Iran and the bomb

Let's start with an excerpt from The Economist, on a possible air attack on the Iranian nuclear program:

Attacking Iran: Up in the air

But even if things went off without a hitch Iran would retain the capacity to repair and reconstitute its programme. Unless Israel was prepared to target the programme’s technical leadership in civilian research centres and universities the substantial nuclear know-how that Iran has gained over the past decades would remain largely intact. So would its network of hardware suppliers. Furthermore, if Iran is not already planning to leave the NPT such an attack would give it ample excuse to do so, taking its entire programme underground and focusing it on making bombs as soon as possible, rather than building up a threshold capability. Even a successful Israeli strike might thus delay Iran’s progress by only three or four years, while strengthening its resolve.

In other words, an air attack simply will not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

From the print edition:

Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders.

In my opinion also, the best possible thing that can happen to a paranoid xenophobic regime like Iran or North Korea is a limited attack on it. Think about it: the government chiefly legitimizes itself by creating a worldview where their state is under constant attack from a hostile surrounding world. It's totalitarianism 101. An attack on Iran would basically tell the population that the bearded crazies ranting about how the Great Satan America is going to attack them any minute now were right all along. In an article I link to later, Iran's opposition "Green movement" is quoted as saying that a US/Israeli attack is the worst possible thing that could happen to reform in Iran. There can be little doubt that they're right.

As an article in the Washington Monthly strongly argues, the whole notion of a nuclear-armed Iran as a horrible disaster for the whole world doesn't seem to be grounded in any actual strategic scenarios. On the contrary, Iran only seems to want a nuclear capability to deter the US and Israel. Not that any clear case for the air strikes is being made, either; the USAF chief of staff recently wondered what the objective of an air campaign might be, in fairly skeptical terms.

It should be remembered that Iran constantly faces an aggressive near neighbor with a considerable nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal and a propensity to invade nearby countries: Israel. Iran is also one of the rare nations that has had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the not-so-distant past; the conventional carnage of the Iran-Iraq war was horrifying enough, but Iraqi atrocities like the Halabja attack added an element of pure horror to the war. Iranian leaders are unlikely to have forgotten that the Iraqi chemical arsenal was provided by the very countries that are now so stridently opposed to Iran's nuclear program, or that the US helped silence reports of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians.

Iran can also hardly be expected to forget that those same Western powers have for decades tacitly accepted Israel's nuclear arsenal, even keeping quiet when Israel actively participated in the apartheid-era South African nuclear program. From Iran's point of view, the West's position seems to be that while Western allies are allowed to use weapons of mass destruction against Iran, and countries like Israel and apartheid South Africa can develop a nuclear capacity, Iran can't. It's a policy that's hard to justify to its victims.

An attack on Iran would be militarily risky, wouldn't stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and would seem to have no positive consequences whatsoever for the security and stability of the Middle East. And that's exactly why Israel is so likely to carry it out.

The basic strategy of Israel since its founding has been the strategy of the "iron wall", best described by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book of the same name. In short, throughout its existence Israel has deliberately maintained a high state of tension with its neighbors. Most of the time, little active effort has been required, but when it has, Israel has resorted to terrorism and provocations, and as a last resort, invaded its neighbors. This strategy of tension serves to keep Israeli domestic policies in line; with the constant threat of an external enemy, criticism of the powers that be can be stamped out as treason, and any external criticism dismissed as anti-Semitism. Israel's entire foreign policy rests on its image as a peace-loving victim of its innately evil neighbors; without that image the world would be too free to take a long, hard look at the way the Palestinians are being treated, and at other disagreeable aspects of Israel. The only lasting peace Israel can conceive of is one that it dictates.

This policy was last prominently seen in action in the criminal Israeli raid on the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. From a strategic point of view, the way Israel handled the situation was a disaster: nothing in the relief mission to Gaza was of sufficient importance to justify such a brutal attack, let alone the international outcry that followed - unless creating that outcry was one of the strategic aims of the operation: to once again "prove" to the Israeli people and their government's supporters abroad how the world is in league against poor, misunderstood Israel. The same motive has informed Israel's "settlement" program, which is deliberately designed to, among other things, sabotage the Palestinian peace process. It last accomplished this function when it was used to destroy the high-profile peace negotiations started by an astonishingly naive Obama administration.

