Eagle Watch

a Calm Discussion about Iran

2012-02-03T10:40:42Z

There are five seemingly unrelated issues regarding American relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran. First among them is the fact that Iran has been in an unresolved state of war against the Untied States since the Embassy takeover in 1979. It should be remembered that, up until September 11 2001, Hizbollah, an Iranian creation that is funded and armed from Tehran, had killed more Americans than all other terrorist groups combined. We ignore this state of affairs. That fact projects an image of national weakness in the Persian mind. And that fosters an environment favorable to miscalculation.

The obvious issue between us is the nuclear one. The problem here is one of a flawed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, negotiated in more innocent times. Iran, or any other signatory, can produce all the pieces of a uranium fission warhead, and not be in violation of NPT unless and until the pieces are assembled into a warhead. This is a condition known as being “a screw away,” and is what the world assumed of Israel for about 20 years[1]. The threshold technology permitted under the Treaty is the fuel cycle – allowing non-nuclear powers to master the enrichment and reprocessing of non-fissionable uranium or spent reactor fuel into fuel pellets (or, further enriched, into weapons-grade material). At the time the Treaty was written, there were only four nuclear powers – Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, and if they were grandfathered-in as the only nations allowed to process or reprocess nuclear materials, things would be greatly simplified today.

Two things to consider here: the geopolitical value of nuclear ambiguity; and, the difference between being able to build a nuclear explosive and building a deliverable warhead. Israel has played the ambiguity card expertly during her various disputes with her neighbors – no one willing to take steps thought to cross a line that might provoke Israel into using nuclear weapons (if they had them). Though it’s still not confirmed (no Israeli test of a nuclear device has ever been detected), it is assumed they have mastered the design and manufacture of deliverable nuclear warheads. The point is, look at how the rest of world has to treat Iran now, knowing that they might be on the brink of developing them. Might. Ambiguity.

DPRK is an excellent example of the second conundrum in dealing with emerging nuclear states. We know they have tested two devices, one generally thought to be a “fizzle,” or partial detonation. That is technically challenging enough, but it is only the first half of the task. Ever see “the Gadget” device built at Alamogordo [NM] to see if the Manhattan Project figured out how build a fission weapon? It’s huge, with detonation circuitry exposed and sequencers hard-wired to the control bunker 5.7 miles away. It had an estimated yield of 20KT (the explosive equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT). The “Little Boy” linear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima 20 days later exploded with a yield of 14.2KT. We had reduced the physics package into a smaller, deliverable bomb that was 71% as efficient as the technology tester[2]. It’s a lot harder now that miniaturization is drastically increased by having to place the physics package into a re-entry vehicle and must be sequenced and detonated in the terminal phase over the target hundreds (or thousands) of miles away. We still have no evidence, for instance, that DPRK has produced a single deliverable warhead.

Iran could be bluffing all the way – playing with the West while extracting as many concessions as it can before we find out nothing’s behind the curtain. This would fit the Middle Eastern mindset as how to manipulate what they view as a weak adversary. Iran could be setting up to produce fissile uranium to use as terror weapons against the West, using Hizbollah or others to actually carry out dirty-bomb or contamination raids. Iran could be gaining the expertise to get a screw away, breaking out with an actual nuclear weapon only if existentially threatened with destruction. Iran could be in a full-fledged rush to clandestinely develop a deliverable nuclear weapon. Evidence to date supports any of these scenarios, needing more insight into the intent of the ruling mullahs to strengthen or weaken arguments favoring each possibility. My own personal view is that Iran is trying to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon to use in their campaign to dominate the Greater Middle East – not to use by deployment, rather using it to intimidate Sunni states to accept Iranian regional hegemony.

Another problem area with Iran is our use of diplomatic negotiations. In this arena, the West is from Venus and Iran is from Mars – we just don’t understand the Middle Eastern mind. A large part of the problem is that, culturally, the Arab/Persian mindset is still Old Testament while the Western mindset is more Alice in Wonderland. We try to contractually bind a rogue state to more normative behavior through a series of give-and-take agreements. Arabs/Persians try to buy time to complete the objected-to task by negotiating with their adversary. They don’t, by Western definition, negotiate in good faith. We saw this in the European-led five-year effort to negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear activities. As we were talking, they were accelerating their efforts.

The West has never negotiated from a position of strength – neither Europe nor the United States trusts Iran not to retaliate violently if pressed – and Tehran knows it. Iran has always been the stronger party at the negotiating table, and the strongest always wins. International negotiations are contests of will, and Iran knows that the West is weak-willed. This is especially true of Arab/Persian adversaries, who disdain the Western tradition of negotiation as a sign of weakness. Their culture sees no moral wrong in lying or ignoring obligations to “outsiders.” The only way to successfully negotiate with a hostile interlocutor is when the hostile interlocutor is the one who needs to negotiate.

