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The Death of Osama bin Laden

The Death of Osama bin Laden

by on May 2, 2011 in Terrorism

Hearing of crowds gathering outside the White House, or chants of, “USA! USA!” at a ball game was that the primary beneficiary (or even impacted party) will be Americans themselves. The effect is largely symbolic: this is more a sort of closure for us rather than a strategic victory in the pursuit of the “Global War on Terror(ism)” (GWoT).

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There’s a message here about our willingness to act unilaterally (it’s not clear whether the government of Pakistan approved the action or we have a de jure violation of sovereignty)–though it’s not really as if that was in doubt. And interestingly, the apparently stable residence of UBL was not in a cave somewhere on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border but not far from Islamabad–this puts a fine point on the reliability of our Pakistani partners. One can imagine both good and bad outcomes for that relationship as a result of UBL’s killing, and unfortunately my confidence is wholeheartedly for the former.

 

A dear friend just sent me this  pic from the decisive moment–which I’d missed because I was writing this. Incidentally, they appear to be in the briefing room aside the Situation Room. No idea why they’re not in the sitroom proper…

But this will not be a “decapitation” by any stretch of the imagination; there are a number of affiliates outside of AQ Prime, and the likelihood that they’ve acted without any direction from the franchisee is extremely high. AQAP, AQIM, what’s left of AQI. And then there are those more loosely affiliated (at least nominally): al-Shabaab, LeT, Abu Sayyaf, Islamic Jihad (in Egypt), the IMU, etc. The diversity of the groups associated (even barely) with AQ Prime puts the geographic and ideological diversity of these groups in sharp relief and should make us carefully weigh the costs versus the benefits of how we engage them.

There was something interesting in Obama’s speech:

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSNN4c4rICg[/youtube]

The idea that the Obama administration was following this lead for months and pursued this degree of certainty before acting might temper old accusations of “dithering” regarding the delays in his 2009 Afghanistan strategy review (detailed in somewhat delightfully excruciating detail in Woodward’s Obama’s Wars). Or perhaps the “behind-the-scenes” insights offered by the book are a red herring. Or perhaps the duration reflects an effort to protect “sources and methods” as well as to “run this thread to ground”. One might hope there’ll be a Woodward accounting informed by another gang of self-serving (but on the whole honest, or at least mutually-balancing) insiders.

The elimination of UBL is yet another challenge to AQ sub-narratives (in this case, the inviolability of the figurehead). Al Zawahiri (now probably himself the “new #1 target) also took a hit when the government of Egypt was overthrown without resort to the methods prescribed by his prior affiliation, Islamic Jihad.

No doubt the GWoT has not been (nor will it be) “won”, but perhaps this symbolic event will serve as sufficient pretext for us to withdraw from some of the most costly and unattainable aspects of our engagement in Afghanistan.

Also, on the question of the reliability of our Pakistani partners, Steve Coll asks:

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests… that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose?

WaPo’s got an interesting set of graphics and text, particularly concerning the ritual preparation and burial of bin Laden’s body.

 

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Shipspotting: Razzle Dazzle

Shipspotting: Razzle Dazzle

by on May 1, 2011 in Shipspotting

Some really interesting ephemeral innovations can happen at the interstices between technological eras. This is particularly the case in military history, especially for the often brief period before both sides adopt the new technology (such as with gunpowder, iron cannons, breech-loading guns, rifled barrels, tracked vehicles i.e. tanks, jets, etc.).

In the period before advanced remote sensing technologies such as radar and aerial surveillance, nautical warfare had to rely on more rudimentary means for identifying enemy ships, and especially their range, speed, and bearing. Think Horatio Hornblower and his brass telescope…

For a brief period beginning in WWI and ending at various points during and after WWII (where radar and aerial surveillance made visual camouflage increasingly obsolete), we had “dazzle camouflage”. As you’ll read, its purpose was not out-and-out concealment or disguise, but rather confusion (again, with the goal of confounding identification of type of vessel, range, speed, and bearing).