An escalation of tension in the Middle East would be in Israel's interests as part of its continuing strategy of tension with the Muslim world. For that reason, they may very well present the US with a fait accompli in the form of an unilateral strike on Iran before the next presidential election. Because the topic of Israel simply cannot be addressed rationally in US politics, it would be electoral suicide for the Obama administration to not support an Israeli attack, no matter how counter-productive it would be from the point of view of US strategy. As long as US politicians continue to pretend that the United States and Israel have the same strategic goals, US Middle Eastern policy will be at the mercy of Israel's military adventurism. When this combines with the fact that US public discourse on Iran is completely detached from reality, Israel's design stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the long run, an Iranian nuclear capacity would probably stabilize the Middle East by making Iran more secure from intervention. The same thing happened with both the Soviet Union and China, even though hawks in the West prophesied disaster at the time. In its political history so far, the Islamic Republic of Iran had shown itself to be a largely rational state actor. So far, nuclear weapons in Muslim hands haven't led to a global or even local apocalypse. Treating Iran as a collection of genocidal lunatics to be cowed by a surgical use of American military power is repeating the same hubris that led to decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with potentially far worse results. In fact, the one thing that could be relied on to push Iran's leaders toward unreasoning radicalism would be a brutal US-Israeli attack. And that may well be exactly what Israel's political leadership wants.

If the aim is stability and consequently security in the Middle East, it seems to this blogger that the best way to achieve it in the current situation would be through mutual deterrence, as pioneered and perfected between the superpowers in the Cold War. Erect the paraphernalia of Mutually Assured Destruction anew in the Middle East: mutual and third-party verification of weapons, arms control treaties, a telephone hot line, the lot. There should still be plenty of Cold War know-how around. Such an arrangement would represent an equitable solution that addresses both parties' need for security and the rest of the world's interest in a peaceful oil-producing region. Included in the negotiations would be Iran's support for terrorist groups like the Hezbollah, and Israel's assassination campaign against the Italian nuclear program.

In the real world, this will never happen, because the West seems to be unable to exert the kind of diplomatic pressure on Israel that would bring it to the negotiation table and actually agree to a solution. Even acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons seems to be an insuperable obstacle, let alone bringing them up for negotiations.

Another option would be for the United States to extend some kind of security guarantee to Iran; essentially a "non-invasion" promise similar to the one made to the Soviets on Cuba. This, too, seems impossible. President Kennedy could do it, President McCain might have; President Obama simply can't. Even if he somehow found the foreign policy willingness and ability that his administration has so conspicuously lacked, letting the right go berserk over "appearing islamofascism" could decide the election.

Once again, the most likely outcome is that stability in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever; not because of any inherent characteristics of the region and its inhabitants, but as a consequence of the West's continuing insistence on treating Israel's interests as identical to theirs. As long as this dangerous illusion persists, the West's policy will remain essentially counter-productive to any lasting peace in the region.

It's almost inconceivable that the US, still embroiled in two wars (despite Obama's cold war-esque "withdrawals"), is contemplating intervention in Iran and even Syria to boot. Unless cooler heads prevail, the ongoing Middle Eastern entanglement (1990-?) and concurrent "war on drugs/terror/civil liberties" will become a national trauma to dwarf Vietnam, with far worse consequences for the stability of the whole world.

A new Falklands conflict?

Next month will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. I don't know if they've got an election coming up or something, but they'be been making noise about the islands again.

The Falklands war is still something of a sore point for Britain's political left, what with Margaret Thatcher being Antichrist to them. I've actually sat a British and Irish studies exam on a book that determinedly referred to the "Malvinas conflict". Unsurprisingly, the foreword went to some lengths - for an academic work - to abuse the then-Prime Minister.

