Category: Bombs and rockets

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

Psychological factors in conveying intelligence

“The process of relaying intelligence can distort its meaning. Content can be altered unconsciously in transmission. Garbled data are made to appear more coherent when relayed in conversation, allowing actual disjunctions between facts to be replaced by false connections; lengthy information can be made shorter; details are suppressed subconsciously if they are not consistent with the rest of the relayer’s message; and transmission errors tend to make the message sound like what the person transmitting it had been expecting to hear. Subordinates also tend to bias messages so as to minimize distress to their superiors; transmitting individuals tend toward ‘closure’ of incomplete images and ‘confabulating detail where gaps are conspicuous’; long periods of time are reported as shorter; and short ones as longer. Early on the morning the Yom Kippur War began, a trusted source warned Israel that the Arabs would attack that day. Somewhere in the communication chain the time of six o’clock was added erroneously to the warning. The Arabs struck over four hours sooner.”

Betts, R.K. “Surprise despite warning: Why sudden attacks succeed” in Andrew, Christopher et al eds. Secret Intelligence: A Reader. London; Routledge. 2009. p. 94 (paperback)

[Update: 13 May 2013] More on the same topic:

“When a consumer is faced with data he prefers not to believe, he can fall back on four psychological mechanisms.

First, he can be more attentive to reassuring data. The threshold at which evidence confirming the individual’s assumptions is recognized comes well before the threshold for contradictory evidence. Information that challenges reigning expectations or wishes ‘is often required, in effect, to meet higher standards of evidence and to pass stricter tests to gain acceptance than new information that supports existing expectations and hypotheses.’ The consumer can also challenge the credibility of the source. An analyst or agency that has been chronically wrong in the past can be dismissed. Some political leaders also tend to be skeptical of advice from military sources and suspicious that professional soldiers manipulate information in order to gain authorization for desired changes in posture. A consumer’s belief that the person giving him information has an ideological axe to grind, or a vested interest in changing policy, will tend to discredit the information. Third, the decision maker can appreciate the warnings, but suspend judgment and order stepped-up intelligence collection to confirm the threat, hoping to find contradictory evidence that reduces the probability the enemy will strike. Finally, the consumer can rationalize. He may focus on the remaining ambiguity of the evidence rather than on the balance between threatening and reassuring data, letting his wish become father to his thought. He can explain away mounting but inconclusive threats by considering other elements of the context, or believing that enemy mobilization is precautionary and defensive. In many cases such reasoning is quite correct. The likelihood a responsible policymaker will let himself think this way varies directly with the severity of the specific costs involved in response to the warning and with the availability of reassuring evidence. There are always some data to dampen alarm. Such data can also be fabricated.” p.99 (paperback) emphasis in original

A lot of this seems quite applicable in the case of policy-makers deciding whether or not to take serious action in response to climate change.

Leading and managing

“The [Central Intelligence] Agency’s position is that it evaluates and trains its senior offices in management ability, but there is a substantial difference between the two concepts: leadership requires inspiring people, while management involves stewardship of resources. The U.S. military observes this distinction: their doctrine is that one leads people and manages non-human resources. Managing, instead of leading, is to treat them as commodities.”

Jones, Garrett. “It’s a cultural thing: thoughts on a troubled CIA” in Andrew, Christopher et al eds. Secret Intelligence: A Reader. London; Routledge. 2009. p. 33 (paperback)

The Looking Glass War

I picked up a library copy of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War because all my own books were in moving boxes, and to begin re-habituating myself to intensive reading in the lead-up to my comprehensive exam in August.

The novel is what you would expect from le Carré: not sensationalized, conveying a sense of awareness about realistic tradecraft. The characters aren’t much differentiated, but the writing is very good and the book seems like a nice counterweight to the sensationalism of the general espionage genre. For instance, there are a number of detailed passages about the inconveniences of operating a WWII-era radio using Morse code. The bureaucratic turf war that forms the primary motivation for the action in the novel seems depressingly realistic.

To sum up: it’s a reasonably interesting quick read which provides the sense of a brush with realism that distinguishes le Carré from other writers in the genre.

William James on war

“History is a bath of blood,” wrote William James, whose 1906 antiwar essay is arguably the best ever written on the subject. “Modern war is so expensive,” he continued, “that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.” (emphasis in original)

Wilson, E.O. The Social Conquest of Earth. (New York, Norton, 2012) (p.62 hardcover)

Phone hacking – everything is a computer these days

This video shows off some of the realistic attacks that can be performed against office-type landline telephones these days:

The presentation in this video was made by by by Ang Cui, a researcher from the Columbia University Intrusion Detection Systems Lab.

More information about the ‘symbiote’ protective software mentioned in the video is on their site. Weird that hacking your own phone to address failures in the firmware might be the best way of improving the security of your network…

I wonder if the Columbia researchers collaborate at all with U of T’s Citizen Lab…

Lesbian wedding at West Point

This is encouraging:

A West Point first: Chapel hosts same-sex wedding

“Penelope Gnesin and Brenda Sue Fulton, a West Point graduate, exchanged vows in the regal church in an afternoon ceremony, attended by about 250 guests and conducted by a senior Army chaplain.

…

The ceremony was the second same-sex wedding at West Point. Last weekend, two of Fulton’s friends, a young lieutenant and her partner, were married in another campus landmark, the small Old Cadet Chapel in West Point’s cemetery.”

I once spent a week at West Point for a conference and found the people there to be unusually level-headed and concerned about ethical issues.

First thoughts on Joseph Anton

As an antidote to my more intolerable academic reading, I have started working through Joseph Anton – Salman Rushdie’s memoir about the aftermath of the death edict issued against him through Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa. He calls it: “his unfunny Valentine from those bearded men, those shrouded women, and the lethal old man dying in his room, making his last bid for some sort of dark, murderous glory”. Rushdie goes on to suggest that the purpose behind the decree was to distract domestic opinion from the disaster of the Iran-Iraq war: “The real imam had taken his country into a useless war with its neighbor, and a generation of young people had died, hundreds of thousands of the country’s young, before the old man called a halt. He said that accepting peace with Iraq was like eating poison, but he had eaten it. After that the dead cried out against the imam and his revolution became unpopular. He needed a way to rally the faithful and found it in the form of a book and its author. The book was the devil’s work and the author was the devil that gave him the enemy he needed. This author in this basement flat in Islington huddling with the wife from whom he was half estranged. This was the necessary devil of the dying man” (p.11 hardcover).

As would be expected from the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, it is a rich, dense text with nested sub-biographies of friends and family members. It is a book that demands time and attention but, unlike the academic prose, it is clear and not redundant. You need to pay attention because there is something important in each line.

So far, the book stands out as an affirmation of the importance of free speech and of questioning religious dogma. Rushdie explains that his family name was the invention of his grandfather and an homage to Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd: an atheist scholar of religious belief from the 12th century. Rushdie describes “the flag of Ibn Rushd” “which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation” (p.23 hardcover).