afghanistan. They are those executed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq until his death in 2006; those who died, sprayed with bullets by US Marines, at Haditha; those shot by private contractors careering in overpowered unmarked blacked-out four-wheel-drive vehicles through Baghdad. They are worshippers at Sufi shrines in the Punjab, local reporters trying to record what was happening to their home towns, policemen who happened to be on shift at the wrong time in the wrong place, unsuspecting tourists on summer holidays. They are the refugees who ran out of money and froze to death one by one in an Afghan winter, those many hundreds executed as "spies" by the Taliban, those gunned down as they waited for trains home at Mumbai's main railway station one autumn evening, those who died in cells in Bagram or elsewhere at the hands of their jailers, the provocative film-maker stabbed on an Amsterdam street, all the victims of this chaotic matrix of confused but always lethal wars.

The cumulative total of dead and wounded in this conflict so far is substantial, even if any estimates are necessarily very approximate.

The military dead are the best documented. Though some may have shown genuine enthusiasm for war, or even evidence of sadism, many western soldiers did not enlist with the primary motive of fighting and killing others. A significant number came from poor towns in the midwest of America or council estates in the UK and had joined up for a job, for adventure, to pay their way through college, to learn a craft. By the end of November 2010, the total of American soldiers who had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New Dawn, was 4,409 with 31,395 wounded. More than 300 servicemen from other nations had been killed too and many more maimed, disabled or psychologically injured for life. In Afghanistan, well over 2,000 soldiers from 48 different countries had been killed in the first nine years of the conflict. These included 1,300 Americans, 340 Britons, 153 Canadians, 43 Frenchmen and 44 Germans.

Military casualties among western nations – predominantly American – in other theatres of Operation Enduring Freedom, from the Sudan to the Seychelles and from Tajikistan to Turkey, added another 100 or so. At least 1,500 private contractors died in Iraq alone.

Then there were the casualties sustained by local security forces. Around 12,000 police were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. In Afghanistan, the number of dead policemen since 2002 had exceeded 3,000 by the middle of 2010. Many might have been venal, brutal and corrupt, but almost every dead Afghan policeman left a widow and children in a land where bereavement leads often to destitution. In Pakistan, somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 policemen have died in bombing or shooting attacks. As for local military personnel in the various theatres of conflict, there were up to 8,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the 2003 war, and another 3,000 Iraqi soldiers are thought to have died over the subsequent years. In Afghanistan, Afghan National Army casualties were running at 2,820 in August 2010, while in Pakistan, around 3,000 soldiers have been killed and at least twice as many wounded in the various campaigns internally since 2001. Across the Middle East and further afield in the other theatres that had become part of the 9/11 wars, local security forces paid a heavy price too. More than 150 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting against radical "al-Qaida-ist" militants in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 2007, for example. There were many others, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in Indonesia. In all, adding these totals together, at least 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers and policemen have so far died.

Casualties among their enemies – the insurgents or the extremists – are clearly harder to establish. Successive western commanders said that they did not "do body counts", but most units kept a track of how many casualties they believed they had inflicted, and these totals were often high. At least 20,000 insurgents were probably killed in Iraq, roughly the same number in Pakistan, possibly more in Afghanistan. In all that makes at least 60,000, again many with wives and children.

Then, of course, there are those, neither insurgent nor soldier, neither terrorist nor policeman, who were caught in a war in which civilians were not just features of the "battle space" but very often targets. In 2001, there were the 9/11 attacks themselves, of course, with their near 3,000 dead. In 2002 alone, at least 1,000 people died in attacks organised or inspired by al-Qaida in Tunisia, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere.

The casualties from such strikes continued to mount through the middle years of the decade. One study estimates 3,013 dead in around 330 attacks between 2004 and 2008. By the end of the first 10 years of the 9/11 wars, the total of civilians killed in terrorist actions directly linked to the group, or to al-Qaida-affliated or inspired Islamic militants, was almost certainly in excess of 10,000, probably nearer 15,000, possibly up to 20,000. To this total must be added the cost to civilians of the central battles of the 9/11 wars. In Iraq generally, estimates vary, but a very conservative count puts violent civilian deaths (excluding police) from the eve of the invasion of 2003 to the end of 2010 at between 65,000 and 125,000. They included more than 400 assassinated Iraqi academics and almost 150 journalists killed on assignment. The true number may be many, many times greater. In Afghanistan, from 7 October 2001, the day the bombing started, to mid-October 2003, between 3,000 and 3,600 civilians were killed just by coalition air strikes. Many more have died in other "collateral damage" incidents or through the actions of insurgents. The toll has steadily risen. There were probably around 450 civilian casualties in 2005. From 2006 to 2010 between 7,000 and 9,000 civilian deaths were documented, depending on the source. In 2010 alone, more than 2,000 died. In all, between 11,000 and 14,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, and at least three or four times that number wounded or permanently disabled. In Pakistan, which saw the first deaths outside America of these multiple conflicts when police shot into demonstrations in September 2001, the number of casualties is estimated at around 9,000 dead and between 10,000 and 15,000 injured.

