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North Korea and the Parade of Kims

North Korea and the Parade of Kims

When one thinks of North Korea, “funhouse” is probably not at the top of the vocabulary–but Kim Jong-il had waterslides.

Kim’s Funhouse
Courtesy of NKeconwatch (featured in prior Gestaltist posts), the pool at one of Kim’s numerous estates includes what appears to be a waterslide:

Perhaps soon many more Pyongyang “elites” will have their own funhouse(s). The 2012 Strong and Prosperous Nation (Kangsong Taeguk) measures marking the centennial of Kim Il-sung’s birth will bring Pyongyang a new 100,000-unit housing development cleverly called “The Development Project of 100,000 Housing Units in Pyongyang”. The development will feature a recreation area which will include–you guessed it–waterslides. Photos of the construction can be found here.

North Korea’s “Real” Potemkin Village
Just north of the DMZ lies Kijong-dong, an apparently bustling town within view of South Korean soldiers and tourists. Except this town has no residents, and the houses have no furniture, and apparently the buildings have no glass on the windows. It’s purpose appears to be propagandistic: it was built just after the war, apparently to lure South Korean sentinels across the border. Kijong-dong is a Potemkin village more real than the metaphor’s apocryphal source. And no one gets to live in a Potemkin village.

Dailypropaganda.com

“The Hotel of Doom”
No one gets to stay in the Ryugyong Hotel either; no one ever has. It’s been 25 years.

The hotel was begun in 1987. Given its setting and mandate, its semiotic function (that is, beside just lodging and making money in some fashion) is clear. It’s huge (105 stories, 3,900,000 square feet). But construction stalled more than once, famine took hold, and for more than 15 years the Pyongyang skyline featured this pyramidal windowless derelict.

Wikimedia Commons

But construction (after a fashion) resumed in 2008, thanks to a foreign investor that’s also engaged in creating North Korea’s cellular data network. Work on the exterior and cladding is complete; though it remains dark, the Ryugyong is no longer windowless.

While a bit hysterical, I have a morbid fascination with Esquire’s formulation, “The Hotel of Doom”. Well, perhaps these changes will be more than superficial. The new angel is an Egyptian telecom, Orascom.. According to The Independent:

It would cost up to $2bn (£1bn) to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korea’s media. That is equivalent to about 10 per cent of the North’s annual economic output. Bruno Giberti, the associate head of California Polytechnic State University’s department of architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently by many cities which were trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them.

When Dubai ran into trouble, Burj Dubai became Burj Khalifa after Abu Dhabi bailed Dubai out. Perhaps we’ll end up with an empty but at least covered Hotel Sawiris?

Are They Serious?

“Who knows does not speak / who speaks does not know”–this blog included (here I am, speaking, after all). What we do know is that the imagery we do see of swooning mourners gnashing teeth is almost entirely from Pyongyang–and merely living in Pyongyang affords a North Korean a degree of privilege and comfort not available elsewhere.. And while the crowds may seem huge, there’s a substantial bit of looping involved.

The article cites B.R. Meyers on the histrionics issue. Listen to an interview with him on the topic at NPR.

This whole wailing and carrying on is really a propaganda exercise in its own right. It’s meant to convey not just the message that these people loved their leader but also the message that this is a uniquely vulnerable child race whose emotions run deeper than the emotions of people in other countries. And they’re faking a very infantile kind of grief.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dowA-daEESQ[/youtube]

In the interview, Meyers asserts that the eldest Kim’s doctrine of “juche” (akin to self reliance) is a fraud. Indeed, from nuclear extortion in exchange for financial aid and heavy fuel oil to pleas for food aid (these are legitimate in that famine is a real problem for North Koreans–though not so much for the ones we see wailing on TV), passing the hat and blackmail are a means of getting the things that would allow an even slightly more open country to maintain legitimacy.

The Daily NK reported that mourners who were judged to have been “insincere” were being sent to labor camps:

The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.

That report has been officially denied, having a statement be declared “official” isn’t exactly a credibility-enhancer.

“Pyongyang-ology”
It’s the new “Kremlinology” (referencing the Cold War discipline of analyzing any trace of information leaking from the USSR–particularly photography–to get clues of who might be favored by whom by inference of who’s standing next to Krushchev at a May Day parade). Similarly with North Korea, ever since Kim Jong-un was elevated to general status ahead of and named to vice-chair to the Central Military Committee ahead of the 2010 Worker’s Party of Korea conference, the “who is standing next to him” question has been vital. Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek not only scores high on the proximity scale but also first appeared in military uniform in those photos. Ri Yong Ho (Army Chief of Staff) is one of the runners-up.