To me, hearing leftists talk about the "Malvinas" is bizarre. Surely, apart from any hopefully mythical modern-day Stalinists, the left believes in democracy and self-determination? The population of the Falklands is British and has repeatedly made it clear that they wish to remain British. It's the Argentine claim that the islands are somehow theirs that represents pure imperialism. What makes the left-wing defense of the Argentines even more bizarre is that at the time of the war, Argentina was fighting the so-called "dirty war" against left-wingers and trade unions, with the same military that invaded the Falklands. One can only assume that the British left let their hatred of Mrs. Thatcher distort the picture.

If you wanted to be neutral, I suppose you could call them the Sebald islands after their probable Dutch discoverer, but I don't see any need to, as the Argentinians are, in my opinion, clearly in the wrong. In this case, it's the former colony that is the imperialist. It was on precisely these grounds that the United Nations found Argentina to be guilty of unjustified aggression back in 1982.

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Unfortunately, as much as Britain may have the moral advantage, they are at a decided military disadvantage when it comes to the defense of the islands. Should Argentina decide to invade again, the British would find it much more difficult to retake the Falklands in 2012 than they did in 1982.

By itself, the Argentine air force is hardly a threat. Their newest aircraft is the A-4AR Fightinghawk, an A-4 Skyhawk modernized with F-16 avionics. It's still a Skyhawk, the first examples of which entered service in 1956. Alongside them the Argentines essentially deploy the same aircraft, minus combat losses, that they fought the Falklands War with: Mirage III:s and V:s, and the Israeli upgraded versions of the latter. They also still fly the indigenous Pucará counter-insurgency aircraft, some of which are run on biofuel so they can fight a green counterinsurgency. In other words, Argentina currently maintains more or less the same air force that the British resoundingly defeated in 1982.

After the 1982 war, a major investment was made in improving the defenses of the Falklands. Mostly, this took the form of RAF Mount Pleasant, a brand-new airbase featuring what Wikipedia calls the world's longest corridor. Opened in 1985, RAF Mount Pleasant is home to No. 1435 Flight, which operates four Eurofighter Typhoons. Ground defense is provided by an infantry company from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. Given its current obsolescent/obsolete state, the four Typhoons at Mount Pleasant and the Royal Navy ships in the area can probably see off the whole Argentine air force. But it's not quite that simple.

In my mind, the best analogy for the Mount Pleasant airbase is Singapore in 1941. The naval base at Singapore had been constructed to house the battlefleet Britain would send to the Pacific theatre. From there, it would have exerted a powerful deterrent - Mahan's "fleet in being" - on the Japanese. The Japanese pre-empted this plan by taking the inadequately defended base before the fleet could be deployed. The outnumbered defending EN forces were destroyed by asymmetric attack: aircraft against a battleship and cruiser. Having lost Singapore, the Royal Navy had to operate from bases in the Indian Ocean, and was unable to retake Singapore. The Navy had been ordered to defend Singapore, but denied the resources it needed.

Similarly, RAF Mount Pleasant could easily house enough air power to deter any Argentine invasion. But what if the Argentines pre-empt this plan? The present complement of four Typhoons may be more than enough to deal with anything the Argentine air force can send their way - in the air. However, a force of only four aircraft is appallingly vulnerable to asymmetric attack on the ground. Should those aircraft be disabled by sabotage or other means and the airbase be taken, how will Britain get it back? Without carrier-borne aviation, which Britain no longer has, any attempt to retake the islands would be in the face of Argentine air superiority. Even their obsolete aircraft could make life very uncomfortable for a naval task force, let alone an amphibious landing, depending on fighter cover from Ascension Island. After the inexplicable decision to retire both the Sea Harrier and Harrier from service, the Fleet Air Arm now operates no fixed-wing combat aircraft, and although the UK still has a single carrier (HMS Illustrious) in service, there are no carrier-capable combat aircraft in her inventory that could fly off her.

