Tim Johnson’s China Rises blog has this video of chaotic scenes outside a southern China rail station in the midst of China’s winter storm. As Tim says, “it’s eight minutes long. But you’ll see scenes you won’t see on the television news”. (Hat-tip: Blake Hounshell.)
Also at ForeignPolicy.com, Blake’s buddy Drew Kumpf offers a tabulated comparison of how China’s winter storm shapes up against Hurricane Katrina. It’s much lower in terms of fatalities (60 versus 1,353), and damage ($7.5 billion vs. $96 billion) – but rather larger in terms of evacuees (1.7 million vs. 1.1 million), homes damaged or destroyed (1 million+ vs. 300,000) and troops deployed (500,000 vs. 50,000).
For centuries, Continental wars that included Great Britain tended to follow a pattern. The British would send an army to the Continent; it would be defeated by the French or Germans; the British would withdraw to their island; and their triumphant European enemy would draw up a superior force on the French or Dutch Channel coast. There was little doubt about the outcome, should that army land in Britain. But it could never get across the English Channel.
A recent conversation over dinner with a Marine lieutenant colonel, formerly a battalion commander in Iraq, helped clarify the nature of our “crossing the Channel” challenge in Fourth Generation war. With a combination of good counter-insurgency tactics (tactics that de-escalate confrontations), a strategy of protecting the population and some luck in the form of blunders by our 4GW opponents, we may be able to restore some degree of order in places where the state has disintegrated. We may further be able to take advantage of the restoration of order to get things working again on the local level: open the schools, turn the power back on, create some jobs, see local commerce revive.
What we do not know how to do, either in theory or in practice, is move from these local achievements to seeing the re-creation of a state. Yet in 4GW, that is crossing the Channel, because unless we can do that we cannot win the war.
But if you’re hoping for the answer, then disappointment sadly awaits.
The problem of crossing the Channel in 4GW is actually more difficult than it was for those French and German armies encamped on the Channel coast, hoping. They knew perfectly well how to cross the English Channel: in boats. They just could not do it in the face of the Royal Navy. As one admiral told the British cabinet during the French invasion scare of 1805, “I do not say the French cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea.”
We have the boats and we have the superior fleet, in the form of complete material supremacy over our 4GW opponents. What we do not have is an understanding of how to employ that superiority to regenerate a state out of statelessness. Until theory can give us such an understanding – and it may find the problem insoluble – we, like yet another attempt to invade England, the Spanish Armada, will sail in expectation of a miracle.
Vulnerability. All of the same network vulnerabilities we see other infrastructures are in force with the Internet’s long haul systems (the network analysis of systempunkts applies). If this was a real attack rather than a series of accidents (the geographical concentration is interesting in this regard), then this was likely a capabilities test that yielded data on response times, impact, and duration.
Means. Attacks on undersea cables are within the capacity of small groups to accomplish. With precise mapping (these cables take very circuitous routes), a cable could be cut with as little as an anchor. However, nation-states are the most capable in this sphere (including, a growing number of micropowers). Why would a nation-state do this? Deterrence. Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely become a form of economic/social coercion in the future (for standard national security reasons all the way down to an inability/unwillingness to crack down on rampant Internet crime, which is growing into a HUGE global problem).
Precision. It’s very hard to precisely target an attack’s damage. Regional impacts are unavoidable (collective punishment for everyone that connects to the target country?). Here’s a final point to consider: closed systems like China’s that route traffic through firewall choke-points, or other closely held infrastructure, are likely very vulnerable to an attack of this type.
Those of our readers in public service will be delighted to hear of a new project designed especially for you: Wikileaks. The short version is explained on the site’s homepage:
Have documents the world needs to see? We protect your identity while maximizing political impact.
Wikileaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.
All staff who deal with sources are accredited journalists or lawyers. All submissions establish a journalist-source relationship. Online submissions are routed via Sweden and Belgium which have first rate journalist-source shield laws. Wikileaks records no source identifying information and there are a number of submission mechanisms available to deal with even the most sensitive national security information.
Wikileaks has a history breaking major stories (in the Guardian, New York Times, CNN, Reuters, etc), protecting sources (no source has ever been exposed) and press freedoms (all censorship attempts, from the Pentagon to London law firms have failed).
So, the $64 trillion question: have they had any good dirt? Well, here are a few examples. Make up your own mind as to the quality of the leak – and indeed whether the information should have been leaked in the first place…
A classified US report intelligence report on the battle for Fallujah in 2004, which is said to “show the U.S. military believes it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to political pressure that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents”. The report itself says, “The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion — coalition victory. But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. … The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations, and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations”;
The full ‘Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure’ (large pdf), which apparently directly contradicts the US’s stated claim that “even though the [Guantanamo] detainees are not entitled to POW privileges, they will be provided many POW privileges as a matter of policy… The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited and will continue to be able to visit the detainees privately”. Documents leaked to Wikileak reveal that some detainees are classified as being permitted “No Access: No contact of any kind with ICRC. This includes delivery of ICRC mail.”; and
A 2,000 page breakdown of the entire US order of battle in Iraq, detailing full equipment registers for all US units in Iraq, as well as detainee operations and, apparently, demonstration that “the US has almost certainly violated the Chemical Weapons Convention”
Still, given the site’s cloak-and-dagger role, you’d have thought that they might have come up with something a bit more, well, subtle as a URL for the page where it all happens than ‘https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Leak‘. Mmm, that wouldn’t stand out at all on your browsing history.
The December announcement by [Managing Director Dominique] Strauss-Kahn that he would lay off 300 to 400 staff (see Update 58) is being viewed as a quid pro quo to secure US Treasury support for giving the IMF an endowment. The G7 has demanded that the IMF cut its expenses before considering how to boost its income. Inside sources have said that the managing director has been holed up in his office working on the Fund’s budget and how to come up with cuts to the work force, meaning that he has had little time to work on what is supposed to be the “cornerstone” of Fund reform: changes to its governance structure.