(Edited versions courtesy of NYT's The Lens

Though most probably this photo was altered for aesthetic reasons, it brings to mind the Stalin-era alteration of photos to remove those no longer in favor (or worse). Much ink has been spilled on this topic; this article from the Hoover Institution summarizes it nicely.

Stalin and Yerzhov

Stalin sans Yerzhov

Condolences
Clues of political positioning are also given by watching who has offerred condolences, and what form they took. Even a local news weatherman may get to sign autographs at a county fair, mind you.

From the US, Bill Richardson and Jimmy Carter both offered condolences (as private citizens); there wasn’t any official condolence. Perhaps interestingly, the UN has been to the impromptu memorial at the DPRK mission to the UN, and the UN HQ in Pyongyang flew their flag at half-staff. Ban Ki-moon also offered condolences,but to the people of North Korea, not the government. It’s an important distinction, akin to Obama’s messages to the *people* of Iran. I’m fond of this quote in Foreign Policy:

‘This case is unique,’ a senior U.N. official explained to Turtle Bay. “Everything in that country is unique. I can’t think of another country where the head of state is permanently dead.” (the eldest Kim is constitutionally declared to be North Korea’s “Eternal President”)

Scott Snyder of CFR has a nice list of events to watch for (in coming months and in general) that might offer clues as far as the hardiness of Kim Jong-un’s succession.

Glimpses
“Bonus” is Gestaltist code for “I am tired of writing” and/or “I have to go for now”. So, a bonus on this topic, a few links of photos from glimpses inside North Korea.

From the Boston Globe’s phenomenal Big Picture blog:

Reuters / Nir Elias

“Land of No Smiles”: from Foreign Policy:

Tomas van Houtryve

http://publicintelligence.net/north-korea-and-the-strangest-show-on-earth/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/8972862/Satellite-images-of-North-Korea-give-a-rare-glimpse-of-life-under-Kim-Jong-il.html

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Forever Overhead Miscellanea

Forever Overhead Miscellanea

 

 

“Forever Overhead” is the rubric under which I put everything having to do with surveillance from above (satellites, drones, etc.), but is intended especially to focus on the “democratizing” aspects of the overhead which are open source (such as Google Earth and Google Maps) and the myriad data are put by myriad enterprising Googlers and scholars. It’s a sort of vertical panopticon http://gestaltist.com/2011/05/29/forever-overhead-panopticon-2-0/ –but one in which we can all play the role of warden.

I’m just returning (physically and cognitively) from a long trek to Russia, Mongolia and China via the Trans-Siberian Railway, and Gestaltist grows stale. Unfortunately, I’m slow to recover my capacity for blogging as so many other things. Sine I’ve got a hoard of potential links and short bits on this topic, so rather than sit on them while I convalesce, I’m rounding them up here.

Chinese Enigmas
First up and most recent are the recently uncovered imagery, via Google Earth, of these strange structures in China. This Danger Room post is itself a comprehensive roundup of the images and various speculations on their purpose(s).

One of the ones I’m most struck by–whose message is clearly less abstruse–is this one. Apparently it reads something like, “Remove ten thousand (i.e. ‘all’) obstacles to strive for victory/success”.

This is in Xinjiang province, (not so) incidentally the site of one of China’s largest ethnic/separatist movements (also incidentally, when I was in China one of my Great Firewall experiments consisted of searching “Xinjiang riots” on Baidu (China’s Google), where the first hit was a Chinese press article asserting that the uprising was staged by provocateurs external to China. The slogan’s a bit of a misnomer, though: there are more than ten thousand Uighurs in Xinjiang.

More images and speculation can be found here.

Pakistan’s Nukes and Google
Many have already read of my fondness for Jeffrey Lewis’s armscontrolwonk blog. Apparently Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Rose Gottemoeller cited one of his student’s (Tamara Patton) work modeling Pakistan’s Khushab complex using open source tools and Google SketchUp; since her mention is itself a pretty good summary of the effort, I’ll
meta-quote it here:

She is using freely accessible geospatial tools to gather and analyze
information about the complex’s capacity levels. The really
interesting part comes when she takes the open source satellite images
of the complex and turns those into 3-D models using a freely
available program called Google Sketch-up. This program constructs the
models with dimensions that Patton ascertained using tools in Google
Earth and basic trigonometry. The model is then placed on the map and
textured using observable features.