So while Britain found it difficult to put together a carrier task force to retake the islands in 1982, the same feat would be impossible in 2012, because the carrier task force simply cannot be assembled. The aircraft don't exist, with even the remaining Harrier GR9 airframes having been sold to the Americans. If the Argentines take the islands with a coup de main, the United Kingdom can't get them back on her own. Having dismantled her power projection capabilities, she would have to rely entirely on her allies for carrier-based air cover. This is a dismal prospect: the Americans are allied with Argentina, and are hardly likely to be interested in a shooting war in Latin America. The Spanish have a carrier, but the prospect of Spain going to war against Argentina over a British colony seems incongruous at best.

If Argentina invaded, British air superiority over the islands could only be realistically re-established by a French or Italian carrier group. That is the state of British sea power in 2012.

The first of the next generation of British aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth class, is due to enter service in 2016. Until then, the Falklands are Argentina's for the taking, because British politicians did what no enemy ever could: destroyed the Fleet Air Arm.

Finland is destroying her national defense

Last week, the Finnish parliament announced sweeping cuts to the armed forces. Over the next two years, five bases will be closed and several units combined. Savings of up to 10% of the current defense budget are sought.

In and of itself, closing some bases doesn't materially affect Finland's national defense. The problem is that these closures are part of a longer trend of gutting the armed forces to save money. Finland is not a member of NATO, and is committed to maintaining an independent national defense. However, back in 2009, the chief of staff of the Finnish Army publicly stated that Finland is no longer capable of defending her territory. Since then, more cuts have followed.

The Finnish Army maintains practically no standing forces, instead relying on conscription to create a large reserve army. This wartime army, however, has been slashed to a third of its size over the last decade, and the current round of cuts will have a heavy impact on reservists' refresher training. Funding for materiel is basically non-existent, leading to the effective disbanding of Finland's mechanized forces, with the remaining tanks and IFVs divided between three "readiness brigades" mostly lacking tracked mobility.

It was of course inevitable that the end of the cold war brought pressure to re-examine Finland's security and defense policy. In fact, no reorienting has happened; Finland has chosen to maintain the facade of her cold war armed forces while in fact cutting their funding to the point where they are little more than a paper army. The process is dictated by party-political expediency: a comprehensive defense review would be politically risky, especially since the political left has successfully demonized NATO, and conscription had been enshrined as a sacred guarantor of the nation's security and manhood. Estimates of the actual costs of conscription to the national economy are simply ignored, and although some 30,000 conscripts are trained annually, neither the refresher training nor the equipment exists to create a capable wartime army from this vast reserve.

In short, Finland continues to operate a massively wasteful system of conscription which fails to produce a viable national defense. There is no political pressure or desire to address these issues; instead, defense policy is mined for populist talking points while the "big picture" is studiously ignored. Over the last few years, the Ottawa land mine ban treaty was acrimoniously debated, which in the current situation is like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic. Similarly, when the current base closures were debated, several politicians made a great point of the fact that Finland's only Swedish-language unit, a marine brigade, was not disbanded. The marine brigade in question has a vital role in Finland's wartime planning, which is cheerfully ignored by politicians trying to turn the debate into a language-political one.

The net result is that Finland is currently unable to defend her territory or airspace, and unwilling to take any steps to change this state of affairs or even admit that it exists. Instead, most Finns either profess a blind faith in a non-existent national defense or deny the possibility of war altogether. Finland is currently defenseless in the face of potential military pressure from Vladimir Putin's Russia, and should Europe be re-divided into opposing power blocs, Finland will be re-Finlandized and return to the state of quasi-independence under Russian domination she was in during the cold war.

In destroying her national defense and refusing any international security arrangements, Finland is gambling heavily on peace in our time. At stake is her independence as a nation and the lives of her citizens. Despite paying a heavy economic price for maintaining an obsolete and ineffective system of conscription, she is more vulnerable today than at any other time in her history, and is constantly becoming more vulnerable. This gamble is not a policy consciously decided on, but an emergent property of her dysfunctional nationalism and political culture. Defense policy is subordinated to cheap populist point-scoring and the myth of inherent Finnish military prowess, which prevent any reasonable public debate.

