I wrote about this in August 2017, in Revolution in Venezuela. There have been previous signals, but none strong enough to counter the structural defect that has impeded revolution in Venezuela. The Caracas drone attack on Maduro was heralded as a serious challenge, yet no challenge to his power emerged. Between 1932 and 1944,  there were 22 plots to assassinate Hitler, yet no equivalent challenge to his power.

Political will to revolution can exist while frustrated of the means actualize it. This occurs when there is no large segment of society that offers refuge to revolutionaries, yet impermeable to the power structure. Revolutions have almost without exception had a strong geographic bias in support.  The French and Bolshevik revolutions were of urban origin, as was Hitler’s putsch.  In the First Indochina War, the Vietnamese refuge was rural. The  Cuban  was agrarian; the Red China revolution advantaged an agrarian base. In each case, a revolution had to subdue the other geography; urban against rural, or rural against urban.

Revolution in Venezuela cites the criteria of Davies and Brinton, already satisfied, that signal ripeness. But I wrote,

As noted, the accession of the extremists would be facilitated by rural sanctuary.  But “melting away” of the rebels into the countryside may be hindered by rural majorities of Maduro supporters. Open sources do not illuminate. This exhausts Brinton analogies. Here’s a new one, the development of the tornado.

This is about to change.  As Venezuela’s oil output drifts towards zero, the subsidy to the  rural poor will vanish. As a sanctuary most of the country will become available.

Maduro’s intellectual mediocrity is the most striking thing about him. It renders him incapable of understanding the historical analogies of his position. He may end up being thrown under the thing he used to drive.

Recent presentations in the media are useful to confirmation bias, while not actually providing new information. Let’s follow an imaginary news consumer trying to puzzle it out.

CSIS presents Undeclared North Korea: The Sino-ri Missile Operating Base and Strategic Force Facilities. Since this is new to the news, it is instinctively identified as a new threat. It is not; NRO has much finer imaging capabilities than commercial imagery used by CSIS.

Remembering Trump’s effusive praise of Kim Jong-un, our imaginary consumer  wonders if the existence of the CSIS – identified facilities is due to spin artists in the Trump administration. Do these facilities antedate North Korea’s development of nukes that can be launched on missiles?

With considerable unease, our consumer cannot make that determination. (They do.) Nevertheless, these missile sites seem to amplify the threat that North Korea presents, in a potential if not actual way.

The average news consumer probably will not jump all the way to the analogy with the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is widely criticized for loopholes that in effect allow the development of “nuclear capable missiles.” The distinction between a nuclear capable missile, and one which is not, exists only in the imagination. Hence an Iran analogy is high on the list of outcomes.

Now the consumer has a choice.  The bag of choices that makes a reader a conservative, a liberal, or the increasingly rare in-between, promotes a polar response to the idea of the impure blends of truth and  lies that most treaties are.

• The hawkish conservative will focus on the lies, criticizing that the bases, which have been studied for years by NRO, are not part of the deal.
• The liberal who wants to get on with the liberal agenda will ignore the parts of the deal that constitutes “lies”, and note that it isn’t cricket to suddenly demand inclusion of  the bases, which antedate N. Korean nukes that can be carried on missiles.
• The in-betweeners are the most thoughtful group. Very intelligent defense specialists, notably former Secretary Mattis, though not a supporter of the Iran agreement, advocated against U.S. withdrawal. Theirs is the most complex calculus, in dealing with a world that cannot be made safe, only safer.

The missile bases are certainly part of the threat, as the destinations of a future deployment surge of nukes; this is discussed in North Korea Buildout; Kim Defines the Game. Quoting,

One of the above, a deployment surge, is consistent with the satellite reports. It is now reasonable to consider how a deployment surge could be used by Kim to his advantage. Some narratives:

• Kim surges the missiles out, readying them for rapid in-situ conversion to operational status.
• In this period, Kim’s language notably lacks hostility, encouraging the idea that negotiations are possible, lacking reference to ground facts.
• With all the parts neatly arrayed for quick assembly, the missiles are fueled and the warheads attached.
• Conversion to operational status occurs in the most inconspicuous fashion within the constraints of North Korean technology.
• The North’s rhetoric shifts from bland to harsh. The strategy is  nuclear blackmail.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a school of thought that has sought to eradicate the last bastions of tyranny and bellicosity. The Middle East has been the most recent laboratory for their experiments. The site nknews.org interviews a Tufts professor; Tufts University’s Sung-Yoon Lee talks diplomacy, “fake concessions,” and what the DPRK really wants.

