Thinking ahead

I would hope that our Washington political class is thinking several steps ahead about this Ukrainian crisis, though past performance in both parties doesn’t give me a lot of confidence. Here is what I see:

The Ukrainians have shown exceptional skill and resilience against the Russian invaders, and the Russians have shown unexpectedly poor performance thus far, but in the end, even if they don’t get much better at their logistics and operational planning, Russia’s sheer numbers will almost surely overwhelm the Ukrainians defenses eventually. And I would expect the civilian casualties to be huge, especially from the urban warfare as they take the major cities, which will further outrage the world.

It is always possible that a ceasefire will be negotiated, but given the terms Putin would probably insist on, I think it unlikely.

So once the Ukraine has been subdued, with perhaps the eastern half of the country occupied (I don’t think the Russians can manage to occupy the entire country), an unpopular pro-Moscow puppet government installed, and perhaps a brutal insurgency in progress, where do things go from there?

The harsh sanctions will have begun to take their toll, which probably means the Russians will have increasing difficulties maintaining their civilian and military infrastructure. If we are successful in confiscating most of the major oligarch’s wealth hidden in the west, we will have a group of very powerful people really pissed at Putin. And we will probably have an increasingly desperate and unpredictable Putin in charge, unless someone can arrange for him to have an unfortunate accident.  

So how does the West take advantage of that situation to hasten the removal of the current ruling regime in Russia?  And what is the follow-on plan, once that is done, so as to not repeat the same mistake we made with the fall of the Soviet Union? How do we draw a new Russian government into the Western world as a peaceful partner, rather than simply humiliate them and then ignore them as we did last time?

And if a paranoid and out-of-touch Putin does continue on and try to invade one of the NATO members next, how will we respond? Will we just defend on NATO territory, or will we go after the Russian military infrastructure as well. And will that initiate a nuclear strike from Putin? And should that fear deter us?  If it does, he has an immeasurable advantage, but in truth the Russians (but perhaps not Putin) would presumably be as loath to lose Moscow or St Petersburg as we would be to lose Washington or New York.

These are hard questions. I hope someone smart is thinking about them.

 

You’ve got to hand it to Putin

You’ve got to hand it to Putin. What a guy. He has managed, single-handed, in only four days, to achieve what decades of American and European administrations and spy agencies, working tirelessly, couldn’t achieve. He has united Europe, reinvigorated NATO, turned the whole world against his regime, convinced the Germans to get serious about defense and put real money into it, got the Finns and the Danes thinking about joining NATO, destroyed the Russian economy, and even gotten the Swiss to consider dropping their neutrality and taking sides!! Amazing!! And in only four days!! 😊

Of course, this is also his worst possible nightmare, and exactly the opposite of what he probably set out to achieve. This may be the most spectacular fail since Baghdad Bob announced on TV that there were no Americans in Baghdad while American tanks were visible behind him!

 

War is a psychological battle

 At its root, wars are psychological battles. They are not won by high body counts, whatever McNamara thought in Vietnam. They are not won by the destruction of tanks and ships and aircraft, whatever the Japanese High Command thought at Pearl Harbor. They are not even won by taking and holding territory, as we should have learned in Vietnam, and if not there then in Afghanistan. They are won when, and only when, one side convinces the other that further fighting is useless.

And the prevention of wars is a psychological battle as well. As the Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus said way back in the fifth century, “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” (“if you want peace, prepare for war”). Or as the Japanese say “jaku niku kyō shoku” (“the weak are meat the strong do eat”). Opponents generally don’t start wars they don’t think they can win. So a big part of maintaining the peace is convincing opponents they wouldn’t win a war. Mind games again!

Why is this relevant to the present moment? Because the Western world faces major opponents again – Russia and China. In a war the West (NATO in particular, meaning mostly the US) could certainly beat Russia, which is much reduced from the old Soviet Empire (despite Putin’s valiant attempts to convince us otherwise), but it would likely be a very, very bloody war, especially if it went nuclear.