Our current national defense consists of hoping no-one will attack us. If they do, we can't defend ourselves.

How many nuclear bombs would it take to destroy the Earth?

Let's start with pinup model Sabina Kelley.

The Helsinki International Film Festival was showing a movie about Grant Morrison, and the Finnish-language blurb mentions that Morrison "grew up in Scotland, near an army base holding enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world 50 times over".

I haven't seen the movie, and from the blurb I can't tell what "army base" they're talking about. Given that (as near as I can tell) neither V-bombers, British ballistic nuclear missiles nor US SAC aircraft were based in Scotland at the time, The most reasonable guess would be Faslane, home to the Royal Navy's nuclear submarines.

In the late '60s, Faslane became home to the Royal Navy's four Resolution class ballistic missile submarines. They each carried 16 Polaris A3 missiles, each carrying three 200kt independently-targeted warheads. So, 48 warheads at 200 kilotons each makes 9.6 megatons per submarine, and 38.4 megatons of total destructive power.

In other words, the total nuclear destructive power housed in a single Resolute clas ssubmarine was less than the 50-megaton yield of the Tsar Bomba, or less than two SS-18 Mod 2 warheads. The four submarines combined carried 192 200kt warheads; hardly enough to destroy the entire world even once. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were even enough to destroy the entire surface of Scotland.

Scotland has a total land area of 78,772 km2; according to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would take approximately 250 one-megaton nuclear warheads to destroy it. So late 60's Faslane didn't even hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy Scotland completely, let alone the world.

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The notion that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over gets thrown around constantly, even at fairly high levels of government; last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the US and Russia that "We have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over".

Do they?

There's a beautiful series of infographics over at Information is Beautiful titled How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Kinda), that nicely illustrate the answer. In a word, no. The total explosive yield of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't nearly enough to destroy the whole inhabited surface of the world, let alone the world, let alone several times over.

This isn't to say that a global nuclear war wouldn't have unimaginably disastrous consequences. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at the height of the Cold War would have been an unparalleled planetary disaster, resulting not only in the direct deaths of millions, but in widespread radioactive fallout and, in all probability, a nuclear winter.

In my mind, the recent studies that suggest even a small-scale nuclear exchange could cause a global environmental catastrophe are suspect. The Second World War saw massive bombing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands and incinerated huge swaths of urban areas, but caused no notable climate effects. A similar instance was the predicted disastrous consequences of the oil well fires in Kuwait following the first Gulf War, which also seemed to ignore the experience of the Second World War. I'm not at all convinced that a small-scale nuclear exchange would have decisively more catastrophic effects. It would still, at the very least, be a horrible disaster for the populations involved.

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To understand why nuclear weapons can't actually destroy the world, it's absolutely vital to understand several things about them. In my experience, it's these misunderstandings that usually lead to a hugely inflated notion of their destructive capabilities.

Firstly, nuclear weapons effects do not increase geometrically with yield. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13-18 kt. It destroyed buildings in a 1.6 kilometer radius. From this, it's often erroneously assumed that a 100kt weapon would have 5-10 times that effect, and a 1Mt weapon would have 50-100 times the area of effect. This is far from true; a 1Mt weapon would cause severe fire damage out to a radius of approximately 10km, and complete destruction of urban areas to a radius of 2.4km. That's a big bang, but far from 50-100 times the actual destruction caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

After the several megaton range, effects decrease even more sharply relative to the yield. The 50Mt Tsar Bomba caused total destruction out to a 35km radius, not the 500km that a simple calculation from one-megaton explosions would suggest.

This, by the way, is why it annoys me when nuclear bomb yields are described in "Hiroshimas", as in a bomb having so-and-so many times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It gives a totally misleading picture of the effects of the bomb in question.

Secondly, for nuclear weapons to destroy the world, they'd have to be targeted at the whole world. In other words, to get the most destructive area out of our nuclear weapons, we'd have to target them in order to maximize the damaged area. But in a real nuclear war, the targeting priorities would be completely different. It's assumed that some missiles won't make it, so all important targets will be targeted by several missiles. If all the warheads make it, overkill will result, meaning that some of the warheads won't even detonate at all. So for starters, a whole bunch of destructive power will be lost to a variety of causes like mechanical malfunctions and overkill.