Just as negotiating with Iran is a waste of time, our fixation on sanctions is inappropriate given the closing window on accomplishing the goal – getting Iran to forego their nuclear program. Again, DPRK demonstrates the futility of trying to target sanctions when dealing with a despotic authoritarian regime. The people always bear the brunt because the goods flow to the people through the hierarchy, and the hierarchy isn’t going short themselves in such a regime.

Iran has to be slicker with it than DPRK because the Iranian people are better educated and more sophisticated than the public in DPRK, but nonetheless, sanctions aimed at the Revolutionary Guard will not hurt them, only create shortages in the marketplace. This is balanced by the aforementioned populace, which has already rioted in the recent past (2009), and could do so again, bringing on brutal repression. This would have the same chilling effect that Tiananmen Square had on Chinese relations for years. The West also has to be cautious to see that the Iranian people don’t resent the West more for imposing hardship than resenting the regime for bringing it on.

Sanctions take a long time to actually pressure a regime, more so if they can’t be enforced – if there’s a Russia or PRC willing to penetrate the sanctions, supplying contraband to the regime. Part of the problem is that the West always begins with symbolic sanctions (rather than ones that will actually punish the target state), and work their way up to meaningful ones, and it’s the meaningful ones that take time to work. So the first few years of sanctions are actually wasted, only serving to let the target state to continue the objected-to behavior while the sanctioning states feel good about taking action. We should have targeted gasoline imports and banking activity years ago, but we didn’t, and so we are in the position of implementing sanctions that can’t work before Iran could develop a workable nuclear device. Style over substance has cost the West any chance of having sanctions work.

We are out of non-kinetic means of persuading Tehran to do something they see as being in their strategic national interest. Not going to happen.

And finally, the Iranian political structure gives them an additional ploy unavailable to most states – the Iranian President is only a figurehead used by the ruling mullahs as the “face of Iran.” They can sacrifice the president to public opinion or international pressure without affecting policy in any way. Style over substance. This “dramatic” change would, again, give Iran time in the public domain before the West figures out that nothing has changed. As noted above, time is what we are running out of. There is a growing consensus that Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium (LEU, or ~3% reactor grade) to further enrich into enough high-enriched uranium (HEU ≥90% weapons grade) to build four warheads. Tehran announced last month that they had successfully enriched some HEX (uranium hexafluoride) to 20% enrichment, a level used for medical applications, demonstrating their ability to enrich beyond the reactor fuel level.

Iran is led by an extreme warrior sect of a minority sect of Islam. They are engaged in a religious war against Sunnis, in particular, and the infidel West, in general, and see America as a decadent oaf that lacks the savvy or political will to protect itself. Nothing we are doing negates that impression.

The ruling mullahs practice an apocalyptic flavor of Shi’ite Islam that awaits the promised return of “the Twelfth Imam,” Muhammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī, who was born in 869 but believed not to have died but “hidden” by God to return someday in order to bring the world to Islam and peace to all. This, they believe, will be brought about by cataclysmic upheaval around the world. A dangerous religious dogma for a nation clandestinely seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

This isn’t about a nation’s rights any more than preventing a delusional psychotic from acquiring a gun is about the Second Amendment. A nation’s sovereignty, ultimately, is permitted by the other sovereign nations. This is a state led by a ruling council that entertains a defining religious justification for worldwide mayhem and sees a geopolitical advantage in regional instability. They are technically rational – adhering to a philosophically consistent behavior – but that philosophy is utterly alien to us, and thus they appear to act in unpredictable ways. We don’t understand them, and that is saturated with miscalculation.

Iran’s rhetoric is bellicose but their actions tend to be rather conservative – they see no advantage (religious or geopolitical) in being destroyed without the conflagration going worldwide. They covet being able to control the price of oil, but the Saudis do that through their dominance of OPEC. They know they can’t really close the Strait of Hormuz because America and Europe would annihilate their navy and air force. But all is answered (in their eyes) if they were nuclear-armed. Western retaliation would be all but eliminated if Iran had nuclear weapons, even more so if they had demonstrated the willingness to use them – favoring a public test as soon as they have developed a testable device, and open threats to use them in regional disputes. They could, in their view, close the Strait at will with impunity, thus controlling the price of oil, thus gaining regional dominance.

Iran is not going to be talked or sanctioned out of developing nuclear weapons. If anyone is actually serious about Iran “not being allowed” to acquire them, they are gong to have to be stopped. Containment and deterrence of a nuclear Iran is as misguided as are negotiations and sanctions, because, again, we simply do not understand how they think.

Israel has two dogs in this fight – Iran has repeatedly proclaimed its intention to “wipe Israel off the map;” and, they are convinced that President Obama isn’t going to do anything whatsoever to stop Iranian from getting a bomb. This plays into the situation because, again, we are running out of time, and our timeframe is different from that of Israel. We see the red line as producing a workable device; Israel sees the red line as moving their production facilities into Qom (or some other buried facility impervious to air attack). Israel’s window is closing faster than ours. Any action taken against Iran on Iranian soil will be interpreted by them as being an American-Israeli operation and will unleash retaliation against both.