It is not clear that we could beat China in a land battle on its home territory, should we be so stupid as to attempt that, but a war with China is most likely to be mostly a sea battle for control of the seas that give China access to its resources, and we probably could win that war, though perhaps with difficulty considering the lengths of the logistic supply lines we would have to maintain.

The incredible destruction and losses of World War II might well have been prevented had the Allies shown a little more resolve when Hitler made his first moves in Czechoslovakia in 1938, so that he didn’t think his next targets would be pushovers (which it turned out they were).

Far better, then, to win the mind games from the beginning than to have to fight the wars. So it really matters what the Western response is to Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. It matters that he comes out of this convinced that it would be unwise to attack a NATO member. It matters that Xi comes out of this convinced that it would be unwise to attack Taiwan. A bit of bluster right now from the West would be a good thing – something more convincing than moving a few hundred US troops to Estonia or confiscating an oligarch’s yacht!

Sanctions don’t work. So what is Plan B?

Economic sanctions have been the American politician’s tool of choice for the last half-century or so in trying to change the behavior of authoritarian regimes around the world. They make it look like something is being done. They don’t cost us much, they don’t involve much risk for us, and they don’t, in general, inconvenience the voters. The odd corporation or two may be temporarily shut out of a small market, but in general we can put sanctions on a recalcitrant regime elsewhere with minimal disturbance to our own way of life.

There is only one problem. They don’t seem to work!

We put sanctions on Castro’s Cuba way back in 1959, but Cuba is still ruled by the same Communist Party today. We put sanctions on North Korea to prevent them from developing a nuclear weapon, and how well did that work?  We have put sanctions on Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. But he is still in power. We sanctioned Iran to try to force them to stop nuclear development, but that certainly hasn’t worked. We sanctioned Putin when he took over the Crimea. But that seems to have made no difference. And we threatened severe sanctions on Putin if he invaded the Ukraine. Well, that certainly didn’t work, as the daily news confirms!

So clearly sanctions don’t work to deter other regimes, though they still may be useful in making things more difficult for them. But in fact it is hard to get everyone to agree to abide by sanctions. Like smuggling, sanction-evading becomes big business for some as long as there is a demand. North Korea’s Kim seems to manage to get everything he needs despite the sanctions. And there seems to be a substantial and fairly sophisticated system, including tankers that turn their transponders off, to help nations like Venezuela and Iran sell their oil in spite of the sanctions.

So what alternatives do we have?  We had better have some alternative to try, or we will be forever at the mercy of thugs around the world who are less risk-averse than we are. We might even have to take a bit of risk. We might even have to inconvenience the voters a bit.  Politicians might even have to do what is effective instead of what is popular. Imagine!!!

Clearly sanctions are not effective. That ought to be obvious by now. We had better find something else.

Should the US care what happens in the Ukraine?

The Ukraine is far away from the US. In fact, a 2014 survey of 2000 Americans found that only about one-sixth of those asked could locate the Ukraine on a world map. Probably the number is a bit higher today because of the intense media coverage over the past month or so. But still, why should Americans care what happens there?

Europe should care, because Russia is in their back yard, but why should we care, safely behind our two ocean barriers? It’s true that the war there will cause immense suffering and displace many people, but that certainly didn’t seem to bother us while we ourselves were creating chaos and mayhem in the Middle East over the past two decades, so why should it bother us in the Ukraine?  What pressing national interest of ours is involved here, if any? It’s a good question.

Let me suggest we don’t really care what happens in the Ukraine itself, that we have no pressing national interest in whether Russia takes them over or not. But we do have a very pressing national interest in what might or might not follow as a result of this war.

Putin is hell-bent on reasserting control over the buffer states that were lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Ukraine and Belarus were two important buffer states, and he has now taken over Belarus and is attempting to take over the Ukraine. But the next logical targets on his list are all NATO members – especially Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Putin might, for example decide next to capture the corridor between Poland and Lithuania that separates Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave from the rest of Russia. Why does that matter? Because under Article 5 of the NATO agreement, if Russia attacked any of these NATO members we would be OBLIGATED to help defend them – we would be at war with Russia.