This targeting also means that the nuclear weapon effects will be concentrated in a fairly small list of targets. In a Soviet-US nuclear exchange, missile bases, airbases and other military facilities, as well as cities, would have received far more than their "share" of nuclear destruction. So calculating the total area of the world our nuclear weapons could potentially damage is a totally theoretical number, since there is no plausible scenario in which nuclear weapons would be used for maximum area effect. That would require targeting a nation's nuclear arsenal all over the world, which, even in the context of full-scale nuclear war, would be completely insane. Nuclear warfighting plans have detailed, thought-out strategies for using nuclear weapons; they don't just say "press button - destroy world".

Even if we tried, we couldn't even destroy the total inhabited surface area of the world; and we're not even trying.

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The idea that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over is totally false. We don't. It's remotely possible that if we put our minds to it, i.e. combined the total nuclear arsenals of the world and made a concerted effort to use them to destroy human life, we might be able to kill everyone. Then again, if we persuaded everyone to walk off a cliff, that would do it as well.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous and frightening in their own right; there's no need to concoct these ridiculous "enough nukes to destroy the world 50 times over" myths to prove it.

Brief book review: Joe Haldeman's The Forever War

I've been catching up on some cyberpunk classics this fall, but I also finally got my hands on Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

The Forever War is one of the classic works of military science fiction, but with the distinction that the author served in Vietnam as a combat engineer. It's that experience that lends strong verisimilitude to much of the story, especially to anyone who's ever been involved with a real-life military organization. Also thankfully absent is the macho chest-pounding that is so disgustingly prevalent in the genre, especially in its more ludicrous offerings.

There's an afterword by Peter F. Hamilton, where he says:

Unlike a lot of books written in the early seventies, he's managed to create a functioning universe and human society which has barely dated. Yes, the actual dates are wrong. We didn't have interstellar ships in the mid-nineties (shame!). But anyone picking this up fresh today would be hard pressed to know that it was written long before the internet, mobile phones and iPods were in existence.

I liked the book, but we have to call bullshit on this one. Parts of the novel haven't aged that well, such as the emphasis on sex and sexuality, and there is an expansive section set on Earth that serves its dramatic purpose excellently, but falls apart under critical scrutiny. While it does an excellent job of conveying the alienation soldiers feel on returning to civilian life, the details of the dystopic world Haldeman depicts just don't hold water. Also, exactly contrary to what Hamilton says, it's painfully obvious at times that Forever War was written before the information revolution.

While it's often depicted as a Vietnam war analogy, which it in some sense is, The Forever War is first and foremost a great novel. I was steeling myself for the possibility that it would be Space Vietnam, with Space Cav troopers flying into a space jungle in space helicopters, but the Forever War is proper science fiction, not just an analogy in space. It should be required reading for anyone interested in science fiction.

The future of manned aircraft

This past summer, the Economist decried the expense of the F-35, and chided the American military for spending too much money on what would be "the last manned fighter". I'm willing to stick my neck out on this and say that they're wrong. There will still be at least one generation of manned fighters.

The Economist is wrong because they underestimate two important factors, of which the most important is sheer bureaucratic inertia. In practically all western air forces, the career path of high-ranking officers is that of a fighter pilot. Decades of propaganda and bureaucratic infighting have established the fighter pilot as one of the celebrated heroes of the modern military, and the core identity of the air force. That won't be given up easily. The move to unmanned aircraft would mean that bold, gutsy and manly fighter pilots will be replaced by guys with Playstation controllers, and even if the latter are more effective in combat, they're just not cricket. In Top Gun 2020, the young fighter jocks won't barge their way into a bar, drink like mad and wow the girls with their rendition of Great Balls of Fire on the piano; they'll sit in the corner, order some apple juice and turn up the J-Pop.

