Pakistan - Nukes More Vulnerable?

NPR had a good story this morning on the security of Pakistan's nukes -

For years, Pakistan has been fearful that in a crisis, the U.S. might try to seize its nuclear bombs. The bin Laden raid has led some in Pakistan to advocate dispersing the nuclear weapons to numerous secret sites. But greater dispersal can lead to greater insecurity, with more people knowing about hiding more bombs in more places. [Ed: MIL-INT emphasis added]

AFPAK Daily Brief has a related round up

The Post reported Wednesday on allegations made by A.Q. Khan, considered the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, that North Korean officials bribed senior Pakistani army officers during the late 1990s in return for nuclear technology (Post). Khan, who has not been allowed to speak to Western investigators, provided a letter to journalist Simon Henderson (available here - [this looks bogus to MIL INT - too specific in naming names and numbers]) that Khan says proves the payment of more than $3 million in cash and jewels to the former chief of Pakistan's army Gen. Jehangir Karamat, as well as retired Lt. Gen. Zulfiqar Khan (Post, AP, Reuters, CBS). Pakistan's interior ministry took Khan to the Islamabad High Court this week, accusing him of "not cooperating" with Pakistan's government in making his security arrangements (ET).

MIL-INT's judgement is its only a matter of time before terrorists in Pakistan go for a nuke site -  if they can penetrate GHQ, ISI HQ, blow up high end P-3s deep inside a major military base - it does not take long for them to work out how to strike a nuke site.

Prison Hulks in USN

Australia was founded as a convict colony when the prison hulks in the Thames could take it no more. Decommission ships of the RN, no longer ruling the waves, were anchored and filled to the gunnels with those who sought to waive the rules. Vile savages guilty of stealing a loaf of bread and other crimes, as the myth goes. 

As with British defense spending and forced force structure downsizing, so with a means of detaining the vile of today for the mighty USN it would seem. 

The USS Boxer appears to be the first modern American example. The boys over at DR have got the contemporary story and raise some good questions about the practice. See

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/floating-gitmo/

Picture credit:

The Fighting Temeraire (a prison hulk following a life of glory on the ocean wave) tugged to her last berth to be broken, J. M. W. Turner, 1838, National Gallery, London. 

Chinese Electric Cars

The guys over at Oil and Glory have a short piece on the state of the Chinese electric car industry and market. For the former, read drywall on wheels. For the latter, read not if it's not cheap. Chinese consumers not wanting to throw money away - imagine!

The German model keeps coming to mind as the antidote to US style cheap n fast globalization. High cost but high quality. We just have to hope that there will be an American middle class left to buy stuff after they were mugged in their homes by Wall St bankers from 2008 onwards. Meanwhile financial reform is a cruel joke...

http://oilandglory.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/07/05/are_the_chinese_really_a_shoe_in_to_win_the_electric_car_race

Indian Defense Porn Channel

It must be film night here at MIL-INT - wandering around the internet after the last posting I came across this gem - the Indian Defense Force has a YouTube channel - who knew? Well 1992 subscribers at the time of writing. The production values are borderline CNNish... ok they are hilarious - an aircraft carrier puff piece by two hyperactive body builder types who bounce around so much doing their lines I'm pretty sure they would not pass a piss test.

Old School Spying Documentary

This terrific old video documentary on the CIA was recommended by a new blog I'm monitoring : Checkpoint Washington. Director of CIA Dulles' interview is remarkable - it is both frank and comparatively long. Today's public affairs folks would freak out if the current DCIA operated like this. It details global actions including the coup in Iran, CIA ops against Sukarno, actions in the Congo and Latin America. The interview with Air America pilots was pretty cheesy but nevertheless fascinating on a few levels. Well worth an hour of your time if you are interested in such things, and as you are here, that means you are!

It caught my while researching a forthcoming paper on CT replacing COIN from an intel perspective.