We could, of course, refuse to honor our obligation, but that would surely permanently lose us all our allies around the world. And those alliances are what keep us safe in the end, and prosperous, so that would be a stupid thing to do.

Now Russia is not an existential threat to us. Russia, for all its massive size, has an economy about the size of Brazil, a disastrous demographic profile, and while Putin has modernized the Russian military, they are nowhere near the threat that the old Soviet Union was. NATO would win any war with Russia, but it would likely be long and bloody and painful and messy, and might in the end involve nuclear exchanges, and even the loss of major cities in the US. So we would very much want to avoid this.

So while we may not care what happens to the Ukraine, we certainly do care what happens to Putin and Russia as a consequence of this war. We really don’t want him to come out of this confident enough to move on to attacking NATO countries.  And by the way, we really don’t want Xi in China to decide we are so weak he can go ahead and invade Taiwan.

Again, we may not care that much about Taiwan (though if they were invaded, we can forget about lots of our clever little gadgets like iPhones and computers – Taiwan makes the chips that make them run).  But we do care whether China can dominate the Pacific Ocean, which is one of our protective barriers, and taking Taiwan would be a first step toward that.

So no, we may not care about the Ukraine directly, but we certainly do care about what might follow. We would very much like Putin to get a bloody nose from this adventure, so that he is not tempted to move on NATO members. And we really would like not to come out of this looking so weak and indecisive (whether we actually are or not) that allies and opponents both begin to question our resolve.

Military article recommendation

 For those interested in military affairs, I recommend an article yesterday from the Modern War Institute site entitled Poor History and Failed Paradigms: Flawed Naval Strategy and Learning the Wrong Lessons for a Century of Conflict.

George and Meredith Friedman, in their excellent 1996 book The Future of War, introduce the concept of "weapon senescence", the idea that as warfare evolves in a measures-countermeasures arms race, some weapons eventually become so hard to protect in the battlespace for their offensive power that they are no longer worth the investment.

Tanks fit this model. Tanks are essentially mobile armored short-range artillery. They were a wonderful weapon when first introduced. Now they can be taken out by a single soldier with a portable anti-tank weapon, or even a cheap drone, so they have added more and more armor and grown to enormous weight (the main US battle tank is over 60 tons) and enormous cost (over $6 million apiece), but still have more or less the same short-range artillery power. In an age with long-range rocket-boosted artillery (up to 300 kilometer range) guided precision shells (2-3 meter precision) and even more precise airplane or drone-delivered precision munitions that can do the same job at far less risk and cost, tanks are simply obsolete, though institutional inertia keeps nations, including the US, investing in them.

The same can probably be said in the navy for wildly-expensive ($20-30 billion, costing around $6 million PER DAY!! to operate) carrier battle groups. Carriers today carry more or less the same number of aircraft, with more or less the same ranges, as carriers in the past, but now require a whole battle group to protect them, and in an age of ship-killing hypersonic missiles and ever-quieter submarines even that may not be enough (we will only know when they are really attacked by a peer opponent).  But again, institutional inertia is still in play and the navy simply can't give up its love of big carriers, whatever the cost.

In fact, large expensive surface warships in general may soon be obsolete, now that they can't hide from satellite coverage and can be taken out from hundreds of miles away by precision missiles from much smaller, less expensive surface ships, from hidden submarines, or even from shore-based sites. Probably we ought to invest far more in submarines and in far more smaller and less expensive surface ships, so that we don't have all our eggs in a few vulnerable big ships.

It is a repeated story in history that winners are always slow to adapt to changes in warfare. After all, they won the last war with the equipment and strategies they used, so why change? Losers have an advantage - they have to face that whatever they tried last time didn't work, so they need to rethink things.

The Olympics

I didn’t watch the Olympics this time, except for a bit of the ice dancing after the Superbowl, which my wife wanted to watch. I find the controversies around the Olympics increasingly unpleasant, starting with the corruption involved in even awarding the Olympics to this or that city, including the enormous financial losses to the host cities, usually sluffed off to the local taxpayers, and the highly political media focus on which country wins the most medals. This has little to do anymore with sportsmanship, and everything to do with national politics and money.

