Talk about scandal....

It has been obvious ever since then-FBI-director James Comey made his extraordinary announcement on July 6, 2016 that the FBI would recommend no charges for Hillary Clinton's violations of security with her emails that something fishy was going on. The announcement was extraordinary because the FBI only has the charter to investigate crimes; it is the prerogative of the attorney general, not the FBI, to decide whether to prosecute or not. It was also extraordinary because the Obama administration had  prosecuted and jailed a number of people over the previous few years for far less  serious violations of security, yet gave Hillary a pass.

Ever since then the scandal has been getting worse. Democrats of course are trying their best to dismiss and downplay the whole issue as a partisan red herring, while Republicans are hyping it at every opportunity.  But if one ignores the partisan spin on both sides and just looks at what has become public since then, it is pretty clear  that there were serious abuses, perhaps even criminal abuses, in the upper management of the FBI and the intelligence community. In fact it appears from a set of emails that the FBI recently released that even president Obama was at least tangentially involved, in that he communicated with Hillary's private email account under a pseudonym of his own, probably including classified materials, and interestingly enough he is shielding those emails from investigators under executive privilege. It certainly shows he was less than truthful when he claimed in March 2015 that the first he heard of Hillary's non-government emails was from the news.

But beyond the immediate scandal, which may in the end lead Democrats to wish they had never opened this can of worms with their Russian accusations against Trump (which so far have uncovered no supporting evidence), there is the very real issue of accountability in this new age of secret Foreign Intelligence Courts (we used to call them "star chambers") and widespread interception of telephone and internet communications, mostly without warrants.

It has been true throughout history, and there is no reason to believe it isn't still true, that giving unbridled power to individuals or bureaucracies with no accountability inevitably results in that power being abused. It is simply human nature. And it is even more likely in this hyper-partisan age, when "true believers" on one side or the other of the political divide think their abuses are justified because of the magnitude of the dangers they think they perceive. 

The current scandal is bad enough, however it is eventually resolved.   The larger lesson we Americans ought to be learning is that we need to become aware of how much we have allowed the government, under both Republicans and Democrats, to put in place policies and secret bureaucracies  that threaten our civil liberties with little or no real accountability, all under the pretext of making us "safer". As Benjamin Franklin wisely said "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"

There are times…..

There are times when this nation’s politicians act like they belong to some s***hole country, to use a recent phrase. This is one of those times. No wonder polls show Congress less popular that loan sharks or used car salesmen. And to make it worse, now that they have shut the government down they seem to be spending most of their energy today posturing for the press about who is to blame, rather than working the problem.  It’s perfectly obvious who is to blame: the entire Congress, including both parties!

Unfortunately the skills needed to get elected to Congress, and re-elected (and raise the money for the endless campaigns) apparently are not the same skills needed to govern effectively.

It’s disgusting. We badly need some adult supervisor in Washington, but apparently it isn’t going to come from either of the current political parties.

Recommended: This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein has written an interesting book entitled This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs Climate Change. After making the case again that human-driven climate change is a real threat, she goes on to show that the capitalist system as it is practiced in the Western world simply is not structured to effectively address the climate change problem.  It's not just the constant capitalist drive to grow and expand that impedes addressing the problem, it is even things like the trade agreements between nations which are a problem.

Her arguments and examples are interesting and convincing, but I do note that capitalism isn't the only problem. Authoritarian nations like Venezuela and China and Russia, which depend on oil and gas sales, are no better structured to address the problem than capitalism. I suspect the real problem is not the particular political system in place; the real problem is human nature. Humans will worry more about what to have for lunch tomorrow than about, say, the extinction of the human race in a decade or two.

Back to the nation’s dilemma

A few days ago I noted in a posting that America faced a dilemma – how to build and maintain a military adequate to protect our national interests and the interests of our allies around the world without bankrupting the nation. I suggested among other things that perhaps we needed to rethink our military force structure.