Add these admittedly rough figures together and you reach a total of well over 150,000 civilians killed. The approximate overall figure for civilian and military dead is probably near 250,000. If the injured are included – even at a conservative ratio of one to three – the total number of casualties reaches 750,000. This may be fewer than the losses inflicted on combatants and non-combatants during the murderous major conflicts of the 20th century but still constitutes a very large number of people. Add the bereaved and the displaced, let alone those who have been harmed through the indirect effects of the conflict, the infant mortality or malnutrition rates due to breakdown of basic services, and the scale of the violence that we have witnessed over the past 10 years is clear.

Some day the 9/11 wars will be remembered by another name. Most of the dead will not be remembered at all.

US War with China "Inevitable", Author Glain Says

Yahoo! Finance's Daily Ticker segment today features an interview with political author Stephen Glaiser, who posits a fairly pessimistic mid- to long-term view of Sino-American relations:

Outside of the market madness, the biggest global news this week might be China sending its first aircraft carrier to sea. The launch was not unexpected and China sought to downplay its significance, saying "it will not pose a threat to other countries."

Still, "it is the most potent symbol yet of China's desire to develop the power both to deny U.S. naval access to Asian waters and to protect its global economic interests, including shipping lanes," The WSJ reports.

Like many others, Stephen Glain, author of State vs. Defense, believes the U.S. and China are, indeed, on a collision course. "Absent a good faith attempt to negotiate this thicket of disputes between China and Taiwan and the Philippines and Brunei and others, I think it's inevitable," he says. "The Chinese are not going to back down."

Just as America adopted the Monroe Doctrine to project power in the Western Hemisphere, the Chinese believe they have a right to their own sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. "China is after all a 3000-year old country; Asia has been throughout most of that history Sino-centric," he says.

But to those who believe the U.S. and its allies must "bottle up" China, Glain says "there's nothing in those 3000 years of Chinese history" to suggest China's intentions are to militarily dominate the region. "On the contrary, they've always remained close to their own territory," he notes. "They have always been the Middle Kingdom between heaven and earth."

However, Glain fears the U.S. and its allies might provoke China into a war that might otherwise be avoidable. "Arms races tend to develop their own immutable momentum," he says, noting the Pentagon is embarking on an "enormous military buildup" in the region.

In his new book, Glain laments the rise of the "military industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned about 50 years ago, suggesting defense contractors and their patrons in Congress and the Pentagon have an undue influence on U.S. foreign policy. American hubris is also playing a role in the march to war, he says.

"Without an admission by the U.S. of its limitations, both fiscal and militarily…I think some kind of conflict between the U.S. and China is inevitable, probably in our lifetime," he says.

USAF suspends Bible ethics course used to train missile launch officers

Hard to know how to categorise this article from yesterday's Washington Post (read it - draw your own conclusions....):

Air Force suspends ethics course that used Bible passages to train missile launch officers

The Air Force has suspended a training course for nuclear missile launch officers that used Bible passages and religious imagery to teach them about the ethics of war.

The course had apparently been taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for more than 20 years, but officials pulled the plug after an article from the liberal Web site Truthout.org appeared online last week.

The group obtained a PowerPoint presentation used in the course that referenced religious figures including Abraham, John the Baptist and Saint Augustine. The presentation also said that there are “many examples of believers engaged in wars in the Old Testament” and “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said that the program had initially been designed to “help folks understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. In the missile launch industry, it takes a certain mindset to be able to walk in the door and say, yes, I can do that.”

But he added: “Senior leadership looked at [the material for the course] and said, no, we could do better than this.”

The reversal marks a victory for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group that provided the documents to Truthout and that has waged a series of battles, legal and otherwise, to preserve the separation of church and state in the services.

Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the foundation, said his group was approached late last month by about 30 officers, most of them Protestant or Roman Catholic, who said they objected to the presentation. He said he saw the PowerPoint and was astonished by documents that appeared to be using a religious justification for missile launches.


“This isn’t about attacking someone’s faith,” he said. “What it’s about is remembering that in this country … we separate church and state. They don’t do that in other countries. We do that here.”
One of Weinstein’s clients, Damon Bosetti, who served as an Air Force captain and attended missile officer training in 2006, told Truthout that he and his colleagues used to call the religious section of the ethics training the “Jesus loves nukes speech.”