Though he provides valuable perspective from a cultural vantage point closer than our own, Sung-Yoon Lee also ideates his fears of hegemony. Instead, let’s stay focused on the three major threats:

• Rather than ideate the nightmare of regional hegemony by North Korea,  the unnamed policy of containment offers good promise that North Korea will remain pariah state, with no influence beyond its borders. It will remain successful provided U.S. economic ties with South Korea continue to have a preferential element.
• The strategic threat has a choke point, tritium. See Trump – Kim Summit; Tritium Choke Point. This is far more important than “hidden” missile bases. As before, follow the tritium like you follow the money. It is far more certain than  missile defense as it currently exists, which has an unacceptable record.
• Nuclear blackmail, discussed in North Korea & Trump’s Mental Rubicon; Smuggling Nukes?, remains a concern. As well as proliferation of warheads, North Korea is a potential source of radioactive material for dirty bombs, in forms more concentrated  than black market  sources.

Nuclear blackmail has a distinct appeal to the criminal mind, because it can be deployed in a deniable fashion. No one has to know where a cache of radioactive material is hidden,  where it came from, or the identity of the instigating actor. While other threats can be countered by counter-threat that appeals to reason of the adversary, this  logic doesn’t assure with blackmail. It might work, and it might not.

In the years after 9/11, some wondered what could deter Al Qaeda from the use of WMDs more  damaging than the 9/11 attacks.  The calculus of statecraft was helpless, because Al Qaeda is not a state, and not driven by rational goals. The threat of destruction of Mecca by nuclear weapons was considered. ISIS, apparently, has a different view; they might desire to  destroy it themselves.

Blackmail remains the dangling thread of the problem. It invites consideration of unconventional solutions. In language, both moderation and bellicosity, of carrot and stick, isolation and selective engagement, of convincing the North Korea leadership of the best path to a normal lifespan. Of other things of which we probably should not speak.

This is not about whether a wall is desirable. That is a political question, to be solved by the political process.

Democracy is well suited to maintaining an equitable and stable social order. As questionable  as the recent record  of American government has been, democracy still has a strong association with maximum realization of human potential. But when  a construction project or anything technical  is mandated by politics, it is vulnerable to failure.  Democracy has a fundamental weakness  in dealing with technical issues.

With technical issues, the shortfall of the body politic, and elected officials, in dealing with the boundary between human affairs and the physical world is acute, and getting worse. In the case of the wall, the reasons are a mix of generalities and specifics:

• Natural reluctance of persons of authority to admit limits of competence, or to subjugate the political will to the limits of the achievable. This is a cousin of the Peter Principle.
• Ballooning complexity of the questions themselves. A wall used to be a pile of rocks. Not any more; all devices, including walls, are required to be smart.  Brains replace mass.
• There are no walls, except in our imaginations, There are only barriers. Maintaining the  integrity of a barrier is a dynamic process.

Amy Patrick, eminent  licensed structural engineer, assesses the proposed wall, with (Facebook) negative conclusions. Her comments deserve the amplification of historical perspective. History would be much different if there were such a thing as an impenetrable barrier.

By the first century B.C. the Romans had perfected siege engines that could easily breach the proposed wall. In a hypothetical match up, the Great Wall of China might have withstood Caesar, because it had a road on top, and was heavily manned. The proposed wall would compare poorly in mass with the Great Wall, because we don’t have millions of slaves and generations to build it.

But the advent of gunpowder, and later, of high explosives, renders the above argument obsolete. Gunpowder made fixed fortifications obsolete. With every advance in the technology of warfare, concentration of force has become greater. In recognition of  this,  Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was not a wall-with-ramparts. It was an agglomeration of obstacles and strong points. Ramparts were obsolete by the late Middle Ages, replaced by the increasingly futile efforts to create fortresses along the principles of military science .

Any kind of wall can stop an unaided migrant. But on the other side of the border, we face rogue forces with capabilities that approach those of a modern military – submarines, planes, drones, and more. These forces have the capability to mount sapper attacks with modern  shaped charge explosives, employing the (Army Research Laboratory) Munroe Effect. These forces have enormous revenue streams,  smuggle drugs into the U.S. with about 75% efficiency, and can respond to the human-smuggling challenge of a wall with well-funded agility. Hence any wall construction which relies on a fixed concept of the adversary is in error.

