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Seventy per cent of Afghans surveyed see poverty and unemployment as the major cause of the conflict in their country, according to new research by international aid agency Oxfam and a group of Afghan organisations. Ordinary Afghans blame government weakness and corruption as the second most important factor behind the fighting, with the Taliban coming third, followed by interference by neighboring countries.
Al Qaeda today no longer poses a direct national security threat to the United States itself, but rather poses a second-order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al Qaeda-trained or -inspired terrorist managing to pull off an attack on the scale of something in between the 1993 Trade Center attack, which killed six, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168.
Robotic systems can’t replace a pilot’s gut instinct
BY COL. JAMES JINNETTE, USAF
Unmanned combat systems have fundamental limitations that can make their technology a war-losing proposition. These limitations involve network vulnerabilities, release consent judgment and, most importantly, creative capacity during air combat and close air support (CAS) missions. Although futurists might assume these problems away with grand ideas of technologies yet to be developed, during the next few decades these limitations will remain critical constraints on our ability to provide airpower in the joint fight.
AIR FORCE COL. JAMES JINNETTE is director of the Air Force Element at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a recent Army War College graduate. Prior to his current posting, Jinnette was an F-15E squadron commander. He has completed three close air support deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.
Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
In 1987, the conservative author Midge Decter described her association with Israel and those willing to place it above conventional judgment. ‘We know ourselves to be bound by ties so deep, so essential, so unconditional, that they are beyond daylight examination. To be a Jew is not an act, it is a fate. The existence of Israel is absolutely central to that fate. The rest is mere details – knowable, unknowable, makes no difference.’
This vein of thinking can be gathered from Israel’s leader David Ben-Gurion in a New York Times Magazine article in December 1960. On that occasion he was defending the illegal abduction of the war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who had been nabbed by Mossad agents from Argentina. ‘I know they [the abductors] committed a breach of the law, but sometimes they are moral obligations higher than formal law.’
This idea of Israel, and Jewish fate, being placed in the realm of an obligatory ‘higher law’, does lend itself to various, dangerous implications. Decter’s observations resonate with the recent decision by Tel Aviv to allow 900 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem in the sprawling Jewish neighbourhood of Gilo. 40,000 Israelis are already resident there. President Obama has gone so far as to see the move as ‘dangerous’. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon has publicly seen the gesture as one that undermines the peace effort.
International conventions and views, which tend to find such settlements illegal, are considered inapplicable by the rank and file in Tel Aviv. The law of nations, that seemingly abstract body of customs and norms that are often more honoured than people might realize, are cast aside as undue hindrances to the functioning of the state.
The perceptive social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, claims that Israeli policy persists in being made in the shadow of the Holocaust. The narrative of threatened existence girds such policies, whether they be ruthless measures against the Palestinians, or the issue of constructing more settlements. A state of affairs like an ‘indivisible’ Jerusalem are created, an assertion of something supposedly non-negotiable. Lines are drawn across borders, and there is a stubborn refusal to budge.
The “1000 ship Navy” is a delusional concept that assumes we can count on other navies–the same delusion that led to the Navy being heavy in the 1980's and 1990's while completely lacking in “small craft” such as mine-sweepers. We wrote the original J-2 Plans piece on Somali pirates in 2005 and nothing was done–years later both U.S Navy and U.S. Special Operations colleagues told us nothing was done because the problem was not expensive enough (we are NOT making this up!). We even volunteered to do some quick and dirty honey trap runs with 70-80 foot yatches available cheap in Turkey, each carrying a couple of topless babes on top and a squad of pissed-off SEALs lounging below, gattling guns at the ready. No takers….hence proving the point that slogans are no substitute for strategic thinking.
Our own original 450-Ship Navy article was accepted by USNI in the 1990's and then constantly pushed back from publication as various Admirals got their ghost-written pet rocks published. We finally sent back the $750 and published it through a defense news online service. More recently, we updated it, and below is the graphic and link to the updated article. Three CNO's in a row have blown this off, the USN appears to be unable to design a total Navy and is still not serious about littoral or expedtionary operations, support to stabilization & reconstruction operations, or our favorite, “peace from the sea.”