Asked why it might have taken more than 20 years for someone to raise objections to the training course, Weinstein said he suspected airmen were simply scared to speak up.

The Air Force said a new course was to be developed.

BBC News: Ivory Coast: '800 die in Ivory Coast ethnic violence'

It seems that the Ivory Coast is on the verge of fulfilling the UN's definition of the scene of 'major conflict' (1,000+ deaths per annum) as fighting in the West African state this week claims over 800 fatalities, according to respected sources. BBC News has the story and video coverage:

At least 800 people are reported to have been killed in the Ivory Coast city of Duekoue this week, as rival forces continue to battle for power.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) staff visited Duekoue and said the scale and brutality of the killings were shocking.

The city was captured by fighters supporting UN-recognised president Alassane Ouattara this week.

His forces have ringed Laurent Gbagbo's troops in the main city, Abidjan.

Mr Ouattara was internationally recognised as president after winning a run-off vote in November, but Mr Gbagbo also claimed victory and refused to leave office.

Do read the rest, providing insights into what promises to be one of the bloodiest conflicts of the year—and Africa's 'other war' (Ivory Coast does not get nearly as much media attention as Libya).

BBC News also has a convenient Q&A page regarding the "Second Ivorian Civil War".

Economist: Cry havoc! And let slip the maths of war

Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen

The Economist today has an interesting article for those of us with a mathematical bent....

In 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a regular pattern. It was as if the chaos of war seemed to comply with some hitherto unknown law of nature.

At first glance the pattern seems obvious. Richardson found that wars with low death tolls far outnumber high-fatality conflicts. But that obvious observation conceals a precise mathematical description: the link between the severity and frequency of conflicts follows a smooth curve, known as a power law. One consequence is that extreme events such as the world wars do not appear to be anomalies. They are simply what should be expected to occur occasionally, given the frequency with which conflicts take place.

The results have fascinated mathematicians and military strategists ever since. They have also been replicated many times. But they have not had much impact on the conduct of actual wars. As a result, there is a certain “so what” quality to Richardson’s results. It is one thing to show that a pattern exists, another to do something useful with it.

In a paper currently under review at Science, however, Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and his colleagues hint at what that something useful might be. Dr Johnson’s team is one of several groups who, in previous papers, have shown that Richardson’s power law also applies to attacks by terrorists and insurgents. They and others have broadened Richardson’s scope of inquiry to include the timing of attacks, as well as the severity. This prepared the ground for the new paper, which outlines a method for forecasting the evolution of conflicts.

The article goes on to outline the theoretical basis for this approach and—although the practical application is not yet fully worked out—it nonetheless makes very interesting reading and raises some thought-provoking questions. How does this fit into the Realist / Liberal interpretations of conflict and human nature, for example?

CFR: Global Governance Monitor

The US-based think tank the Council for Foreign Relations monitors developing situations worldwide—an important feature resident on their excellent website is an interactive utility which they have called the Global Governance Monitor (click to link)

Its function? - "Tracks, maps and evaluates multilateral efforts to address today's global challenges". Sounds perfect for our needs in the Global Politics strand of the A2 syllabus....!

About the Global Governance Monitor

The challenge of global governance has never been more imperative and more daunting to realize. The headlines are filled with transnational challenges, from terrorism to climate change to weapons of mass destruction. To foster better understanding of modern global challenges--and the international community's record in responding to them--the International Institutions and Global Governance (IIGG) program has launched the Global Governance Monitor.

The Global Governance Monitor is a tool that shows how the international community is doing in addressing the most daunting threats that it faces. For each issue area, the monitor provides:

• a cinematic overview of the challenge, which explains why international cooperation is needed;
• an interactive timeline that traces the world's efforts to craft collective responses to the challenge;
• an issue brief that evaluates the overall performance of the regime and suggests potential reforms to improve international cooperation;
• a matrix that catalogs relevant international treaties, organizations, and initiatives;
• an interactive map that details critical countries and groups; and
• a resource guide for further information on the topic.

We hope that by monitoring the world's performance now, we can help U.S. and international policymakers identify remaining gaps in global regimes and propose new institutions or partnerships to fill them.

It's pleasing to see that each of the areas reported on within the CFR Global Governance Monitor have fairly recent updates... Two areas of current concern to us—War and Nuclear Proliferation—have updates of 28 February and 18 November respectively.

Definitely worth a look in effort to broaden our knowledge of these topics!