If it is your inclination to discount the above, with arguments like

• A hole can be patched.
• One shaped charge can’t collapse the wall.
• Attempts would be interdicted.

you may suffer from mental rigidity. It is unfortunately necessary to consider all possible combinations of threats.  What if the adversary decides to spend $5K on a rock drill and an air compressor, with a Mariachi band for company? In  the technique developed for hard rock mining, the holes thus made are filled with explosive, vastly increasing the destructive power. And compared to granite, concrete is not very hard.

What if the adversary chooses to degrade the wall over time, gradually knocking hundreds of holes in it, turning it, eventually, into a heap of gravel? This scenario challenges the idea of rushing border control officers to plug a single breach.

The concept of a wall as a static obstacle, like an ocean or mountain range, is not valid. Protection of the border becomes a problem for Operations Research, with cost/logistical/functional study of:

• Static resistance  – the ability of the wall to resist short term intrusion.
• Maintainability; the cost of repairing damage inflicted by the adversary.
• Optimal trade-off between the fixed asset, the wall, and dynamic assets, human patrol and interdiction.
• Relative cost allocation of the dumb and smart attributes: the quality of static resistance, and the ability of the wall to detect and report challenges.

A smart wall is simply an extension of battlefield technology. The modern battlefield is alive with sensors, enabling rapid, accurate response. While military use centers on lethal force, the smart wall is compatible with minimized lethality. In Israel, border barriers comprise mainly (AZ Central) steel fences, augmented by sensor fusion to provide detailed information about who is doing what to the barrier, and where.

Any damage to a steel fence, even a truck bomb, can be repaired in a few hours, versus months for a concrete wall.

And certainly in less time than a typical government shutdown.

A  mathematical equation provides useful input to prediction of radiological terror. This is because radioactive decay proceeds as a natural, inexorable process, affecting the ability of terrorists to amass a stockpile.

Markov chains model radioactive decay, providing precise predictions of how long a radioactive substance will remain potent, resulting in the simple equation presented here. Decay proceeds with the precision of an atomic clock, and cannot be slowed by “proper storage” or any other treatment by man. (Markov chains will also be used in a future discussion of power projection.)

Use of dirty bombs has long been anticipated, yet the threat has not so far materialized. To understand why, and to offer an insight as to when it might, we must consider the terrorist problem, which is to accumulate a stockpile prior to use. The more radioactive material can be assembled in one place, the more harmful the effect will be.

A stockpile of a radioactive isotope undergoes exponential decay, decreasing in potency by half every half-life. The half-life of a particular isotope is precisely known and unchangeable. The physical bulk of a source remains, but containing an ever-increasing proportion of inert, stable isotopes. Isotopes used in hospitals have half-lives between days and years.

• Most radioactive substances  in hospitals are used as tracers. Injected into the body, a tracer concentrates in particular tissue, providing diagnostic information. Tracer isotopes have short half-lives, decaying rapidly, avoiding persistence of radioactivity in the patient. Tracers have little terror potential.
• In brachytherapy, a tumor is irradiated from a source placed inside the body. These sources are more powerful and longer lasting than tracers. Cesium-137 is  used as an implant to a tumor. With a half life of 30.17 years, it must be removed from the body after treatment. The discarded implants  have terror potential. Amassing a stockpile requires collection of many discarded doses.
• The most dangerous isotopes used by hospitals are found in external radiation machines, which direct an intense beam of radiation into the body. The standard isotope is cobalt-60,  contained within a thick lead capsule with a bore hole at one end. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years.

Cesium-137 and cobalt-60 do not fit well into  the conventional definitions of low or high level waste. While a single hospital source is far less radioactive than a single spent reactor fuel rod, collected discarded sources over time can accrete to massive levels. But there is a limit, determined by the half life of the isotope.

Suppose some  individuals in Peshawar, perhaps a nuclear medicine technician or physician and an analytical chemist,  put themselves in the illicit business of collecting, assaying, and reselling radioactive sources to terrorists.  Suppose that, on the average, they manage to collect a fixed amount of a particular isotope per year, perhaps a few ounces. Every source in their stockpiles decays relative to when they acquired it. For this example, let’s consider cobalt-60.