[1] It is now assumed that Israel has ~200 assembled warheads, probably stored separately from their delivery vehicles.

[2] Although the same amount of uranium was used in Little Boy as in the Gadget, the actual bomb utilized the simpler, linear gun type of bringing the fissionable material into critical mass – the beginning of the chain reaction. The Gadget used the implosion method of compressing a hollow sphere of fissionable material into critical mass. The difference in detonation “stretch” – the amount of time the material was critical before it blew itself apart – was only micro-seconds, but enough to reduce the yield by 29%.

the “Green” Movement

2012-01-30T12:52:00Z

The highly publicized – first by the White House, now by the media – “Green Movement,” which subsidizes alternative energy while strangling hydrocarbon-based energy, is a near-perfect example of why government is the worst source for making generalized economic policy.

First, on broad-stoke issues. Assuming that we need to rid ourselves of hydrocarbon-based energy, and that we must do it now, politicians offer nothing substantive beyond the statement itself. The assumption is accepted as axiomatic. There should be a rational conversation on both halves of that assumption – that change is necessary, and that change must occur now.

Assuming that we must wean from hydrocarbon-based energy, given the current state of alternative energy technology, how long will it take for viable alternatives to be in a position to replace hydrocarbons for transportation, electrical power generation and winter heating without severely stunting GDP, all other things being equal? In other words, how long do we have to ramp-down oil and gas use? Again, two parts – how long will it take, and how much will it cost?

Government is functionally silent on both parts. In public, politicians act as though we can do it tomorrow if we just let go of gasoline and incandescent light bulbs; and, of course it will cost more, but it’s worth it. In reality, they are clueless on the first part and indifferent to the second.

We have a test-case for following the administration’s blueprint for rapid adoption of existing alternative energy sources: Spain. Europe’s current policy and strategy for supporting the so-called “green jobs” or renewable energy dates back to 1997, and has become one of the principal justifications for [our] “green jobs” proposals. Like politicians everywhere, the Spanish government phased-in their proposals over a five-year period, so it wasn’t really in effect until 2002. How did “green jobs” do? In 2002, unemployment is Spain was 11.3% - normal for heavily socialized and taxed Europe – and in 2008 (the year that the global recession hit in November) it was 13.9%. It is now over 20%.

Turns out that a rush to “Green Energy” cost the conventional economy 2.1 jobs for every “Green” job created. Everything touched by the “Green Economy” rose in cost. Spain is now functionally bankrupt (next in line after Greece). Just when they need to return to oil and gas to reduce costs, their dismantled hydrocarbon sector is in no position to resume supplying oil and gas at pre-Green levels, and they can no longer afford to import enough to take up the slack. Spain’s energy sector has turned gangrenous.

“No matter,” says our administration, “we’ll do it better.” The early signs are not encouraging.

First, we mandated that ethanol be blended into gasoline in the US, and subsidized its production from corn – “Brazil has almost completely transformed their automotive use over to ethanol-burning cars,” we were told. The subsidy made it more profitable to grow corn to burn than to grow corn to eat, so other crops were ignored to plant more corn, meaning that our foodstuffs exports plummeted, causing increased hunger and food riots in south Asia and Indonesia (and, incidentally, increased trade deficits). Other users of ethanol, mainly the plastics and pharmaceutical industries, find one of their basic feed stocks suddenly scarcer, raising their cost of production, raising their price to consumers. This “let’s burn food” policy is now recognized as a misstep, but the agricultural states who benefit from the subsidies won’t readjust their practices back toward growing for food and export, and their congressional delegations won’t vote to end the subsidies. In other words, we’re stuck with a poorly thought-out policy that is costly and dysfunctional.

After the West Wing took over General Motors, it saw a two-birds-one-stone opportunity if it insisted that Chevrolet rush its Volt electric car out as a hybrid, giving buyers a $7,500 rebate. The car, a converted $18,000 Cruze, costs ~$40,000 after the rebate, doesn’t perform as well, and has sold fewer than 8,000 (GM had estimated 10,000 cars sold by the end of 2011). Add to that, National Highway Safety Board testing has resulted in three battery pack fires after side-crash tests. All Volts have been recalled for adjustments to the liquid-cooled batteries, and loaners given to owners who request them. Total cost of this hasn’t been released, but the math is fairly straight forward – research and development of the fix, plus dealers’ time in applying the fix, plus rental cost per diems for those requesting a loaner. It will be in seven figures.

And of course, there’s Solyndra, Beacon Power, and Ener1 bankruptcies, costing over $660 billion with no successes to show for God know how much more taxpayer money. All of these examples – ethanol, GM and solar/biofuels/batteries – show what has been widely known all along: politicians are abysmal at picking winners and losers in the marketplace. They don’t make business or economic decisions, they make political ones.

