OK, so Thomas P.M. Barnett is purring like a kitten at the discovery that his Blueprint for Action has been translated into Turkish. Barnett’s famed prescription, the so-called SysAdmin Force, seems to be vanishing under the far horizon. Check out this NYT report from western Afghanistan. It seems the Iranians are dramatically out-competing NATO &…
Read More Bandwidth! Low latency! Sexy!James Glanz of the NYT reports at great length on the electrical siege of Baghdad, with detail, network maps, and more. Great. Obviously, this being a blog, the primary meaning of this is an excuse to moan about the press. Why didn’t Glanz (or anyone else at the NYT) report on this back in 2004,…
Read More Electricity – let it wash all over me! Or notYet more stupid giant floating radar news. Not only can’t it keep the sea if the weather turns bad, not only is there no sea boat, and no security – but its support vessel won’t be able to go alongside it most of the time, according to the US Coast Guard. This really is one…
Read More I see a ship in the harbourAn interesting couple of mystery-jet stories – last week saw an aircraft using a Flying Dolphin/Dolphin Air callsign (ICAO: FDN), the company in Sharjah that took over the assets of Viktor Bout’s Santa Cruz Imperial and that continues to deal with Phoenix Aviation, pass through Dubai en route to Baghdad. Not that unusual, but interestingly…
Read More When you feel the heat you’ve got to move your fleetYou may recall the incident off Somalia where a cruise ship beat off pirates using a LRAD, a long-range audio device – essentially a weapon that produces a very loud noise in the direction of a target. Here is a civilian version, with a standard MIDI interface. Now we make beats with computer technology, indeed.
Read More ..with diesel power!You may recall that we’ve followed the career of the Iraqi Special Forces, née Ministry of the Interior Commandos, née 36th ICDC Battalion in some detail. This force is one of the few reasonably capable Iraqi units, made up of a mix of exiles and SCIRI Badr Corps men. Kazimi has a mildly hagiographic post…
Read More The Colonel of the 36thThat leaked Rumsfeld memo. What strikes me is that it’s incredibly poor in quality. Rumsfeld was clearly…well…labouring under delusions of adequacy when he wrote this. Consider the “options”. “Significantly increase the number of US trainers and transfer more equipment to Iraqi security forces,” “Reduce quickly the number of US bases, currently 55, to five by…
Read More Even More Iraq!The war comes to Iraq the Model. A modest proposal, if I may. Comments like this one are not “supporting Iraqi democracy”: Congratulations Mohammed. You and your neighbors have taken the first step toward democracy and living as free people. It appears you are coming to the realization that being “free” comes with taking the…
Read More Supporting Iraqi democracyThis is very bad news from Baghdad, via perfect.co.uk, but note some details. For a start, a neat primer on modern urban warfare: On Saturday, the Web site displayed a recipe for civil war. It recommended protecting Sunni neighborhoods by “spreading snipers on the roof of buildings,” planting roadside bombs at neighborhood entrances and distributing…
Read More 1239. 7018. 4766. Now start a warThe great Israeli historian Martin van Creveld argued, years ago, that the occupation must end because of the “power of the weak”, that eventually the degree of violence that would be needed to maintain it would destroy Israeli moral cohesion. It seems someone on the other side has read him. Within the last month we’ve…
Read More Van Creveld in Gaza