Whether or how well it worked is unknown, but we can expect that the more identification relied on purely visual means, it’s effectiveness would have been at least marginal, and likely even more so in the case of submarines where rangefinding would have been especially reliant on what you could do through a periscope.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the technique was developed by an artist; the intersection of massive military machines and what resembles “decoration” (the attractiveness of which being particularly debatable in many cases) is quite stunning.

A wonderful collection of images can be found here.

Perhaps we find ourselves (briefly, if at all) at another of these interstices–with similar techniques applied to human faces and meant to confound automated facial recognition systems.

 

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Strategies of Failure

Strategies of Failure

by on April 17, 2011 in Terrorism

Why would a terrorist claim credit for a failed (sometimes badly) attack?


The botched Times Square plot; Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban”, TTP) claims responsibility.

AFP

The Christmas Day “underwear bomber” attempt; Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claims responsibility.

The air cargo/toner cartridges attempt; again, AQAP claims responsibility.

Reuters / Hyungwon Kang

Tactical failures might be seen to have some strategic success when the target or its protectors react in ways that are costly and ultimately futile. In a “bleeding” strategy, they might, in essence, be bleeding themselves.

Al Qaeda had historically tended not to to claim responsibility for even successful attacks (most notably the East Africa embassy bombings). And certainly never for failed attacks or foiled plots (Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, the 2006 transatlantic air plot–which was, incidentally, the seminal event that led to us checking constrained volumes of shampoo and mouthwash in Ziploc bags); all these have been linked to AQ.

Reuters

Some insight might be gleaned from Usama bin Laden (UBL) himself, in claiming that our response to minor financial and physical efforts on the part of terrorists may cost millions, even billions. A particularly literal reading of asymmetric warfare:

…for example, al-Qaida spent $500 000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost – according to the lowest estimate – more than 500 billion dollars. Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And possibly, a lesson on measuring the means and goals of our reactions:

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahideen to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

Ultimately, the Times Square attempt, the Christmas Day bomb attempt, etc., were foiled not by law enforcement or military measures, but by ordinary people–street vendors, even. UBL says, “Your security is in your own hands”; I suspect this isn’t what he means, but I’m really fond of Stephen Flynn’s formulation of taking one’s security into their own hands:

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.

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Apocalypse Mickey Redux

Apocalypse Mickey Redux

by on April 15, 2011 in laf

I was talking to a friend at work the other day; he’d just been to Metreon “theatre” and made some terribly clever reference to the orgiastic confection of cinema fauxstalgia plaster and noise-making machines. Something akin to “movie hell”.

It reminded me of something similarly clever my wife said, years ago, at the same location, in something of the same spirit. It was one of those claw crane games, and the vitrine was filled with many of the same thing: a pile of stuffed Mickey Mouses, but instead of the familiar flesh/black/red pants, they were entirely red and white. A whole pile of them. My wife’s acerbic observation: “apocalypse Mickey”.

Of course I’d snapped a picture at that moment, and wanted to share. I knew I’d used the picture for a test post here, and was navigating in vain when I remembered this WordPress theme’s dastardly effective SEO. So I googled “apocalypse Mickey”, expecting to be the first result (given the uniqueness of the phrase and the aforementioned SEO), but it was actually second, and I was terribly curious what else might actually warrant the moniker.

Wow. Apparently one of the many novel artifacts of WWII were these Mickey Mouse gas masks.

On January 7th, 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor, T.W. Smith, Jr., the owner of the Sun Rubber Company, and his designer, Dietrich Rempel, with Walt Disney’s approval introduced a protective mask for children. This design of the Mickey Mouse Gas Mask for children was presented to Major General William N. Porter, Chief of the ChemicalWarfare Service. After approval of the CWS, Sun Rubber Products Company produced sample masks for review. Other comic book character designs were to follow, depending on the success of the Mickey Mouse mask.

The mask was designed so children would carry it and wear it as part of a game. This would reduce the fear associated with wearing a gas mask and hopefully, improve their wear time and, hence, survivability.

I have a fond imagining of T.W. Smith, Jr. pitching this to a panel of stern-countenanced brass at the War Department, Smith at the other side of the room in a rumpled khaki suit: “you know–for kids!”