In that regard, consider the US navy’s love of nuclear submarines. We currently operate 66 submarines, all nuclear powered. This force is comprised of 18 Ohio class ballistic missile submarines, 3 Seawolf class attack submarines (we stopped building more when the Cold War ended), 34 older Los Angeles class attack submarines (which we are retiring; we have already retired another 26 of them), and 11 new Virginia class attack submarines (with 5 more under construction, to replace the older Los Angeles class as they are decommissioned). And the navy is already designing the Columbia class submarines as the replacement for the Ohio class ballistic missile submarines as are they are retired.

As I have noted in previous posts, it takes 3-4 ships in the inventory for each ship kept on station somewhere around the world. The other ships are in transit to or from station, in training or in maintenance. Submarines take a lot of maintenance, and sub crews require constant training and practice because a modern sub is exceedingly complex. So it takes all this inventory to keep about 6 missile subs and about 20 attack subs on station at all times.

Now US nuclear submarines are impressive. With their nuclear reactor power they can cruise around the world at high speed (for a submarine) and stay underwater for years at a time. In fact it is the stamina and the food supply for the crew that limits their deployment time. But they are wickedly expensive to build, crew and maintain. The Block III Virginia class submarines we are currently building cost about $2.7 billion each to build and about $21 million a year to run throughout their 30 year lifespan. And they are exceedingly quiet and hard to detect, which is the name of the game in submarine warfare.

BUT in 2005 a small Swedish Gotland class diesel-electric submarine with an air-independent propulsion system participated in war games with the US and repeatedly “sank” (virtually) the new $6.2 billion aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and a number of the supporting US attack submarines and destroyers without ever being detected by the armada of anti-submarines forces around the carrier. The US navy actually “rented“ this Swedish boat and crew for two years after that to use in war games to try to figure out how to defeat it, and though the navy obviously won’t talk about the results, word is that they never solved the problem. The problem is that even our quietest nuclear subs require pumps running constantly to cool the reactor, and those pumps produce some detectable noise. The Gotland class subs don’t require such pumps and are even quieter. In fact, most modern diesel-electric subs, even those without air-independent propulsion,  are exceedingly hard to detect.

AND the real kicker is that the Gotland class submarines cost Sweden about $100 million each to build, so we could buy/build about 27 of them for the price of one Virginia class US sub. Yes, it wouldn’t go as fast or as deep as a US nuclear sub, nor can it stay underwater nor be deployed as long. But fitted with vertical launch tubes, intercontinental missiles and/or sub-launched anti-ship cruise missiles each one would be almost as deadly, and there could be SO MANY of them.  

Fortunately Sweden is a NATO ally, so we don’t need to worry too much about their subs, but unfortunately China and Russia are also building subs like this, the Song class for China and the  Lada class for Russia, and many other nations around the world are following.  But not the US navy – we are apparently wedded to nuclear subs exclusively despite their enormous costs. That is the sort of institutional inertia – not only in the navy but in all the armed forces and in Pentagon thinking – that we need to overcome if we are to find an affordable way to maintain an adequate military.

A politically incorrect proposition

Tuesday mornings a group of us in the neighborhood, all retired professionals (epidemiologist, physician, physicist, systems engineer, etc.) get together over coffee for a couple of hours to discuss whatever interests us. Today the discussion got around to the state of American education, and in particular to how best to distribute scholarships (one of our members belongs to an organization that gives college scholarships to area high school students). Should we give priority to the very best students, irrespective of where they come from, or should they be distributed across the area to sort of even out the opportunities among local schools?

That led me to the following (politically incorrect) train of thought:

1. Proposition: in the end the single most important attribute of a culture or society or nation is this: does it have what is required to survive?  If it doesn’t survive, then in the long run it doesn’t matter if it is moral or artistic or smart or has any other desirable attributes. This is certainly true of the evolution of species in nature – those that are best fitted to their environment tend to survive; those that are less fitted to their current environment tend to be edged out by the better fitted. And it seems to me exactly the same is true of cultures and societies and nations.