Through the Keyhole
When you’re watching TV or a movie and see some plucky analyst viewing live satellite imagery of somebody or thing, and some officious supervisor looks on or orders the satellite to be retasked to some other target (a newer, more 21st-century of the “enhance” meme) the closest actual thing (that we know about) is the Keyhole satellite.

One of these (albeit much older–a KH-9, we’re currently up to KH-11 at least) was put on display at the National Air and Space Museum… somewhat dramatically, for only one day.

An appropriately antiquated KH-9 image / Wikimedia Commons

 

Earth and the Anthroposphere
Globaia has produced a series of maps and visualizations attempting to map all current and existing human activity.

The Global Transportation System / Globaia

After the 34th congress of the International Union of Geological
Sciences, “anthropocene” may become an “official” epoch:

But the concept itself, the idea that human activity affects the Earth
to the point where it can cross a new age, is not new and dates back
to the late nineteenth century. Different terms were proposed over the
decades, such as Anthropozoic (Stoppani, 1873), Noosphere (de Chardin,
1922; Vernadsky, 1936), Eremozoic (Wilson, 1992), and Anthrocene
(Revkin, 1992). It seems that the success of the term chosen by
Crutzen and Stoermer is due to the luck of having been made at the
appropriate time, when humankind became more than ever aware of the
extent of its impact on global environment. It should be noted that
Edward O. Wilson (who suggested Eremozoic, “the age of loneliness”)
popularized the terms “biodiversity” and “biophilia.”

They define the Anthropocene epoch (we’re currently in the Holocene,
though after August 2012 this may no longer be true) thusly:

A period marked by a regime change in the activity of industrial
societies which began at the turn of the nineteenth century and which
has caused global disruptions in the Earth System on a scale
unprecedented in human history: climate change, biodiversity loss,
pollution of the sea, land and air, resources depredation, land cover
denudation, radical transformation of the ecumene, among others. These
changes command a major realignment of our consciousness and
worldviews, and call for different ways to inhabit the Earth.

More maps and related articles can be found at the Anthromes site.

And there’s the “i-tree” software from the US Forest Service:

i-Tree Canopy offers a quick and easy way to produce a statistically
valid estimate of land cover types (e.g., tree cover) using aerial
images available in Google Maps. The data can be used by urban forest
managers to estimate tree canopy cover, set canopy goals, and track
success; and to estimate inputs for use in i-Tree Hydro and elsewhere
where land cover data are needed.

US Forest Service

 

Satellite Archaeology
NASA’s Earth Observatory celebrated the 25th birthday of Landsat 5 by
documenting the evolution of Las Vegas sprawl.

A University of Alabama researcher has found at least 17 buried pyramids (as well as more common buildings and streets) using open
source and NASA infrared imagery:

Even ordinary satellite images used by Google Earth have helped. Many
of the old Egyptian sites have buried mud brick architecture that
crumbles over time and mixes with the sand or silt above them. When it
rains, soils with mud brick hold moisture longer and appear discolored
in satellite photos.

University of Alabama-Birmingham

‘In the old days, I’d jump into the Land Rover and go look at a
possible site,’ said Tony Pollard, director of the Centre for
Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
‘Now, before that, I go to Google Earth.’

X Marks the… You Know
There’s no plaque or memorial commemorating the death of JFK (though there is a cenotaph) at Dealey Plaza, but there is a white “X” on the road where the fatal blow was apparently dealt (both shots, actually).

Google Street View

The X is a bit of a pilgrimage site. There’s even an (obligatory?) planking photo on the X.

The Vertical Panopticon, Liberated
The Sentinel Satellite Project embodies the “democratic panopticon” concept (their slogan is “The world is watching because you are watching”) using open source satellite imagery to track the movements of Sudanese soldiers and tanks against refugees, and even says they’ve discovered mass graves.

Sentinel Satellite Project

That’s it for now. While I’m not out of misc., I am out of time.