After some years of collecting, the total radioactivity in their possession will almost plateau, as an asymptote. They more isotope they have, the more is decaying. At some year relative to start of their enterprise, the amount lost to decay is merely balanced by the amount of their annual collection. The stockpile continues to increase in bulk, becoming ever harder to concentrate for dirty bombs, yet no more radioactive.

This is the cash-out point. Some time relative to it, both the terrorist and the technicians  make a deal. We cannot predict the actual event of use  but we can estimate the cash-out point, when the stockpile reaches a point of diminishing returns. Nothing can be done to change the rate of decay.

Where

h = half life of the isotope

t = the elapsed time from start of collection

R = rate of collecting discarded sources, in whatever unit of radioactivity you prefer

ln is the natural logarithm

Q is the  quantity of isotope in the stockpile

Q_T is the maximum amount of isotope that can be accumulated given the rate of collection R

we have

Q = [h*R/ln(2) ] * [1  – 2  (to the power of (- t/h))]

while the maximum size of the stockpile (the asymptotic value) is

Q_T = h*R/ln(2)

For cobalt-60, the point of futility, the cash-out point, when the amount collected is about 84% of Q_T, with the bulk ever increasing, is about 15.5 years. Cesium-137 can accumulate for a much longer time.

This calculation is independent of how much isotope is collected annually, assuming only the same amount each year. If the collecting started in the early 2000’s,  the time is about now.

(BBC)  Putin wants government to “take charge” of rap music.

We cannot ring out the year without taking up the challenge rap  presents to Russian state power.  Yes, take charge of it.  Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll almost sunk the Brits, who survived only by heavy state repression. The pivotal role of MI-5 is yet to be revealed.

Essentially, implement a “loyalty test” to challenge a rapper’s professed loyalty to the Russian state.  The Romans had the same problem in the first century A.D.  They devised extreme methods to vet their centurions. This documentary video re-enacts the Roman test, which I hope will be helpful to Vladimir Putin:

Roman Loyalty Test.

(Reuters) White House mulls new year executive order to bar Huawei, ZTE purchases.

This is the only effective mitigation of the threat. The British approach, to cajole Huawei into closing security holes, is defective. For explication, see Huawei, Security, and British GCHQ

LIndsay Graham, one of my favorite senators, strongly opposes Trump’s decisions to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. (Newsweek) Lindsay Graham Calls for Immediate Hearings on Trump’s Syria and Afghanistan Decision, Warns of Second 9/11. This is about Afghanistan, which fails the ROI test that the U.S. presence in Syria currently passes. This is described in U.S. Withdrawal from Syria re Providing for the Common Defense.

A second 9/11 is possible, this time involving dirty bombs. An  end to the U.S. role in Afghanistan adds some incremental risk. But risk abounds elsewhere; Peshawar, in Pakistan, is a market for low-level radioactive waste.  Quoting (Reuters, 5/15/2008) How real is the Pakistan nuclear risk?,

Al Qaeda is known to be actively seeking nuclear material. Pakistan could be the place they finally manage to acquire some.

“It’s not going to be a risk where rogue elements take over Pakistan’s nuclear assets and then launch them at India or launch them at the U.S.,” Kuusisto said. “It will be a radiological bomb exploding somewhere that is traced back to Pakistan.”

The United States has given Pakistan assistance in checking containers leaving from key ports for radioactive material. But Vickers said smuggling radioactive material out of the country would not present a major problem for militants.

What is the incremental risk of Afghanistan? With risk all over the   globe, could a reduction be achieved by reallocation of resources? Terror originating in Afghanistan must transit through a third country, most likely Pakistan.

We fear handing Terror a nation-state, but what degree of accommodation would the Taliban offer to it? In 2001, the Taliban refused to give up Bin Laden, but is this still relevant? (Reuters) ‘Very positive signals’ after U.S., Taliban talks: sources. This is one of the most important pending intelligence estimates.

Part of this blog is about the skill of prediction, which deeply involves recognizing previous situations that analogize with the present. The news sites present snapshots of the present, leaving us vulnerable to all our hopes and fears. Sloppy analogy with past can leave us vulnerable. Carefully drawn analogies,evaluated in number and quality,  bind the future to the past. So what is the quality of historical analogy available for the four top issues?

• Iran: Current Iran approaches have limited but useful analogies with the neoconservative approach to  Iraq in 2003.
• Russia: Limited analogy exists to expansionism dating to the 18th century, and to balance-of-power policies.
• China: There is no precedent for the rises of China.
• Afghanistan: Numerous, extensive analogies with  Vietnam exist.