Economist Daily Chart: Present Arms

The world's biggest weapons suppliers (as revealed by the The Economist):

Three-quarters of global arms exports were supplied by just five countries between 2006 and 2010, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a think-tank. The volume of such exports rose by almost 25% compared with 2001-05. SIPRI counts the deliveries of large conventional weapons, each of which is assigned a value according to cost, strategic importance and other criteria. The two biggest importers of arms over the past five years, India and China, both bought over 80% of their weapons from Russia. The third- and fourth-biggest importers, South Korea and Pakistan, favoured American-made items.

Economist Daily Chart: Gruesome Paradox - Mexican Drug War

This interactive map of the Mexican Drug Wars from The Economist today in their Daily Chart series:


FORMALLY, power in Mexico is shared between 31 states and one federal district. Informally, it is also shared by eight large drug-trafficking organisations. These “cartels”, as the mobs are known (despite competing ruthlessly for market share, unlike real cartels), battle each other and the Mexican government for control of multi-billion dollar drug-trafficking routes to the United States. The cartels’ territory, and the routes over which they squabble, have been mapped by Stratfor, an American security analysis company.

The latest update shows how scrappy the battle for territory has become. Whereas a few years ago Mexico’s dope trade was carved up between five big outfits, those territorial distinctions have blurred. A push by the Mexican security forces has upset the pax narcotica that previously reigned, triggering a sickening rise in violence as gangs mark out territory with severed and skinned heads.

The past year has seen the continued rise of the Sinaloa cartel at the expense of mobs such as the Carrillo Fuentes Organisation (also known as the Juárez cartel). Government forces have dealt heavy blows to La Familia Michoacana, and forced the Beltrán Leyva cartel to split into rival factions, one of which was severely weakened by the subsequent arrest of its leader, Édgar Valdez Villareal. Yet the death toll has only risen: 2010’s body count was nearly a third higher than that of 2009.

The map’s most ominous feature is its southern edge. Mexico’s cartels are spreading out of Mexico, into Central America.

AS THE tally of murders linked to organised crime has risen over the past four years in Mexico, analysts have warned that insecurity is spreading to areas that were previously unaffected. The Mexican government insists that, on the contrary, the violence remains highly concentrated. Who is right? The answer, oddly, is both. In 2007, the first full year of the crackdown against the “cartels”, as the mafias are known, 70% of homicides linked to organised crime took place in just 4% of the country’s municipalities. In 2010, again, 70% of killings took place in only 3% of municipalities. If anything, the violence has become slightly more concentrated over time. But total annual killings have risen dramatically. The total for 2010 was more than five times that of 2007 (though there was an encouraging dip towards the end of the year). So although 97% of the country still sees only 30% of all the violence, that 30% represents a much larger number in gross terms than it did four years ago. The map above illustrates the paradox that violence in Mexico has spread extensively, while remaining highly concentrated.

Resources: Uppsala University Conflict Database

The Uppsala University Conflict Database—based in Uppsala, Sweden—works to compile information regarding numerous instances of armed conflict since 1975. As such, the database represents an important resource for students studying Conflict, War and Terrorism (Unit 4).

The Conflict Database can be found on the web, from which is has served as a source for numerous articles and discussions (including on Wikipedia):

http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/search.php

And for those of you equipped with iPhones, the Database is now available as a free app:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/uppsala-conflict-database/id380077089?mt=8

Get downloading!

Seed Magazine: On Peace

Seed magazine today in their Global Reset series has a thought-provoking article suggesting a way forward that might be adopted with great advantage globally to reduce conflict and promote peace:

HISTORY—NOT TO MENTION DIFFERING LANGUAGES, CULTURES, AND VALUES—CAN MAKE PEACE DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE. SCIENCE IS A COMMON GROUND UPON WHICH NATIONS CAN COLLABORATE TO IMPROVE OUR WORLD.

Whilst the article does not deny the scientific and technological advances promoted by war, author Daniel Zajfman is keen to remember scientific cooperation after WWII between Germany and Israel that subsequently helped to forge the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1965. If these two actors can forge a new relationship, he suggests, we all can—and cites several modern examples to back his case. Worth a read.

Information is Beautiful: War Games

Six months ago today, the Guardian newspaper published a series of data visualisations exploring military expenditure around the world—with some surprising results...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/01/information-is-beautiful-military-spending

An excerpt follows:

Check it out!

Mexico's drug wars: interactive map (Guardian)

The Guardian has published a useful resource—an interactive map—for those interested in the Mexican Drug War:

Soon after taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderón launched a military offensive against Mexico's drug cartels. Between then and the end of July 2010, 28,353 people were killed in fighting between state forces and the traffickers, and in turf battles between rival criminal groups.