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Palestinian Statehood, Legitimacy, and “Unity”

Palestinian Statehood, Legitimacy, and “Unity”

Rarely do I agree with more than one politician at one time, on one topic, but…

Susan Rice:

The reality is, the absolute only way to achieve our goal [of] two states living side by side … is through direct negotiations… There is no short cut.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro8MeyM7mFE[/youtube]

Mahmoud Abbas:

No one can isolate Israel. No one can delegitimize Israel. It is a recognized state… We want to delegitimize the occupation, not the state of Israel.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ASOBTKpCeU[/youtube]

Indeed, the Palestinian Authority (PA) can no more seek to deligitimize Israel than they can pose an “existential threat” to the state with the occasional Katyusha rocket. Unfortunately, theres not much more I agree with Abbas on.

Much as it pains me I’m even “agreeing” with Netanyahu on minor points. I agree with the conventional wisdom on this issue.

As overdue as I may think Palestinian statehood is (especially post-Oslo, and post-2003), the idea of getting it by end-running Israel at the UN is ill-advised. The fact that Israel offers so many intractables, particularly at present, is no excuse; a creation of a “state” in that body without the full cooperation of the other players in the equation, especially Israel, still means they will ultimately need those players “playing ball”. Quasi-legitimacy may introduce more problems than it solves–and given the regional realities, quasi-legitimacy is all the UN can confer. And reversing the order might just make the next step more arduous. This is not to say Israel is even close to ball-playing.

The PA will reportedly first make their application for full UN membership (making them a de facto state) at the Security Council. The US would veto the application, and and have been forced to show its hand. As unfortunate as I think that is, let’s not forget that these moves, their unpopularity, and the theatrics preceding them are similar to Israel’s 1948 moves at the UN.

I doubt there will ultimately be a UNSC vote on full membership, though. The “best” that can be hoped for at this point is some arrangement that will keep the PA from submitting and instead pursuing some face-saving measure short of the pursuit of full recognition in front of the General Assembly (which as an act of good faith the US and Israel should both vote in favor of in exchange for a good-faith return to negotiations on the part of both parties). At the UNGA, the best they can hope for is to be promoted from “non-member entity” to “non-member state” status (like the Holy See, i.e. The Vatican,) which would–among other things–leave them just where they’re sitting now.

Legitimacy and Law
The elevation of Palestine to a “non-member state” at the is unlikely to afford the PA the leverage that status would afford relative to the negotiating challenge they now (and would still) face. Though it would give them access to ostensible levers only available to states such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), to employ them would be a mistake. If one of their first moves as a state would be to provoke action by the ICC to investigate Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, such a move would make Netanyahu–or Israel in general–more difficult to negotiate with (this is not to justify Cast Lead), which would them further back than they started. Regardless of their standing at the UN, they still need to work out innumerable practical issues with their “neighbor”. And they unfortunately can’t do this without the US. Or the people of Palestine (although the IDF’s promise to regard such an act as “war” fleetingly makes me feel galvanized, too)…

Guy Goodwin-Gill, a law professor at Oxford, brings up some questions that might have the PA considering this a hasty pursuit of statehood:

What we have here, it seems to me, is a moment in which certain matters have just not been thought through. Historically, the PLO has been the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, internationally and within the United Nations [UN]. Now it is to be the state. Who, though, is the state, and what are the democratic links between those who will represent the state in the UN and the people of Palestine? An abstract entity – a state – is proposed, but where are the people?

One issue here is that the majority of Palestinians are refugees living outside of historic Palestine, and they have an equal claim to be represented, particularly given the recognition of their rights in General Assembly resolution 194 (III), among others. It is not clear that they will be enfranchised through the creation of a state, in which case the PLO must continue to speak for their rights in the UN until they are implemented.

Professor Goodwin-Gill’s paper can be found here.

Put simply, Abbas is not the legitimate leader of the people of Palestine.

I’m “not unfond” of the Quartet proposal being lobbied by their envoy Tony Blair:

Under Blair’s proposal, the Palestinians would indeed present their bid for statehood, but to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Mr. Ban would take the proposal under advisement, with a commitment to present it for a vote in the General Assembly by the end of the year if the Israelis and Palestinians have not returned to direct negotiations by then.