ABSTRACT

The US still talks COIN but in reality the strategy has shifted to a global counter terror campaign aided by the incredible strategic intelligence capabilities it can tailor to individualized challenges. We have entered the era of bespoke warfare, where concern for collateral damage and its political consequences have demanded personalized strategic responses from major states.Intelligence is about understanding context and ultimately, enabling change. It used to be the case that strategic intelligence provided contextual understanding (and ideally warning) and military intelligence provided the commander with a pathway through which violent change could be effectively implemented. Today these relationships are reversed. Military intelligence is being asked to provide cultural context and strategic intelligence is lining up targets to be hit. When bin Laden escaped Tora Bora, the stage was set for a long campaign against a completely new target set. It took time to build an intelligence system aligned to the novel challenge of finding individuals within a shadowy global network. The Abbottabad raid was without any exaggeration, the culmination of a decade of fundamental change in the character of, and inter-relationships between, US intelligence, military forces and grand strategy. Strategic intelligence assets have turned to answer the most tactical questions imaginable, right down to the location and activities of specific individuals. How individuals connect through social, electronic, and financial networks, in both combat zones and far away from them, has consumed strategic intelligence programs. Equally, MI programs have struggled to adapt to non-technical challenges of understanding culture, religion, ethnicity, and social structures, in profoundly foreign operational environments. Taken together, these are the most radical reconfigurations of the business of intelligence since the dawn of the nuclear age."

The Science of CT

Following from an earlier posting on scientific predictions about bin Laden's likely location (that turned out to be uncannily accurate WRT the type of location if not the specific location), an article has just been published in Science, one of the top two journals in any scientific field (Nature is the other), that describes a means by which insurgency can be predicted. I found this over on Danger Room - have a look at their analysis. My analysis continues below.

Saudi - US Security for Oil Facilities

From an AP story run in Army Times on new US-Saudi security cooperation - which might in part explain recent Saudi efforts to get other OPEC members to adjust prices down - although such actions would have other benefits for KSA.

The force’s main mission is to protect vital oil infrastructure, but its scope is wider. A formerly secret State Department cable released by the WikiLeaks website described the mission as protecting “Saudi energy production facilities, desalination plants and future civil nuclear reactors.”

Pakistan - 70% population View US as an Enemy

The Pew Research center has released a new poll on Pakistani attitudes to the US in the wake of the bin Laden raid. The results of a new poll were also touched on in the last story.

Pakistan at it Again - University Competition to Honor bin Laden in Verse

You can't make stuff like this up - Punjab University - let that word sink in for a minute, is running a competition to honor bin Laden through the most peaceful of means - poetry. The AP wire story, carried in Stars and Stripes, gives good coverage of the tensions inherent in Pakistan.

"Whoever is America's friend is a traitor!" roared the head of the student group, Zubair Safdar, in an interview with The Associated Press.

His views were echoed by 19-year-old student Bismah Khan as she read one of the posters promoting the bin Laden contest. One of three topics for the essay section was: "Osama, a thorn piercing the hearts of infidels."

US Asks China for Alt Supply Line to Afg?

In a comprehensive article in the Post that ran July 2, the tenuous US supply lines to Afghanistan were examined WRT ongoing and future difficulty in supplying NATO forces in Afghanistan via frenemy Pakistan. Fast becoming more enemy than friend in the wake of the Abbottabad raid, the US dependence on fraught supply routes crossing over 1600 kms from Karachi to Kabul and beyond. This has been a subject of interest of mine for a while now.

Costs of War

How much has the US spent on war since 2001?  $3.2-4 Trillion!

In the course of researching intelligence issues related to the adoption of CT over COIN in Afghanistan (coming soon), I have come across a website that brings a marco assessment of the costs of war - broadly defined. It has some credible academics associated with it who have done important work in the field, including Linda J. Bilmes, Neta C. Crawford, and Andrew J. Bacevich. The site is worth exploring and looks quite comprehensive. Some will quibble with the political leanings of some of the specialists associated with the site and that might be fair - but show me a credible alternative! I doubt there is one.

This is from their site and is an interesting summary - I'd like to see the data behind it.

Bin Laden - Intel from Raid Starting to Surface

Reports are starting to surface on the treasure trove of intel captured by SSE - here's a quick list that will be updated as new reports come to light - readers are invited to make submissions so we can keep this as comprehensive as possible.

Post - Bin Laden document trove reveals strain on al-Qaeda
Post -  Al-Qaeda data yield details of planned plots