2. Proposition: although almost everyone in the culture contributes something to the culture, the smartest and best educated among us contribute disproportionately more to the culture and its long-term survival than the rest.  America owes its current dominance in the world largely to brilliant scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and explorers. A Nebraska farmer or a New Jersey auto mechanic or a California nurse certainly contribute to the American society, but not nearly as much as the inventor of the transistor or the creators of the internet or the inventor of the cotton gin.

3. Proposition: given the two propositions above, it is more important for the long-term survival of American society to identify and give a good education to our best and brightest youngsters than to be sure no student is left behind. That isn’t to say it isn’t important to give every youngster the best education possible, just that it is more important – for the long term survival of the America nation – to be sure first and foremost that our best and brightest get a good education.

Now all three of these propositions are politically incorrect in our current PC culture, yet I would argue that they may well be valid anyway, and ought to be debated rationally outside of current ideological restraints. They would certainly change the direction of our current social and educational policies.

For example, we have a school system in our town that has a disproportionate number of very bright students. We are surrounded by poorer communities that have much poorer school systems whose students on average are usually several grade levels behind.  If we take students from these surrounding school systems into our schools, that certainly improves the education of those students, but at the expense of a poorer education for our brightest students (because teachers have to spend so much time and effort bringing the poorer students up to grade, while the brighter students are bored in class).  This is certainly socially laudable, but is it really in the best interests of our nation in the long run?

If we use a tracked system, where for example the best students take algebra and calculus while the less able students are shunted into lower level general math classes, this may produce a social stigma for some students. On the other hand, if we mix them all together the brightest students are bored at the pace and get a poorer education while the less able students are over their heads all the time. Is this really any better tfor the nation in the long term? Is it really any better for the students?

These are difficult questions, but they need to be debated, and debated rationally, with facts and evidence instead of unsupported and emotional ideological and social beliefs.

So here is the nation’s dilemma

We as a nation face a real dilemma. The budget for our military is about 3.5% of GDP ($582.7 trillion in the 2017 budget). It is constrained by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which was put in place to try to control the ballooning federal deficit now that the federal debt has passed $20 trillion. But even so constrained it is one of the largest items in the federal budget.  In fact it is about as large as the money required to run all the rest of the government except Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. It is also about the size of the new money we borrow each year and add to the federal deficit ($666 billion in 2017). Here is a chart of how the federal government spends its money, just to get some perspective on the military’s portion:

In part this high cost for the military is due to the costs of the decades-long Middle East wars (about $2.7 trillion thus far), but only in part. It is also big because we maintain troops and military hardware all around the world to help protect and strengthen allies, because we train our armed forces continually to keep them effective, which wears out equipment that needs to be repaired and replaced, because we try to give our armed forces the best equipment available, and because the US military procurement process is so abysmally poor that everything costs far more than it needs to.

Despite spending so much money on our military, we still haven’t given them enough to maintain what they have, let alone renew aging fleets of ships and planes. According to the Navy, 53% of Navy aircraft (about 1,700 combat aircraft) are not in flying condition. They are either waiting for parts or the Navy doesn’t have the money for the parts. Typically, if things were normal, about 25-30% of the planes would be in maintenance. 53% is an unusually high proportion, and means the Navy aviation force is pretty much a hollow force at the moment. And as of June 2017, 37% of the certifications for the crews of cruisers and destroyers based at the Seventh Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, had expired, meaning the training of those crews was not current because the Navy had to keep the ships on station longer and couldn’t stand them down for crew training and maintenance. The USS Boise, a submarine, has been sitting pier-side at Norfolk Naval Base for 53 months because it has lost its dive certification. By the end of 2018, if things don’t change, at least 5 more US submarines will no longer be certified either. And when ships do finally get into maintenance they often need so much work that they may spend years in dry dock.

At the end of the Cold War the Navy had just over 500 ships in service. Today we have about 275, and a substantial portion of those are currently unfit for combat operations. There is an often-repeated political goal of increasing this to about 350 ships to match, among other things, China’s current shipbuilding program of 350 combat ships by 2020, but thus far not enough money has been appropriated to meet that goal, nor in fact do we seem currently to have enough domestic shipyard capacity to meet the goal.