Israel’s Diplomatic Isolation
Israel’s increasing isolation in the region only adds more wrinkles and will likely cause Netanyahu to dig in and get more intransigent rather than less. Their on-again/off-again relationship with Turkey is waning and their embassy in the post-Mubarak Egypt has just been attacked. Things are sketchy on the Northern border with Syria. Netanyahu’s intransigence on settlements has put him on the outs with the Obama administration, and of course there was the “much ado” business over ” the pre-1967 borders”.

Khalil Hamra / Associated Press

Mitchell’s gone and some the latest moves seem to be backfiring on other envoys in diplomatically spectacular ways:

Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, Nabil Shaath said that a plan delivered at the last minute by U.S. envoys David Hale and Dennis Ross did not meet several Palestinian demands, thus convincing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the U.S. was not serious in trying to negotiate peace.

Talk about waning influence…

I am not surprised the Palestinians are frustrated.

Two Palestines
Since mid-2007 there have been two Palestines to match the geographic separation. Unable to agree on a government (among other things), Hamas withdrew to “govern” Gaza exclusively and Fateh continued to manage the West Bank. The convenient withdrawal of Hamas is one set of circumstances that led to Cast Lead. With Egypt set to be under new management, the position of Gaza and the Egypt-Israel accord seems slightly more tenuous–this is just one circumstance driving the will to “unity”.

Wikimedia Commons

I began putting down notes on this topic after the Fateh/Hamas deal, first intending to post immediately after and then well ahead of the UNGA meeting and whatever move the PA made. Alas, the 11th hour has arrived…

At the time, Matt Duss wrote:

As for Hamas, the key question is why now? Hamas’s strategy thus far has been to sit back and watch Fatah fail, let the peace process crumble, and remain standing as the only viable Palestinian alternative. Going for this deal now indicates that they feel they have something to lose by continuing to stand aloof. The change to an Egyptian government less willing to rigidly enforce the United States and Israel’s red lines was also almost certainly a contributing factor.

Further, Hamas has seen its support among Gazans drop considerably. Shikaki’s polling shows “50% of Gazans are ready to participate in demonstrations to demand regime change in the Gaza Strip,” where Hamas rules, while only 24 percent of those polled in the Fatah-ruled West Bank said the same. It’s also likely that Hamas feels vulnerable with its key Arab ally and patron Bashar al-Assad facing serious unrest in Syria. The growing challenge to its rule in Gaza by even more extreme Salafist factions may have Hamas worried about its future.

The later revelations in the “Palestine Papers” didn’t buy them any special legitimacy at home either.

Nation Branding
Al Jazeera blogs on the branding moves a newly-minted State of Palestine would need to undergo, and I can’t help remembering not only Nation Branding but also an earlier post here on that same topic with regard to South Sudan. Palestine is most definitely a nation; unfortunately stamps–in this case probably even UN recognition–do not a state make.

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9/11 Plus 10

9/11 Plus 10

 

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQu6suV9dk[/youtube]

The anniversary is about to end on the East coast, and my desire to avoid op-eds, other news stories,  even my carefully-pruned RSS feeds has begun to subside (though only for the latter, really). From the traffic and timestamps it would appear some of my favorite authors share that sentiment.

In doing my part to reduce the orgiastic blovation-quotient, I’ll instead merely link to a few of the finest this evening:
There’s nothing really anniversary-specific here, but I’ll always recommend the writing at Opinio Juris and Lawfare, as it appears that the legal ramifications of International Relations are no longer the sole domain of the most wonky, and on occasion it’s useful to hear from people who know what they’re talking about.

UPDATE: actually, it appears that on Lawfare there’s a sort of memorial “to the towers themselves”, wherein he cites Philipe Petit’s truly singular act of walking a tightrope surreptitiously strung between the towers, with a scene from Man on Wire.


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jov-HMaOPQ[/youtube]

Abu Muqawama’s (Andrew Exum) wonderful Q&A with Thomas Hegghammer on contemporary jihad.

The Long War Journal on a similar topic.

Since 9/11, there has been no other al Qaeda attack on US soil or
any other al Qaeda attack of a similar magnitude anywhere. Osama bin
Laden is dead, and most of al-Qaeda’s ‘legacy leaders’ have been
killed and replaced… Some officials have declared all of this a
“victory,” but lessons from the Philippines show that the next defeat
can come from the jaws of victory.