On the other side of the equation, EPA is, as I write, formulating regulations that will render coal mining and coal-generated electricity non-profitable far faster than we can replace them. The administration’s plan for forcing the market to adopt inferior technology is to outlaw what works, making available energy more expensive than the experimental sources it favors. The net losers? Us – the people who use energy in their daily lives, or use the things that use energy in their production and transportation (read: everything).

Any sane examination of the energy problem would seek a way to increase private research and development in alternative energy, while expanding domestic oil and gas production to bridge the gap until reliable, cost-effective new energy sources are brought on-line, and updating our fragile electric grid which simply can’t add America’s cars to existing industrial and domestic electricity use. None of this is finding its way into this administration’s thinking.

Regardless of the goodness of the intent, the execution of this administration’s energy policy is profoundly wrongheaded in demonstrable ways, and will result in quite predictable and profoundly costly failure.

Dr Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, et al, Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, March 27 2009, p. 1.

CIA World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, January 1 2011, p. 344.

Alvarez, pp. 27-29.

Headed Straight for the Reef

2012-01-23T17:56:51Z

We all watch in horror the tragedy of the cruise ship aground off Giglio Island. “Inexcusable!” is the universal cry. “Those reefs are on my chart,” says veteran sailor and FOX News host Geraldo Rivera. Anyone else see President Obama as Captain Schettino, America as the Costa Concordia, and self-absorbed Euro-style social democracy as the well-charted Giglio reef?

Virtually everything that Republicans warned us about is happening – a jerk to the left in the trajectory of America: healthcare designed to become nationalized; Iran accelerating toward a nuclear weapon; a gutting of the military; the abandonment of Iraq and predictable descent into chaos (and soon Afghanistan, and the embracing of the Taliban); the abandonment of Israel and embrace of Hamas and Fatah; discomfort with America being a superpower; Keynesian economics run wild; the punishing of success and reward of failure; on and on ad nauseum. Meanwhile, the President’s European model is sinking as they frantically bail out Greece’s stateroom, throwing the water into Germany’s. The reefs are well-charted, and yet we set-sail straight for them.

Newt Gingrich (and then Mitt Romney, and then Rick Santorum) is right in that this is truly a pivotal election. The last one disruptively changed the direction of America, and it must be reset before it’s too late – before we hit the reef of economic and diplomatic self-destruction. Gingrich compares it to Lincoln’s re-instatement of the Union, but I also see it as akin to Reagan’s recapturing momentum from President Carter’s disastrous agenda of denuding the military while pursuing policies resulting in double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates.

We are headed for unsustainability and that needs to be changed before we drift into blissful disaster.

We are nearing the twin reefs of majority dependency and majority [income-tax] non-participation. That combination will give politicians a free hand to build personal fiefdoms at the expense of sound national policy. We are living the practical results of entitlement mentality. The collapse of the housing bubble was set in motion by the liberal desire to make home ownership more of a right than an earned option, and they accomplished this by using one of their favorite ploys – the sock-puppet of class warfare. “The rich bankers and realtors,” the narrative went, “are denying minorities affordable loans by ‘red-lining’ their neighborhoods for exclusion of consideration.” The fact of the matter was that bankers (and therefore realtors) were unwilling to extend ownership to those unable to service the debt. Laws were changed, banks were coerced, and “fairness” became loans to people who couldn’t afford them. This went on for thirty years, until the pyramid could no longer support itself and the housing market collapsed. Know who the liberals blamed? The bankers and realtors!

The same fundamental flaw in the housing debacle is present in ObamaCare. You can’t make a right out of somebody else’s labor – the market has to be so distorted to support that surreal idea that it dysfunctions to the point of self-destruction. The difference between housing and healthcare is that ObamaCare is poised to bring down the American economy. In their normal obsession for implementing an idea regardless of the actual consequences, liberals have now saddled us with a sweeping new entitlement program just as Baby Boomers are retiring en masse – fewer workers per retiree every day. We are doing to ourselves what we did to the Soviet Union – give the economy an impossible imperative. This is all happening during a financial crisis that hasn’t yet been resolved – what happens in Europe will echo in our economy.

We need to steer back into clear waters before we hit a shoal we knew was there.

Creative Destruction

2012-01-16T14:26:00Z

Newt Gingrich and others are making a lot of noise about Mitt Romney’s time as managing partner at Bain Capital, a private equity firm. This is disappointing coming from Mr Gingrich because he knows better. It’s the first time that I know he is being disingenuous with the voters, and it damages his earlier effort at speaking truth to those who would listen. I question his decision to go negative in the first place, but the way he has chosen to do so all but eliminates him for my consideration as being deserving of the office he seeks.

The charge is that Mr Romney presided over a company that, by and large, bought control of companies to drain them of worth, fire everybody and sell the remaining assets, generating an overall profit for the effort. He then points out a couple of companies that seem to match that description.

That is nothing short of cheap demagoguery.