But I thought the whole debacle surrounding little 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva was simply cruel. It is cruel for Russian coach Tatiana Tarasova to exploit young girls, with little regard for their health, just to win gold medals. It is cruel for the Russians to continue to violate the doping rules with their athletes, and most especially with children. At 15 years of age, Valieva was unlikely to have decided to take a proscribed drug on her own. In fact, I suspect she never even knew she was given it. And it was unfair to other athletes to let her continue to compete after a failed drug test – a real double-standard. I assume the real reason she was allowed to compete had to do with money and viewership – she was very popular – rather than ethics. But no 15-year-old ought to be put through such a painful situation. I even wonder, cynic that I am, if the Russians arranged for her to fall to fourth place in the final standings so that there would be a medal ceremony for their other skaters. I wouldn’t put it past them.

The Olympics have simply become another big-money media event, like reality TV, and I find it increasingly disgusting.

Interstellar 5 – Summary

There are lots of other technical problems to be solved for interstellar travel, but the four I have mentioned already make it clear why it may well be impossible. The immense distances involved require travel at a very high speed, a significant fraction of the speed of light. But accelerating to that high speed requires prodigious amounts of energy, whatever the propulsion method is. And at that high speed, collision even with tiny dust particles can be catastrophic, so we have to add a heavy shield to the front, which vastly increases the already-enormous amount of energy needed to get it up to speed. And finally, the whole complex mechanism has to work flawlessly for decades or even a century, in an very hostile environment, and without any outside maintenance.

And all this is just for an automated spacecraft. Adding a human cargo adds immense additional problems, because we humans are a pretty fragile species, so protecting us from the harsh radiation of interstellar space, feeding us, providing oxygen, keeping us warm in the immense cold of interstellar space, keeping us sane, etc, etc – for decades if not centuries – adds layers and layers of additional difficult problems.

So yes, we may well manage to put humans on the moon and Mars eventually, and perhaps even keep them there for extended periods of time.  But difficult as that will be, it is nothing compared to the difficulties of interstellar travel, despite some of the media hype.

But it is always possible that we have badly misunderstood the physics of the universe, and some new principle will let us travel faster than light, or go through “wormholes”, or “fold space" (as in the SF story Dune), or use some other as-yet unknown technique. But based on what we know now, humans are probably never going to get to the even the nearest star. But perhaps in 10,000 years someone will read this, on a planet orbiting another star, and wonder at how naïve we were in 2022.

 

 

Political dysfunction

Governing a nation as large and diverse as ours is a difficult proposition even for the most talented of politicians, and the current bitter political and cultural polarization has made it even more difficult. But I am amazed at how woefully incompetent both political parties seem to be these days. Both seem to be doing their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

On the Republican side, it is simply mind-boggling that the RNC (Republican National Committee) would censure Senators Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and withdraw any financial support for their re-election campaigns. Here the Republicans are trying to take back control of the Senate, yet are unwilling to support two of their most popular (with voters, not with Trump supporters) Senators.  Republicans are in a great position to take back control of Congress in the upcoming midterms, yet Trump and his supporters may well jinx the whole effort, just as they did with the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, which might well have been won by Republican David Perdue (who only lost 48.4 to 50.6%) and/or Kelly Loeffier (who only lost by 49 to 51%) if Trump and his supporters hadn’t so clumsily interfered.

Beyond that, Republicans seem to be content to just be against anything the Biden administration or the Democratic Congress proposes. It’s hard to know what they are really for, and I can’t see how they can appeal to voters if they don’t have something positive to offer.

On the Democratic side, setting aside the questionable performance thus far by the Biden administration, it is simply mind-boggling how far out of touch the elite ultra-left progressives and their wealthy donors have gotten with even their own Democratic voter base, let alone the independent voters they desperately need to retain power. With absolutely no margin in the Senate, why would they be so stupid as to viciously attack two of their own (Senators Manchin and Sinema), when they desperately need to hold on to every seat?

