by Charlie Edwards | Feb 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Excellent comment piece in today’s FT on how the Pentagon needs to plan for climate change. According to the authors there are five key areas in which effective military planning can be undermined by uncertainty over when and how the major carbon-emitting countries combat climate change.
First, climate change poses a threat to fragile states that lack the capacity to adapt to environmental shifts. The Pentagon needs to know if the military will be called upon to operate more often in countries that have collapsed or are on the brink of doing so. The risk of a regional conflagration sparked by global warming is particularly severe in east Africa and south Asia. How urgently should the Pentagon begin planning for such contingencies?
Second, the US military needs to know how significantly to expand its capacity to act as a first responder in times of natural disaster. Climate change will increase the frequency of large-scale disasters over the next three decades. But the scope of this threat will vary depending on what action is taken to minimise emissions. Although some of the emergencies created or exacerbated by climate change may be managed by the UN, the US military has an unrivalled capacity to act as a first responder in these situations.
Recall the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck a little more than three years ago: only the US could or would so rapidly have deployed and sustained the 15,000 troops, two dozen ships and 100 aircraft needed for the mission. But if the US military anticipates being called upon more often to respond to such disasters then it needs clarity about how soon it should invest more resources into planning such missions.
Third, the US military will have to conduct traditional missions in increasingly adverse weather conditions. Planners must decide how soon to invest in equipment that works better in storms, floods and other hostile climates.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 11, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Peter Riddell at the Times has the details:
Further far-reaching changes in the running of 10 Downing Street are imminent … The two big appointments so far this year – of Jeremy Heywood as permanent secretary at 10 Downing Street, and of Stephen Carter, from the private sector, as chief of strategy and principal special adviser in charge of political strategy, communications and research, including the policy unit – will now be followed by the addition of more new staff. Mr Heywood is bringing in some civil servants to strengthen the private office and domestic policy side and a number of special political advisers are being recruited. This is to provide a new viewpoint and to beef up the policy unit. In addition, new advisers on developing a media strategy are being hired. This inevitably raises questions about the creation of a prime minister’s department in substance if not in title, an issue that everyone involved wants to dodge.
As significant as these changes is Mr Brown’s acceptance that he misjudged what was necessary to run No 10. There was an unprecedented turnover of staff when Tony Blair left Downing Street last summer because virtually all the special advisers left (apart from two in the policy unit) and there were changes among most of the key Civil Service officials. The result was an initial sharp fall in the number of people working in No 10, which, visitors said, felt much less crowded than in Mr Blair’s heyday. This was partly deliberate as Mr Brown sought publicly to distance himself from both the “sofa government” and presidential aspects of his predecessor’s style. Consequently, he brought over only a handful of officials and advisers from the Treasury to run No 10. Mr Brown now accepts that this was not sufficient to handle an operation as complicated as a prime minister’s office. Like many of his predecessors, he has been struck by the intensity of the media pressure: when one thing goes wrong, so do two or three others.
These concerns led to the reappraisal by the Brown inner circle before and during Christmas that led to the appointments of Mr Heywood and Mr Carter. They now share an office next to the Cabinet Room, which, before last June, was used by Mr Blair as his den or private office. Mr Brown now uses a small room on the other side of the lobby outside the Cabinet Room as his private office, although he meets visitors upstairs in what is now called the Thatcher Room next to the state rooms on the first floor overlooking Horseguards Parade.
The Heywood-Carter team has reviewed the operation and concluded that it has been short of numbers, and weight, in some areas. Mr Heywood is familiar with the No 10 operation from his days as principal private secretary under Mr Blair: his rank and authority are now much greater. Mr Carter, whose main experience has been in the business and media worlds, has had to adjust to the tight and tribal world of the Brown inner circle and to the private language and understandings of politicians and advisers.
It’s reminiscent of the story of the National Security Council under the Bush Administration, which initially slashed staff numbers, only to increase them again under Stephen Hadley when it became clear that the inter-agency co-ordination process was foundering – not least for want of capacity at the centre.
by Alex Evans | Jan 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Last year’s big issue at Davos was climate change – unsurprisingly, given that it was the first time the WEF crowd had convened since the Stern Review was published and An Inconvenient Truth was released. This year, for all the worry about meltdown in financial markets, the big issue was by all accounts scarcity.