Bain Capital, as a private equity company, specializes in turn-a-rounds – buying troubled companies, jettisoning the unproductive aspects, and reorganizing the working parts into a profitable company which it then seeks to sell to owners interested in operating the company from there. Most of the time they succeed, and the reorganized company goes on to grow and hire and produce wealth. Some do not, and they end up in bankruptcy (which is where they were headed before Bain – or any private equity firm – came in to try and save it).

The critics never mention Domino’s Pizza and Staples, Bain Capital’s two largest successes that, between them, have created a couple of hundred thousand jobs and created billions of dollars of new wealth. Yes, 22% of Bain’s acquisitions have failed. That means, of course, that 78% of them have not, and that is typical of the private equity industry, whose economic function is to save companies that are faltering for whatever reason. It’s a different undertaking than venture capitalism – which provides seed money for new startup companies – and “corporate raiders” – whose activities resemble those described by critics of Mr Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.

Arthur Rock is a quintessential venture capitalist. He invested $100,000 in a startup (Intel) in exchange for “eight points” – 8% of the nascent company. One would probably need one of their microprocessors to figure what eight percent of ground-floor Intel is worth today, but that is the idea behind venture capitalism: to absorb the risk of a good idea propagated by good people and enjoy the reward if it succeeds. Carl Icahn is a primary example of a “corporate raider.” He takes over companies to “flip” them – to extract the maximum amount of money from a failing venture, normally by “piecing it out.” They are noticeable by their proclivity for hostile takeovers, where they take control of a company against the wishes of the current owners – a practice not exhibited by private equity firms.

I would expect these anti-business arguments from Democrats – especially the anti-business Democrats now in power – but not from Republicans – especially those claiming to be conservatives. Disappointing.

Mr Rock also underwrote $2.5 million in convertible debentures, an arcane financial instrument which he used in an unconventional way – forgiving them as they were “paid back” in lieu of the 8% ownership stake.

the Two Firsts Produce a First

2012-01-11T21:48:41Z

Mitt Romney became the first Republican non-incumbent to win both Iowa caucuses[1] and New Hampshire primary contests. While this provides great momentum (and that’s no small thing in political campaigns), it by no means anoints him.

Returns from 69% of New Hampshire precincts showed Mitt Romney with 38% of the vote, followed by Texas Representative Dr Ron Paul with 24%, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman with 17%, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Senator Santorum with 10% each, and Texas Governor Rick Perry, who didn’t really campaign in New Hampshire, got 1%[2]. Romney’s win was worth 7 delegates to the Republican National Convention next summer, Paul earned 3 and Huntsman 2. That brings totals after two contests to Romney with 20 delegates, Santorum with 12, Paul with 3 and Huntsman with 2. It will take 1,144 delegates to win the nomination.

As interesting to political strategists as the horse race itself are the exit polls, which ask the all important “why did you vote the way you voted” questions. AP and the network pool had polling conducted among 2,670 voters[3]. Sixty-one percent of respondents said that “the economy” was their most important concern, and another 24% cited “the deficit” as theirs.

Fully a third of voters noted as most important to them the nomination of someone who could beat President Obama in November, and Romney won this group overwhelmingly. Another quarter of voters said that experience was the most important attribute in a candidate, and Romney and Huntsman split these voters.

Twenty-two percent cited “moral character” as their criterion, and Ron Paul won this category. Unusual for a sitting politician to be thought of as “moral,” but I think this is attributable to his unwavering message, which is virtually unchanged for 30 years. This is also partially attributable to the intense loyalty of his followers, which borders on fanaticism.

Thirteen percent of those interviewed said they were looking for a “true conservative,” and Ron Paul won most of these voters. This reflects the “tit-for-tat” thinking that surfaces when it is perceived that an extreme has been detected (the Obama-Pelosi-Reid administration), and reacts by wanting to counter with the opposite extreme (Ron Paul).

In and of themselves, none of these figures is surprising from a party out of power, but the mosaic illuminates the theme that Republicans should emphasize: the economy; deficit/debt, and experience will resonate with a plurality of primary voters in this cycle. For the general, the administration’s amorphous foreign policy should also be in play.

On to South Carolina and Florida!

[1] FYI, 14 states use the caucus system to select delegates (electoral votes) [Republican delegates]: Alaska (3) [27], Colorado (9) [36], Idaho (4) [32], Iowa (6) [28], Kansas (6) [40], Maine (4) [24], Minnesota (10) [40], Nebraska (5) [35], Nevada (6) [28], North Dakota (3) [28], Texas (38) [155], Utah (6) [40], Washington (12) [43] and Wyoming (3) [29]. A total of 115 electoral votes (271 needed to win) and 585 delegates [1,144 needed to win].

[2] See David Espo and Steve Peoples, Romney sweeps NH to cement top status; Paul second, Associated Press, January 11 2012.

[3] This sample-size yields a margin of error of ±3 percentage points at a 90% degree of confidence.

It’s Hard Hat Time Yet Again!