Meanwhile the air force is so short of qualified pilots that it is recalling up to 1000 retired pilots to fill the ranks. It has an estimated 2000 unfilled pilot slots just to fly the planes it already has, and needs to find another 4000 maintenance people to keep them flying. The Marine Corps has had to go to the aircraft “boneyard” (desert storage area in Arizona for retired aircraft) to resurrect 23 old F/A-18 Hornet fighters to fill in their aging aircraft fleet until they get the new F-35 fighters they have on order. The Marines estimate that 70% of their current fleet of strike aircraft are no longer airworthy.

So here is the dilemma: the cost of our military is a real burden on the federal budget, which is already running a hefty deficit, yet even so we are not spending enough to keep the military functional. Now the object of having a military in the first place (at least for a non-expansionist nation like ours) is to deter aggressors. But if we don’t spend enough to keep that military effective as a deterrent, than we have wasted what we have spent and might as well not have had a military in the first place. On the other hand, expensive as an effective military is, it’s a lot less expensive than fighting a war, and incomparably less expensive than losing that war.

So what could we do to address this problem? Clearly we need to find a way to do more with less, or as Churchill is reported once to have said “Now that we have run out of money we have to think.”

Perhaps the first thing we might do is reform the military procurement process, which is a byzantine process run by a byzantine bureaucracy (I’ve seen it up close and it isn’t pretty!). Changing the culture of a huge federal bureaucracy is one of the hardest things to do, but it needs to be done. The procurement system is why we have a new F-35 fighter that costs about $100 million per plane and a Zumwalt class destroyer that costs $1.8 billion per ship and an M16 rifle that costs $647 per copy. This is in part because defense contractors have a natural incentive to raise costs, but it is also due in part to design by committee in the armed forces, by poor management and oversight, and by the crazy stop-start-stop-start way Congress funds programs.

And related to that would be efforts to get politics out of the process, so that for example we can close expensive bases the military doesn’t need. The Pentagon would like to close down about 22% of its bases, but of course Congressional delegations fight any closing in their own districts. Similarly, powerful Senators insist on building weapons (in their districts) that the military doesn’t want (like the extra new $437 million Littoral Combat Ship the Senate just pushed into the 2017 budget). But lots of luck getting politics out of the process!

And then we might rethink the whole force structure. Build more of fewer types of systems, so as to get larger volume discounts. We used to build huge battleships to be able to carry the huge 16-inch guns needed. Now that we have very accurate cruise and guided missiles, wouldn’t we perhaps do better with a larger number of small, relatively inexpensive surface ships armed with these missiles rather than fewer large expensive (and vulnerable) cruisers and destroyers and frigates, or perhaps even a sizeable fleet of relatively inexpensive (but very quiet) diesel-electric submarines with vertical launch tubes? Not only would this expanded fleet of smaller ships likely cost less to build, run and maintain, but it would be far less vulnerable to swarming attacks, since it represents so many more targets, distributed over a vastly larger area.

Similarly with the air force, perhaps we ought to push toward more inexpensive (and expendable) unmanned vehicles rather than a few very, very expensive manned fighters. But of course this requires a major change in Navy and Air Force cultures, and that will be difficult.

Nevertheless, we have to find some better way of ensuring our national security without bankrupting the nation, and that will require thinking “out of the box”.

The Trump-bashing distraction

It’s hard to get much perspective on the current political scene. The anti-Trump half of the country, including much of the media, just can’t stop being perpetually and noisily and tiresomely outraged by him. And just as in the primaries and the election, he is stoking the fires deliberately and effectively with his Twitter comments, thereby dominating the news cycle and sucking all the oxygen out of his opposition. How long has it been since any Democrat or any liberal proposed a new policy that made the news? I can’t think of one case since the election. If there was a case, it was swamped in the news cycle by the constant clamor of liberal outrage.