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Shipspotting: Office Window

Shipspotting: Office Window

by on April 10, 2011 in Shipspotting

I was sitting in a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a new person (in a corner conference room with sweeping views of the bay right over the Ferry Building–31st floor) and mentioned obiter dictum that we might be about to have a novel sighting of a–probably quite old and rusty–military vessel. Indeed, minutes later, there it was in the company of three tugs. Traveling backwards, in fact, just to put a fine point on the novelty.

SS Lincoln

 

The Suisun Bay “Mothball Fleet”
The vessel (I haven’t had time to ID it yet) was an old military ship from the “mothball fleet” at Suisun Bay, formally the National Defense Reserve Fleet, a collection of some 50-200+ assorted vessels, from cargo ships to battleships (just one, actually) from as far back as WWII, kept in a state of at least nominal readiness in case of any of a variety of crises.

The reason this ship and others before was passing the window is due to the ultimate decommissioning of the fleet as the result of a suit between the State (and a collection of environmental organizations  such as NRDC) and MARAD. The ships are conveyed by tug to the BAE Systems dry dock in SF for “cleaning” (particularly paint removal) after which they’re towed some 5,000 miles (through the Panama Canal) before ultimate shipbreaking and “recycling” in Texas. Morbidly romantic as that circuitous journey may sound, this business may be kept local soon (see below, pentultimate graf)…

Most so far have seem to come from "Row J"

After seeing the first of several of these boats travel by, I’d determined to do the “official” mothball fleet tour, which my wife and I did last Memorial Day (auspicious-seeming, but the tour was for the most part unceremonious).

Right before the meeting I’d noticed something odd-looking on the water steaming in,. I launched an iPhone app which shows ships’ AIS transponders on a map showed three tugs escorting nothing–this is often a giveaway as the ships being hauled from Suisuin Bay don’t have AIS transponders.

Helicopter Carrier
He mentioned having recently been cycling down near the BAE drydock and seeing something that looked like a squat aircraft carrier. It happens that that ship had been an earlier Suisun Bay craft I’d seen on it way to demise. It was one of seven Iwo Jima-class helicopter carriers built for Vietnam War service. It is visually striking indeed; it certainly caught my eye on its first pass, and his description is, though basic, quite apt. It’d made an appearance in the film, “Apollo 13”, standing in for the eponymous USS Iwo Jima which had hosted the recovery of the actual Apollo 13 recovery.

Note: until now I’d been rather smug at having identified it as the USS New Orleans, as review of some satellite imagery led me to believe that it was one of two Iwo Jima-class carriers that had been at Suisun Bay, and the other had already been sunk during SINKEX exercises (a side topic I’d thought of mentioning here, but alas I’ve run out of steam–also, I’d have talked about “artificial reefing” in the same context), but “thanks” to Wikipedia I’ve discovered the New Orleans was also 86’d in the same manner.

The USS New Orleans goes down in a blaze of glory (US Navy)

In fact, almost all seven have; I’ve failed in this instance of shipspotting–perhaps I can redeem myself slightly by reiterating that I usually am quite busy! I’m now going with the USS Tripoli. The fact that it had done very late duty (recently, in fact) as a test platform for the Ballistic Missile Defense system would in fact explain the radome she now sports. But anyone with more gumption I might find it in the MARAD inventory.

Left, the Tripoli returning after modification post-BMD tests. Right, the X ship as seen by friend (note the radome on both).

There’s also a substantial industrial/economic element not to be forgotten, here: the first two vessels to be decommissioned fetched $1.47 million to BAE Systems (for drydocking and cleaning and $2.1 million to ALL Star Metals for the chopping up and recycling. Again, that’s just for the first 2 of at least 57. A facility has been purpose-built just for these jobs (I’m not sure whether any of the ships have gone there yet). With the creation of the Mare Island facility, the whole process (cleaning to recycling) can be done locally. Eureka! Jobs created, Congressmen crow.

A Few Other Mothball Ships of Interest
Later I’ll mention a couple particularly interesting vessels that are or have lived at Suisun Bay, including:

Sea Shadow

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