2012-01-09T12:45:00Z

According to USAF’s Strategic Command, Russia’s Phobos-Grunt (grunt is Russian for “ground” or “soil”) probe, which was to land on Mars’s moon Phobos, will re-enter our atmosphere between January 14 and January 17. It’s currently stuck in a decaying Earth orbit – falling from a perigee (low point) of 130 miles ASL to 114 miles now – the 29,100-pound spacecraft, stuffed with 8.3 tons of hydrazine fuel, will likely come down around January 15, the Russian Defense Ministry agreed. It was lifted into Earth orbit November 8 from Kazakhstan, but the kick-motor intended to send Phobos-Grunt on its eight-month journey to Mars failed to fire. NASA and the European Space Agency have been feverously trying to help the Russians re-establish communications with the spacecraft[1].

Phobos-Grunt could impact anywhere from 51.4° north latitude (about as far north as London), to 51.4° south latitude (nearly as far south as the tip of South America). On the upside, the toxic hydrazine rocket fuel is carried in aluminum tanks, which will easily melt during re-entry, allowing the fuel to burn-off very high in the atmosphere, posing no problem for those on the ground.

Russia’s space program, according to Michael Listner, a space law attorney and writer for The Space Review, “is way too ambitious, and way too underfunded, to reach its goal. Adding the Chinese orbiter late seems to have pushed the risk to [this] mission very, very high.” The $163-million spacecraft carried a piggybacked Chinese Mars orbiter, added late during the mission preparation, and a Planetary Society microbe experiment.

Phobos-Grunt joins a couple of other large spacecraft that have fallen in recent months. NASA’s UARS satellite landed in the Pacific Ocean in September, and Germany’s ROSAT plunged into the Bay of Bengal in October.

The troubling aspect of this incident is that Russia is now having problems with both lift vehicles and payloads, which bodes ill for our voluntarily making ourselves dependent on their space program to maintain our own.

[1] See Dan Vergano, Russia’s Phobos-Grunt probe heads for fiery finale, in USA Today, January 7 2012.

the Hawkeye Circus, er, Caucus

2012-01-05T14:58:00Z

The first “First in the Nation” is now behind us, and all those left standing are now working the second “First in the Nation.”

Iowa has played its traditional role of showing the candidates in flannel shirts and coveralls, sitting in diners with small-town folks, talking about crops, hogs, and this year, economics. In the end, Mitt Romney (13 delegates) pulled out an eight-vote win over Rick Santorum (12 delegates), leaving Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich to explain their performance in the arcane caucus process. All others are done, whether they admit it (or know it) or not.

Mitt Romney is still exhibiting his ~25% ceiling (he’ll do better in New Hampshire because he has ties to that state), but Mr Romney’s floor of support and his ceiling are practically indistinguishable. In Iowa, he polled the same this time around as he did in 2008, and that tracks with his national numbers. As the field narrows, his numbers will grow, and I still think he will get the nomination. That will give the GOP “enthusiasm” problems in November, but for once, neither party will enjoy an enthusiasm gap.

Rick Santorum’s Iowa showing is a product of his peaking when the music stopped. He has a good, fundamentally sound conservative record and message, but not an innovative or exciting one. He’ll do well in fund-raising (he got a million dollars yesterday!), and that will carry him through New Hampshire and into South Carolina. How he does there will determine a lot about how much further he goes.

Ron Paul had his best showing ever this year, and that could prove a boon to Democrats. Since Dr Paul isn’t seeking re-election to the House, he could be deluded into thinking a third-party run at the presidency would be justified. This will also be a GOP problem with Donald Trump’s ego until the convention is over. Dr Paul’s Iowa showing helps Mr Romney, keeping the Not-Romney vote splintered going into New Hampshire, which will insure his momentum going into South Carolina. Paul has a national polling of ~3%, which could get as high as 6% this cycle, but that’s only enough to guarantee an Obama victory.

Newt Gingrich now has to balance all his baskets on South Carolina’s egg. He needs to win it. If he can even the playing field a bit, he will do well in Florida, but Romney will hit South Carolina two-for-two, and Gingrich must stop the surge there. To do that, he must neutralize Santorum in New Hampshire (read: finish ahead of him) and win South Carolina.

Michele Bachmann has already announced her withdrawal, and Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman are only lacking the announcement. Huntsman will do reasonably well in New Hampshire (he’s been working it like the others did in Iowa), but has little appeal or backing beyond the Granite State. He’s too much of an insider to appeal to South Carolina’s Republicans, and nothing to show Florida. Perry could stage a comeback in Florida (another southern state), but it would be too late.

Iowa still provided its traditional “three tickets out of the state” – Romney, Santorum and Gingrich – with Paul’s people’s usual acumen for working caucuses. But Newt Gingrich has to stop being the Howard Stern of the race, return to his positive message and hope the networks will continue to pummel us with “debates.”