Bureaucratic inertia is made even worse by the fact that air forces the world over are still, to some extent, young services fighting to establish themselves. Go back 50 years and witness the intense fighting on both sides of the Atlantic: in the States, over whether the army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft or not, and in the UK over who controls naval aviation. That may seem like a long time ago, but in both countries, there is a level at which air forces still perceive themselves as younger and less secure services than the other two. Unmanned aircraft question the very existence of a separate air force: if, after all, you're just going to fly drones, then the army already has people doing just that. Why would they need a special service of their own? The navy could easily ditch naval aviation in favor of NCOs flying drones off their ships. It's not just the pilots that will go, after all, but nearly all of the support staff and facilities will be rendered irrelevant. The massive fixed airbases that were such a huge liability in the cold war will finally meet their end.

It's a well-established fact of defense policy that the armed services will, in the pursuit of administrative goals and inter-service rivalries, make inefficient decisions. What makes this even worse is the lack of a real military-technological rivalry to drive development forward. Unlike in the cold war, the US doesn't have a real technological challenger. The Russians can still produce very good aircraft, but nothing with which to really challenge the F-22 and F-35 in terms of pure technology. In its current decrepit state, Russia is still years away from being able to mount any kind of challenge to US air superiority, and China is much further away.

Remember that in the cold war, Western fighter development was basically driven by intelligence panics. A new Soviet prototype would show up on the runway at Ramenskoye and be spotted by a US reconnaisance satellite; then the intelligence guys would try to figure out what characteristics it had. Because of the difficulty of getting solid intelligence out of the Soviet Union, this was mostly guesswork, and regularly led to incredible overestimates of Soviet capabilities. The actual characteristics of a plane like the Su-24 Fencer had almost nothing to do with the intelligence projections, but because all they had to go on were the more-or-less informed guesses of their intelligence, Western aircraft were produced to face a much more powerful threat than the real one. For instance, the F-15 Eagle, which some people consider the greatest air superiority fighter of the 20th century, was essentially created to meet and defeat what the West imagined the MiG-25 Foxbat to be. The MiG-25 was seen at a runway somewhere, and the intel guys panicked. "It's got swing wings and two engines OH MY GOD IT CAN DO MACH FOUR AND HAS MISSILES THE SIZE OF MY HOUSE!" The actual aircraft was, well, different, but the threat of the imagined MiG-25 drove the US to create the F-15. There's nothing like the Ramenskoye panics driving aircraft design now.

This combination of a lack of research impetus and real air threat simply means that the Americans can be quite content with a substandard jack-of-all-trades, master-of-fuck-all aircraft like the F-35, and even inflict it on unsuspecting allies at a gigantic price. Even if drones would be cheaper and more effective, the West can settle for the far more expensive and ineffective manned aircraft, because they're good enough. It also, in all likelihood, means that since a new generation of pilots will be trained up on the F-35, they will fight just as hard against the inevitable as their predecessors did, and will probably manage to secure a next generation of manned aircraft for themselves. After all, think of all the jobs that would be lost.

As a side note, maybe this could restart the US space program. After all, the air force will need something to do.

In summary, assuming, say, the US Air Force will switch to unmanned aircraft in the near future assumes a level of rational decision-making that is totally alien to any peacetime military establishment. As a piece of military hardware, the manned aircraft will far outlive its usefulness. As the Economist put it in a more recent piece, the pilot in the cockpit may be an endangered species, but he's surrounded by a gigantic bureaucracy dedicated to his preservation.

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And besides, the drones will just get taken over by Skynet anyway.

Motivating the troops, Israeli style

The Independent: Army rabbi 'gave out hate leaflet to troops'

The Israeli army's chief rabbinate gave soldiers preparing to enter the Gaza Strip a booklet implying that all Palestinians are their mortal enemies and advising them that cruelty is sometimes a "good attribute".

When people say that Palestinians are religious fanatics, one would do well to keep this stuff in mind as well.

Some others have commented on this news item as well. For a frightening look at the mental health of one particular man, go here.