Mostly liberals are just reacting with knee-jerk outrage to anything Trump proposes, even if it was something they themselves supported under Obama, like building a border wall (Obama already built 700 miles of it) or negotiating better relations with Russia (remember the Obama-Clinton Russian reset attempt?). I keep waiting for Democrats to catch on to how they are being played every day by him, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

For the media, of course, this continuous outrage drives great ratings, so it is great for business if not for the nation. CNBC and the New York Times are having a field day. And for reporters, reporting the next big anti-Trump scoop, whether true or not, is good for job security and perhaps for promotions and pay raises.

But what this distraction does seem to be doing is keeping Democrats from getting real about their perilous political situation, and doing some hard thinking about how to regain some political power. It’s bad enough that half the Democratic party is off chasing Bernie Sander’s economically unrealistic socialist policies. Now they think Opry Winfrey ought to run for president, just because she gave a good speech last week.  Why they think either of those strategies will recover the essential blue collar voter base that they so disdainfully ignored in the last election is beyond me.

Meanwhile there are really serious issues that threaten our national security and ought to be getting more discussion and more press – chief among these is the obvious dysfunction of our whole government and political process. Congress hasn’t passed a budget on time in the past 9 years, and we are running a half-trillion dollar deficit every year, and health care costs continue to rise so fast that even without Bernie Sander’s “free” health care proposal it will bankrupt the nation, and many citizens, in a few decades.

If Democrats would just stop noisily obsessing about Trump and put some serious thought to issues like these they might be able to cobble together a future for the party, which would be a good thing. But I don’t see any signs of it yet.

Meanwhile the nonstop outrage is getting pretty tiresome.

Recommended: A New Year’s Toast To The Old Breed

Victor David Hanson has a thoughtful piece worth reading: A New Year’s Toast To The Old Breed. He meditates on the difference between the generation that fought the Second World War, including his father, and the generations that followed - the Baby Boomers and now the Millennials. I too have been thinking a lot recently about the nature of our America society, pampered by an excess of consumer goods, driven by an entitlement mentality, focused on greed, and now engaged in such bitter political trench warfare. He is right - I recall in my own family the "can do" spirit of those in that generation, including my own father and mother. And I don't see it much in our society anymore. Its absence may well signal the coming end of the American era.

Is Trump really an idiot?

I see more liberal media Op Ed writers asserting that president Trump is an idiot (see, for example, Michelle Goldbergs’ piece today in the New York Times: Everyone in Trumpland Knows He Is An Idiot.) . They apparently haven’t thought this argument through very carefully. If Trump really is an idiot, then that implies that the Democratic candidate in the last presidential election (Hillary) and the whole Democratic platform on which she ran is so bad that even an idiot could beat them. And perhaps that is really true, because the reality is that Trump did win the election, despite all the attempts to claim otherwise.

Now clearly Trump has some unfortunate traits. He certainly wasn’t my choice for president, but then neither was Hillary. He is narcissistic, uninformed on many topics, misinformed on many other topics, vengeful, thin-skinned, sometimes crude and often economical with the truth – though in fact that could be said about many of his predecessors as well (and some of these adjectives would fit Hillary just as well). On the other hand he seems to be a pragmatist not locked into an unthinking ideology, either liberal or conservative, and he is certainly shaking up the so-called “Washington consensus” on foreign policy, which the events and missteps of the last three or four administrations suggest is badly needed.

My assessment is that eccentric as he is, he is a lot smarter, and a lot more aware of public sentiment, and a lot better at manipulating public sentiment, than many of his detractors in the media and politics. He is certainly (in my opinion) wrong on lots of issues, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t smart or effective at achieving his goals. He was elected by his base to be a bull in a china shop and shake up the incestuous and smug Washington politics, and he is certainly doing that. Liberals would be very unwise to underestimate his persuasive skills and his ability to sway voters. They already made that mistake once

Three principles

Liberals (largely secular)  and conservatives (largely religious) in America continue to talk right past each other, neither hearing the other, neither convincing the other and both demonizing the other. This is not a useful approach.  Let me suggest to both groups three principles:

Principle I: Each of us lives in our own private cultural framework or bubble, which shapes our world view, our biases, and our assumptions.