Official Iowa results show Mitt Romney with 30,015 votes (24.557%); Rick Santorum with 30,007 (24.551%); Ron Paul with 26,219 (21.452%); Newt Gingrich with 16,251 (13.296%); Rick Perry with 12,604 (10.312%); Michele Bachmann with 6,073 (4.969%); Jon Huntsman with 745 (0.61%); No Preference with 135 (0.11%); Other with 117 (0.096%); Herman Cain with 58 (0.047%).

the Vision Thing

2011-12-22T10:46:00Z

We’ve heard much about various politicians’ “Vision of America” – come next November, we’ll find out what the voters see.

First, let’s dispense with the discussion about whether or not this election will be a referendum on President Obama. All presidential elections (and not a few off-year ones) are referenda on the sitting president. If voters think he’s doing a good job, he’ll be re-elected (or supported); if not, he won’t. It’s not rocket science.

President Obama will try to make the election about the Republican candidate – whoever gets the nomination will be the devil incarnate – rather than his record, which is tainted by the legacy of his absentee-landlordship over a dysfunctional Democratic Congress’s spending like drunken Greeks. The Republican will try to make the election about that record. The undercurrent of this cycle will be about government’s role in American society.

This is a national argument that we’ve had since the Founding, albeit taking different masks at different times. Both conservatives and liberals favor a strong national government – the conservatives for presenting a dependable national face to the world, and the liberals for the sculpting of domestic society. It’s Hamilton versus Jefferson.

The problem with highly polarized eras is that this becomes an either/or question rather than one of where to strike the balance. Obviously, government has a place in shaping society – law enforcement, poverty relief, and so on – and equally obviously, government has a responsibility to protect its territory, citizenry and interests. Unfortunately, the 2012 elections will be portrayed as the evil, child-eating Republicans against the oblivious, frenzy-spending Democrats, when the real question is whether we want a nation that trusts its people or one that trusts its politicians.

The idea of market-republicanism is that the people, in the aggregate, make better decisions – the averaging of 300 million self-interested individuals tends to be more solution-oriented than the averaging of 535 self-interested politicians. Politicians, of course, tend to disagree. Both Democrats and Republicans favor increasing their personal power and, taken times 535 means larger government – for no higher purpose than cumulative self-aggrandizement.

That would be annoying enough except the consequences are more important than just that. More government means less left over for investment in problem-solving and wealth-creation, which is what raises standards of living for everyone. Government doesn’t make anything, so whatever it gives to someone, it must first take from someone else. Government doesn’t create wealth, it consumes it. Government is hopelessly inefficient at actually doing anything – it’s a deliberative body, not a particularly good administrative one.

A large part of the problem is that Congress isn’t about solving problems, it’s about how best to use problems to advance an existing agenda. Both parties do this. Individuals tend to solve the actual problem at hand. I don’t know how anyone can look at the current condition of America at home and abroad, and conclude that incumbents deserve to have their power increased.

Of all the monies collected to help the poor, 70% is absorbed by the numerous bureaucracies set up to “help the poor.” By far the biggest beneficiaries of such funds are the middle-class bureaucrats assigned to administer those funds.

Iran’s New Toy

2011-12-13T11:08:00Z

An hour after Iranian state television aired images purporting to show off a captured LockheedMartin RQ-170 Sentinel, General Norton Schwartz, the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, raised the specter of a foreign power copying the stealthy jet’s top-secret technology.

The RQ-170 is a flying wing UAV containing many features familiar to those conversant in stealth design – e.g., notched landing gear doors, sharp leading edges and a curved wing planform – has a 43-foot wingspan and is powered by a General Electric TF34 non-afterburning turbofan. A streamlined blister atop each wing carries datalink communications gear, and a ventral streamlined blister along the centerline contains sensors. The New York Times has reported that the Sentinel, in addition to its imaging equipment, is “almost certainly” equipped with communications intercept equipment as well as highly sensitive sensors capable of detecting very small amounts of radioactive isotopes and chemicals (gas chromatograph on a chip) which may indicate the existence of nuclear weapons facilities. The RQ-170 is also known to carry an excellent synthetic-aperture side-looking radar, used for detailed mapping.

The available reports don’t shed much light on how the Iranians came into possession of the drone. At first, they claim to have shot it down, then they said that they hacked the system and redirected it to land in Iran. Both are highly unlikely. The chronology suggests a glitch – probably software – that resulted in an “undefined” situation (as far as the operating system was concerned).

US military officials in Afghanistan announced that they had lost contact with a UAV operating over western Afghanistan. The next day, Iran claimed that they had shot down an “American spy drone” and had the wreckage. The New York Times reported that the missing drone was an RQ-170, a sophisticated stealth platform with advanced sensors. Iran then said that they had hacked into the UAV’s operating system and redirected it to land in eastern Iran. And then they showed what appeared to be an in-tact RQ-170 on state-run television. The airframe showed light damage consistent with a wheels-up landing.

