Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

The strategy behind Pakistani nuclear development

Today, there are three important strategic beliefs [in Pakistan] regarding nuclear weapons that were largely absent when [Zulfiqar Ali] Bhutto took power in 1971 but have since become dominant in Pakistani strategic thought. First, nuclear weapons are the only guarantee of Pakistan’s national survival in the face of both an inveterately hostile India that cannot be deterred conventionally and unreliable external allies that fail to deliver in extremis. Second, Pakistan’s nuclear program is unfairly singled out for international opposition because of its Muslim population. This feeling of victimization is accentuated by a belief that India consistently “gets away with” violating global nonproliferation norms. Third is the belief that India, Israel, or the United States might use military force to stop Pakistan’s nuclear program. Today, these three beliefs—nuclear necessity for survival, international discrimination against Pakistan, and danger of disarming attacks—form the center of Pakistani strategic thinking about nuclear weapons. Collectively, these convictions have served to reinforce the determination of Pakistan’s military, bureaucratic, and scientific establishment to pay any political, economic, or technical cost to reach their objective of a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Khan, Feroz Hassan. Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb. Stanford University Press; Stanford. 2012. p. 6

Saudi Arabia and the political economy of oil

The fact that oil money helped develop the power of the muwahhidun in Arabia after 1930 and made possible the resurgence of Islamic political movements in the 1970s has often been noted. But it is equally important to understand that, by the same token, it was an Islamic movement that made possible the profits of the oil industry. The political economy of oil did not happen, in some incidental way, to relied on a government in Saudi Arabia that owed its own power to the force of an Islamic political movement. Given the features of the political economy of oil – the enormous rents available, the difficulty in securing those rents due to the overabundance of supply, the pivotal role of Saudi Arabia in maintaining scarcity, the collapse of older colonial methods of imposing anti-market corporate control of the Saudi oilfields – oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political control of Arabia: the House of Saud in alliance with the muwahhidun. The latter were not incidental, but became an internal element in the political economy of oil. ‘Jihad’ was not simply a local force antithetical to the development of ‘McWorld’; McWorld, it turns out, was really McJihad, a necessary combination of social logics and forces.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 213 (italics in original)

Mitchell on “Carbon Democracy”

A surprising oversight in Timothy Mitchell’s generally-insightful Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is how he gives relatively little consideration to static versus mobile forms of fossil fuel consumption. He strongly emphasizes the production and transportation logistics of coal versus oil, but gives little consideration to special needs for fuels with high energy density (and sometimes low freezing points) in transport applications from cars and trucks to aircraft and rockets. People sometimes assume that oil demand and electricity production are more related than they really are, especially in jurisdictions where oil is mostly used as transport fuel and for heating (both areas where little electricity is generally used).

At a minimum, I think it’s important to give some special consideration to the needs of the aerospace and aviation industries, especially when pondering biofuel alternatives. Also, we need to try to project things like the deployment rate of electric ground vehicles in various applications, when trying to project how the forms of energy production and use in the future affect politics and low-carbon policy choices.

Supergrade

The technical term “supergrade” has had a pair of distinctly American meanings:

(a) A supergrade was the civilian equivalent of an Army general

(b) Supergrade is industry parlance for plutonium alloy bearing an exceptionally high fraction of Pu-239 (>95%), leaving a very low amount of Pu-240 which is a gamma emitter in addition to being a high spontaneous fission isotope

Quantum sensors and vulnerable submarines

A recent technology quarterly about new quantum innovations, published in The Economist, referred to a disturbing development in quantum sensor technology:

Military types are interested, too. “You can’t shield gravity,” says David Delpy, who leads the Defence Scientific Advisory Council in Britain’s defence ministry. Improved gravity sensors would be able to spot moving masses under water, such as submarines or torpedoes, which could wipe out the deterrent effect of French and British nuclear submarines.

So much of the present nuclear balance of power (such as it is) depends on ballistic missile submarines being essentially invulnerable by virtue of being impossible to locate. Reportedly, almost no crew members about an American boomer (as subs carrying nuclear missiles are known) know the precise location of the ship, and nobody on land has the information.

If states suddenly feel their subs are vulnerable, it risks two big effects. First, it raises tensions in a crisis. If states fear they will lose their seaborne second strike capability, they may be inclined to launch a nuclear attack earlier. Second, if the safest leg of the nuclear triad (along with bombers and land-based missiles) suddenly seems vulnerable, it’s likely they will assemble and deploy more weapons in more locations, wasting money and raising the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.

As with other emerging nuclear-related technologies like hypersonic weapons, it would be better for everyone if we could agree to prohibit sensors that threaten subs. Alas, states are rarely so cooperative or trusting.

Dictatorships and the coercive dilemma

Coercive institutions are a dictator’s final defense in pursuit of political survival, but also his chief obstacle to achieving that goal. This book argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to organize their internal security apparatus to protect against a coup, or to deal with the threat of popular unrest. Because coup-proofing calls for fragmented and socially exclusive organizations, while protecting against popular unrest demands unitary and inclusive ones, autocrats cannot simultaneously maximize their defenses against both threats. When dictators assume power, then, they must (and often do) choose which threat to prioritize. That choice, in turn, has profound consequences for the citizens who live under their rule. A fragmented, exclusive coercive apparatus gives its agents social and material incentives to escalate rather than dampen violence, and also hampers agents from collecting the intelligence necessary to engaged in targeted, discriminate, and pre-emptive repression. A unitary and inclusive apparatus configured to address significant mass unrest, however, has much better intelligence capability vis-a-vis its own citizens, and creates incentives for agents to minimize the use of violence and to rely instead on alternative means of repression, including surveillance and targeted pre-emption. Given its stronger intelligence capability, the mass-oriented coercive apparatus is also better at detecting and responding to changes in the nature of threats than its coup-proofed counterpart, leading to predictable patterns of institutional change that are neither entirely path dependent nor entirely in keeping with the optimization predicted by rational design.

Greitens, Sheena Chestnut. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence. Cambridge University Press. 2016. p. 4-5

Sheena was in the Oxford M.Phil in International Relations program during the same two years as I was, and we both served on the executive of the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group.

Related:

JSOC and al-Qaeda

It is one of history’s little ironies that al-Qaeda itself was set up as a JSOC-like group. The main trainer of al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11 was Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian American army sergeant who had served at Ft. Bragg, the headquarters of JSOC. In the 1980s, Mohamed taught courses on the Middle East and Islam at the Special Warfare Center at the army base. During his leave from the army, he trained al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan using Special Forces manuals he had pilfered from Ft. Bragg. His life as an al-Qaeda double agent was not discovered until 1998.

Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. Crown Publishers; New York. 2012. p. 153

Intentions, outcomes, and rejustifications

This [claim by Al Qaeda military commander Saif al-Adel that Osama bin Laden deliberately provoked the United States into attacking Afghanistan] was a post facto rationalization of Al-Qaeda’s strategic failure. The whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to get the United States out of the Muslim world, not to provoke it into invading and occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing al-Qaeda’s closest ideological ally, the Taliban. September 11, in fact, resembled Pearl Harbor. Just as the Japanese scored a tremendous tactical victory on December 7, 1941, they also set in motion a chain of events that led to the eventual collapse of Imperial Japan. So, too, the 9/11 attacks set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of much of al-Qaeda and, eventually, the death of its leader.

Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. Crown Publishers; New York. 2012. p. 58-9. Emphasis in original.