Gideon Rachman, writing his weekly column in yesterday’s FT, agrees:
Without a big short-term crisis to distract them, the international politics crowd were able to look at longer-term trends. They too are trying to understand the consequences of globalisation. But while the bankers grapple with the top end of the process – the movement of billions of dollars around the world financial system – the political analysts are increasingly preoccupied by the way globalisation is affecting people at the bottom of the pile. The costs of food and energy are rising fast. The availability of water is also becoming an issue, from Australia to Africa. The struggle for these three basic commodities – food, energy and water – came up repeatedly in Davos.
And he’s not only worried about the problem. Just as much of a concern is whether the world’s institutions and policy elites have the capacity to manage it:
Soccer crowds in England like to abuse match referees by chanting: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” If protesters had been able to get near the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, they could justifiably have aimed the same chant at the world leaders who assembled in the Alps.
These people are meant to be the “masters of the universe”: presidents, prime ministers, bankers, billionaires. If anybody can make sense of world events, it should be them. But the air of confusion in Davos was both palpable and alarming.
Update: rising food prices also got a mention in President Bush’s State of the Union yesterday…
by Alex Evans | Jan 16, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, East Asia and Pacific
The FT reports on friction over rising soyabean prices in Indonesia this morning, in what it’s calling “the biggest food-related protests since last year’s Mexican tortilla crisis”:
Indonesia was yesterday forced to take emergency action to calm street protests over record soyabean prices triggered by US farmers reducing the crop to grow more corn for biofuel. Rising Chinese demand for soyabeans and bad harvests in Argentina and Brazil have also contributed to the jump…
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Indonesian president, was forced to announce measures to boost local soyabean supply. The move came a day after 10,000 people took to the streets in Jakarta to complain about the rising cost of one of the country’s staple foods. The government had already responded to the protests by lifting import controls on a commodity that hit an all-time global high of $13.20 a bushel this week, an increase of almost 90 per cent on last year’s level. Indonesian prices have risen even higher. Henry Saragih, the head of the Indonesian farmers’ union, warned: “I think the social situation with soyabeans will probably get worse before it gets better.”
Indonesia, which imports two-thirds of its soyabeans, has suffered from the impact of rising shipping costs and the long-term neglect of its agriculture sector. Meanwhile, many Indonesian farmers have switched to corn cultivation and other more lucrative crops.
Incidentally, the FT’s coverage of the food prices issue continues to be streets ahead of any other international news outlet: the only other newspapers even to cover the protests in Jakarta were local, if Google News is to be believed. This is entirely consistent with other recent food stories. Accept no substitute…
by Alex Evans | Jan 16, 2008 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
Readers will recall the story on January 9 of Iranian speedboats swarming around US ships, with one of them apparently saying over the radio that, “you will explode after a few minutes”. President Bush, speaking on the eve of his Middle East trip, commented at the time that “we viewed it as a provocative act … it is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple”. The media lapped it up: the New York Times, for instance, said in an editorial that
Iran played a reckless and foolish game in the Strait of Hormuz this week that — except for American restraint — could have spun lethally out of control.
But as Kevin Drum reported late last night, IPS have unearthed a rather different angle: the incident was not remotely out of the ordinary for the Straits of Hormuz.
The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are “just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination”.
Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice.
So why did this incident become such a media circus?
With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident. The decision came just as President George W. Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition. That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7. It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.
That news release did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the US ships, that any threat was made of US ships ‘exploding in a few minutes’, or that US ships had nearly fired on them; “on the contrary, the release made the U.S. warships handling of the incident sound almost routine”. As the IPS analysis continues, those details only started to appear in later stories – after an off-the-record briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman.
The decision to splice in to video of the incident a separate audio recording of threats made against the US ships was, according to an unnamed IPS source at the US Navy Office of Information in the US, made in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. As the IPS article concludes,
The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy’s reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, “There is a different perspective over there.”