Our cultural bubble is shaped by our experiences, our circumstances, the culture and religion we grew up with, the family we grew up in, and the peers we surround ourselves with. A rich, single, white, young Silicon Valley entrepreneur simply has a different view of the world than an unemployed 50 year old black machinist from Detroit or a 35 year old married woman on an Iowa farm. In fact, your own children, your own parents and even your own spouse are more likely than not to live in a somewhat different cultural bubble than you do, with somewhat different assumptions, different biases, different political and social ideologies and different aspirations.

I call this a cultural “bubble” because it emphasizes the fact that none of us sees the world the way it really is. We all see the world, and interpret what we see, in a unique way filtered  through all of our own experiences and assumptions and biases and ideologies and religions and expectations, and to that extent what we see is distorted by these filters. And by the way, many, perhaps even most, of those biases and assumptions are buried in our subconscious, implanted in us, often non-verbally, when we were very young. We may feel confident in our beliefs because our peers, the people we hang around with and live among, all believe more or less the same things we do. But of course they do; we select our friends and peers for exactly that characteristic.

A good education would teach people all of this. Apparently American education isn’t that good, even for the expensively educated wealthy ruling elite who went to Ivy League colleges.

Principle II: However stupid, silly, backward, immoral or illiberal someone else’s views may seem to you from within your own cultural bubble, they make perfect sense, indeed may even be self-evident, within that person’s own cultural bubble.

How could it be otherwise? Why would anyone ever believe something that was at variance with all their own biases, assumption, and experiences?  If you accept this principle, than the more common, unproductive, and frankly blindly arrogant, approach of “that is a stupid thing to believe” becomes the much more productive question of “how does the world look to them such that that is a reasonable thing to believe?”

Principle III: If you want to change someone’s opinion on an issue, you have to address it from within their own cultural bubble, not from within your own cultural bubble.

There is an old saying: “You can always get to people through religion; their religion, not yours”. That applies here. Liberals lecturing (or more often, berating) conservatives from within a liberal view of the world is simply ineffective at changing anyone's views, and highly annoying. Conservatives condemning liberals from within their religious world views is similarly ineffective, and similarly rude.

The obvious corollary to this is that to be effective in changing the views of a group, you first have to work, and work hard, to understand how the world looks to them. You don't have to agree with or accept that world view (though getting a look at another world view might just possibly broaden your own), but you do have to thoroughly understand it. Only then will you know how to shape your arguments – in terms of their world views, their cultural framework, not yours – to be effective.

What is most notable in the current liberal-conservative battles is that neither side appears to have any interest in understanding the other, or perhaps even any capability of doing so. Both are locked into rigid, unthinking ideologies; both are so sure their view of the world is the only possible correct view that they are blind to the rather obvious fact that whatever they happen to believe, the vast majority of humans believe something different. A little humility here would go a long way. 

Recommended: Alone in the Universe

For decades now there have been attempts to detect signals from intelligent life from nearby stars, all so far to no avail. John Gribbin argues, in his new book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique, that while simple life may emerge on any planet that has a tolerable environment (not too hot, not too cold, with liquid water), complex multi-cellular life and certainly intelligent life is probably so rare that we may be the only example in our galaxy, despite the enormous number of stars and planets in our galaxy. He details the many things, and the many accidents of nature, that make our planet unique.

He also points out, with detailed discussion, exactly why intelligent life, and indeed all life on earth, is so tenuous. Not only do we live under the threat of major asteroid hits of the sort that have wiped out most species on earth several times before, but we are threatened by climate change not only from our own technological progress, but also from major super-volcanoes (like an exploding Yellowstone)  and major outpourings of lava such as formed the Siberian traps 250 million years ago.

This is a fascinating book to read, full of complex detail about how Earth was formed and why not many planets share our metals-rich surface, our shielding magnetic field, our relatively stable orbit, and dozens of other features that have provided enough protection and enough evolutionary pressures to drive the evolution of intelligent life.