Leading Democratic pollsters and strategists have been telling the party for the last two years that they are pushing the wrong issues, but apparently to no effect. A recent Pew poll of registered voters found that the top voter concern was (as expected) the economy, with the pandemic and crime also ranked high. Yet liberals in power in Congress spent their time and political capital, unfruitfully, on climate change (11^th rank) and social justice (8^th rank).

So the Republican party seems to be in the grip of the Trump/QAnon nuts, while the Democratic party seems to be in the grip of far-left activists and wealthy donors with largely impractical Utopian ideas. And both parties have adopted a “my way or the highway” approach to even their own members.

Both George Friedman (The Storm Before the Calm) and Peter Zeihan (Disunited Nations) have predicted a decade or so of political disruption, They seem to have been accuate.

 

Interstellar 4 – Reliability

So now we have a little interstellar probe on its way to Alpha Centauri on about a century-long trip. We have a few mechanical things that have run for a century – clocks for example. We have no complex things that have ever run that long, even with continuous maintenance. We have some antique airplanes and steam trains and a few historic ships that are 100+ years old and still working, but they have been continuously maintained and even rebuilt over that period.

Engineers know that the reliability of a collection of linearly dependent parts (that is, all are in series and all have to work for the entire system to work) is the product of their individual reliability. Estimating the reliability of real-world devices is usually a bit more complex because of redundancies, but as a first approximation, just to understand the magnitude of the problem, let’s assume that we have only 100 components (transistors, resistors, capacitors, motors, solenoids, heaters, etc), all of which have to work for our probe to survive for a century and do its job when it gets to Alpha Centauri

Assume that each component has a 99.9999% chance of working perfectly for a century in the hostile cold and radiation-flooded environment of interstellar space. That is one chance in a million of failing over the whole century. That would be unbelievable reliability in today’s world, but let’s assume it anyway. Then the chances the whole assembly of 100 components will work for the whole century is 99.9999¹⁰⁰, or 9.999, just under 10%. That is, despite how few critical parts there are and how incredibly reliable they each are, the odds the whole thing will still work when it gets to Alpha Centauri are about 1 in 10.

Realistically a probe would probably have far more critical components, and the reliability of each would probably be significantly less, but even under our wildly optimistic assumption, the odds of success are pretty low.

So we have a long way to go before we could probably build a probe that would work reliably, without human maintenance, for a century in the hostile environment of interstellar space. That is our fourth problem.

 

Absurdities

There was a story yesterday about how Rotterdam may have to disassemble a historic bridge to let Jeff Bezos’ new half-billion dollar yacht through from the shipbuilders to the sea. It strikes me as absurd that anyone needs a half-billion dollar yacht. A half billion dollars would go a long way to help solve any number of the world’s pressing problems.

But it got me to thinking about the absurdities of the world’s elites. Like buying $50+ million dollar apartments in the ugly and absurdly-designed pencil-thin high rises in Manhattan’s “billionaires row”. (The penthouse on the 96^th floor of 432 Park Avenue was just listed at $169 million)

Like paying $25 million for an 11-minute ride to space in a Blue Origin rocket (in theory there is no significant environmental impact since it burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen – as long as one ignores how the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was generated in the first place).

Like United Airlines’ recent investment in a new supersonic jetliner to be developed by Boom Technology. Whether it finally comes to fruition or not, is it really environmentally sound to use vast amounts of jet fuel to ship a few of the extremely wealthy across the world in a slightly shorter time?

Like Ford’s new F-150 Lightning Platinum electric pickup truck ($90,874, with only a 280-mile range!) for the rich person who needs everything and wants to pretend they are environmentally conscious. Though to be fair, the rich have been buying wildly expensive cars (like the Ferrari LaFerrari at $1,420,000, or the Bentley Mulliner Bacalar at $1,900,000) for decades.

It does seem to me we have re-entered the age of robber barons.