Paul Miller’s FP post, again, on a similar topic:

…9/11 was the declaration of a war that is not yet over. We cannot
mark this day until we know how this war ultimately ends. The public
meaning of 9/11 will be profoundly different depending on whether we
can look back with pride or with shame at the war that followed. That
means the global war against al Qaeda and, importantly, the war in
Afghanistan.

Resilience and Closure
Spencer Ackerman says:

When Barack Obama ran for president, his national security team told
me, in an extensive series of interviews, that a major focus of his
presidency would be to confront what they called the “politics of
fear” — the national-security freakout that led to counterproductive
post-9/11 moves like invading Iraq. But since coming to power, Obama
has accommodated himself to the politics of fear far more than he’s
confronted it.

He’s allowed widespread surveillance of American Muslims. He was
reluctant to fight Congress over closing Guantanamo Bay. He backed
down on holding criminal trials for the 9/11 conspirators.

Obama deserves credit for ordering the raid that killed bin Laden. But
presidents don’t ever give up their power without a fight.

Only when citizens make it acceptable for politicians to recognize
that the threat of terrorism isn’t so significant can the country
finally get what it really needs, 10 years later: closure.

This puts me in mind of a prior Gestaltist post on strategic failure where I
quoted Stephen Flynn on resilience. It’s worth quoting again:

There were no federal air marshals aboard the aircraft. The North
American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, could not intercept it;
it did not even know that the plane had been hijacked. Yet United 93
was stopped 140 miles from its likely destination—the U.S. Capitol or
the White House—because of the actions of the passengers who stormed
the cockpit… Americans should celebrate — and ponder — the reality
that the legislative and executive centers of the U.S. federal
government, whose constitutional duty is to “provide for the common
defense,” were themselves defended that day by one thing alone: an
alert and heroic citizenry.

The Contours of Catastrophe
The twin towers have, unfortunately, become an iconic image of disaster. As dreadful as it is, the image of the standing unscathed, smoking, or collapsing twin towers have become incredibly evocative to say the least. Even the void left by the towers has a semiotic power. Constantin Boym modified the original, more pristine, twin towers (during the first attack) to a revised pair bearing the marks of the two planes.

A few of Boym's Buildings of Disaster: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the WTC

A decade has passed and bin Laden is dead. The original charter of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad–Zawahiri’s original home–which suggested that the Egyptian regime would have to be violently overthrown, has been quite fantastically disproven. In considering of 9/11 and the wars that followed I remember passage XXI of the Tao Te Ching:

When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them
with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe the rites of
mourning.

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Cartoons, Meet Combat. Combat, Cartoons.

Cartoons, Meet Combat. Combat, Cartoons.

 

Cars 2 starts with not only cars but boats. Minutes in, we’re introduced to Tony Trihull, who’s guarding a platform swarming with Bad Guys (or Bad Cars). I didn’t find out his name until later, and at that moment thought, “what an odd boat, it looks almost like a submarine”. It turns out it was a boat (the name being a bit of a giveaway), and like any vehicle in the Cars franchise, it’s got a liberal grounding in The Real.

Tony Trihull and the USS Independence

 

It’s the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and, as its name implies, is a vessel intended for close to shore, or sea-to-shore operations. As is implied by Tony’s name, it’s a trihull and has no forward decks to speak of. As you’ll see in the diagrams (or even by just watching Cars 2 as Tony turns around), there is a substantial  rear deck for most configurations.

Segueing into configurations, it’s modular and can be fitted with a number of these modules depending on its intended application. So much hardware is in the modules and tied with vessel systems that it almost becomes a different ship depending on which module it’s fitted with, as the some of the names imply: Mine Hunter, Surface Warfare, Anti-submarine Warfare, etc. One carries a number of new-ish helicopter drones (the MQ-8B UAV), making for quite a sexy package.

MQ-8B heli-drone

Israel had initially expressed an interest in the LCS, but opted to build its own. Other potential customers include Saudi Arabia and China.

While we’re at it, a trivia question (prize TBD): how many countries have no Littoral (coast, i.e. “landlocked”), ocean or even large lake? BONUS: how many countries have no coast but still have a navy?


Incidentally, I’d come up with a moniker for a country completely enclosed by another (only one, with only one border): “statelocked”. Lesotho https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/lt.html is my personal favorite; the Holy See (Vatican City) is perhaps more obvious, but it’s not so much a “state” and certainly isn’t in the UN pantheon (though it is an observer, as is the Palestinian Authority). There are more of these than you might think…

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