A couple of things of interest here: the Sentinel is programmed to, upon losing contact with its controller, re-trace its flight path and land itself at the airstrip where it began its journey. So a controlled descent and landing is within the platform’s capabilities. The operating system and associated software is double-encrypted, and would be very difficult for anyone without specific decryption algorithms to “redirect” a Sentinel to an alternative landing site. The RQ-170 communicates with its controller via line-of-sight SATCOM datalink network, again, extremely difficult to breach. Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute [Arlington VA], noted that engine or navigational malfunction could be ruled out because of the in-tact nature of the sample shown on Iranian TV.

I think an unforeseen set of circumstances caused the Sentinel to deviate from its “return and recover” routine, and sent it looking for a flat place to land. Subsequently, the Iranians found the platform (it would have been noticeable during its descent and approach) sitting where it landed and shut down. The light damage a result of an unimproved landing site.

I’m not that worried about any stealth technology that could be compromised by examining the aircraft – the materials, coatings and architecture of minimal radar-cross-section design are in the public domain – but I am concerned about what sensors are on-board and what condition they’re in. Chinese and Russian engineers are en route to examine the Sentinel.

President Obama requested that Iran return the UAV, but that request has been rejected. My thought was they might take a page out of our book: Major Viktor Belenko, a Soviet MiG-25 pilot, defected to the West by flying his Foxbat into Japan in 1976. The Kremlin insisted that we give their MiG back, which CIA did in a series of crates and boxes after the aircraft was completely dissembled and examined. The Chinese will try to buy the RQ-170 in-tact, which cash-strapped Iran may well permit. This would be the worst-case scenario, from our standpoint.

Among PRC, Russia and Iran – our chief geopolitical adversaries – PRC can get the most value from this artifact. They have the assets and talent to decrypt the operating system (thus learning much about how we automate the flight regime of our UAVs); they can move ahead of Russian stealth methodology by studying the internal construction and materials of the Sentinel; the Chinese covet our miniaturized synthetic-aperture radars (if one was on-board this RQ-170), and the firmware of how we integrate the various sensors into meaningful data packets. And PRC can afford to develop a platform based on a reversed engineered Sentinel, which would tax the Russian defense budget, and is utterly beyond Iranian resources, capabilities and talent.

However this incident ends, it’s not the end of the world – even though the F-117’s technology is now in the public domain, it remains virtually invisible to air defense radars – but it is a set-back. We loose an advantage we have enjoyed for several years, as the rest of the world moves closer to our state-of-the-art in operational low-observable technologies, and that ratchets up the risk for any given stealth mission while proliferating the ability for stealth being used against us.

See Dave Majumdar, Iran’s captured RQ-170: How bad is the damage?, in Air Force Times, December 9 2011.

Scott Shane and David E Sanger,"Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret US Surveillance Effort, in The New York Times, December 7 2011.

The mathematics of radar evasion are widely known, and much was learned by our adversaries from the F-117A Nighthawk shot down over Serbia during our aerial campaign during the Bosnian war.

We have since acquired three examples of MiG-25s which are operated by the Air Force’s “Aggressor Wing” at Nellis AFB [NV].

Which, of course, means that our encryption/decryption algorithms are now compromised and must be ground-up re-written.

Occupy versus Tea Party

2011-11-29T17:16:00Z

There has been much ink and air time given over to how the Occupy Movement is the Left’s Tea Party. As a conservative, I wish that were true, but it’s unfair and I would caution politicians against aligning themselves with Occupiers. It’s unfair unless the Left wants to take up the cloak of overthrowing the system rather than working within it. The Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party was established to impress upon our representatives three basic principles of governance: stop spending money you don’t have; stop assuming we will gladly pay to match your influence-peddling; and, please pay attention to the Constitution you swear to protect and defend as a condition of holding office.

Occupy Wall Street – the no-agenda agenda, its name, the location of the encampment and the date that it began – was the brainchild of two anarchists at Adbuster Magazine, as now chronicled in The New Yorker, a publication of impeccable liberal credentials.

The anarchists were quickly joined by leftists whose agenda couldn’t be more different – all-encompassing government versus no government, highly organized versus “horizontal” organization (read: no organization) – thereby muddling whatever message could be deciphered from the crowd. These were joined by the homeless who were in search of food and shelter. The result is a collection of differing causes, all culminating in contempt for authority, hostility toward people trying to get through them to go to work (mostly “99-percenters”), and an unfocused anger that began to express itself in ugly ways.

After weeks at Zuccotti Park, they had become a health hazard and a dangerous place for citizens to be after dark. Women were assaulted, cars were used as toilets, hundreds were arrested, nearby businesses were shut down for lack of customers, and so on. Many of those who jumped on the Occupy bandwagon are now putting distance between themselves and the Movement.

As badly as the press would love to find a congruity between the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, they haven’t been able to do so because there is no real message coming out of these encampments other than cities should leave them alone and let them squat.

I wish there was a vocal expression of a contemporary liberal agenda, more specific than “eat the rich.” What, exactly, is “rich;” what, exactly, is their “fair share;” where, exactly, is your budget for FY2011 or FY2012? It’s a debate the voters deserve.

See Mattathias Schwartz, Pre-Occupied, in The New Yorker, November 28 2011.