With Afghanistan, as with Vietnam, it can be hard for the best minds to differentiate between the desired outcomes, foreign policy goals, and the work of prediction, when we try to exclude confirmation bias. Like most Western readers, I would prefer to imagine the outcome of an Afghanistan with a civil government that has at least limited secular, inclusive aspects. The situation of Pakistan, which is more a failed state than a model, would actually be progress in Afghanistan.

So let’s start with Vietnam. As painful as the experience was,  the lesson lived in memory for little more than a generation. The goals of our fathers for Vietnam were fairly modest. The  corrupt rule of South Vietnam’s elite was supported because, so it was thought,

• The doctrine of Containment of world communism required it.
• Absent the lock-down of a rigid ideology, South Vietnam would continue to evolve.
• The goals were achievable.

A magnificent book recounts  the cautionary tale. The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam, documents and dissects. The best thinking of the time, employing the best tools of the time, statistics, estimation theory, game theory, and operations research, could not predict the failure of the massive U.S. military and logistical footprint to defeat a small, economically primitive country with an army of foot soldiers.

The analogy, already obvious, deserves elaboration. To be continued shortly.

In the past few years, U.S. strategics priorities  have evolved, with reduced  importance of the Middle East, while China and Russia are identified as primary strategic competitors and possible adversaries. So  Trump’s personal decision to withdraw of U.S. forces from Syria does not go against the new strategic priorities, but this does not mean it is tactically correct.

No view or doctrine can anticipate the specifics of every place and time. Historically, U.S. foreign policy has oscillated between isolationism, and “the best defense is a good offense.” Neither of these very general, simplistic ideas can replace strategies particularized for time and place.

We could attempt to understand  Trump’s decision as stemming from the colossal failure of “the best defense…”,  in SE Asia and Iraq. It may  fail again on a global scale in the attempt to extend Pax Americana further into the 21st century. But another strategic metric/strategy, virtually  unused in U.S. foreign policy, has to our chagrin been employed by Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. Yet it’s essentially capitalist in nature.

This is ROI, return on investment. Compared to interventions of recent history, the U.S. deployment in Syria has provided very  good ROI. The Kurds, who seem to have a natural affinity for the West, are also among the best proxies  we’ve ever had. The ROI metric says, support the Syrian Kurds.

The NSC staff and Secretary Mattis have cogently stated the case for the Kurds as proxies, both to shape the Syrian state, and to impede the extension of Iranian influence to the shores of the Mediterranean. But the Kurds are a stateless people, with tragedy as their companion. Let us suppose that at some point in the future, overarching U.S. objectives require their abandonment. Foreign policy and stateless tragedy are bedfellows.

There is a moral question. It is possible that the moral question and U.S. interest coincide, at this moment of time, and possibly into the distant future. This is left to the reader to decide for himself.

(Reuters) Britain says Huawei ‘shortcomings’ expose new telecom networks risks and (Financial Times) Huawei caves in to UK security demands.

GCHQ are congratulating themselves on their due diligence. Quoting,

Senior UK security officials have repeatedly stressed that their concerns are related to technical deficiencies and not the company’s Chinese origins or any evidence of espionage or malicious activity.

It surprises that the astute heads at GCHQ would segment the Huawei threat in such an ostrich-like manner — if an ostrich could segment. It reminds me of the tongue-twister, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

This kind of segmenting, with burial of one of the segments, is probably due to British exposure to China economic pressure. As I am not a party to the funeral, let’s spell it out. The Huawei threat has two parts, both enabled by the nature of integrated circuit design and testing:

• Visible at the pins of the chip, as errors of protocol. This includes vulnerabilities in key exchange protocols, and the existence of chip-states that should be disallowed. These fall into the loose category of the 71% of a chip that can be tested through the external terminals. (I think this is due to Karpovsky.)
• Buried in the chip firmware/gate arrays, invisible at the external pins of the chip. This is feasible when chips are made by a supplier affiliated with the Chinese state, such as Huawei, because the combinatorics makes testing impossible even with a  test duration on the order of the age of the universe.

Both exploits have advantages:

• With use of the visible exploit, the attacker’s identity can frequently be concealed, or at least reduced in certainty. It’s frequently the case that multiple attack vectors can exploit the same protocol vulnerability.
• The invisible exploit is activated by codes that are so improbable that, if detected, they point with perfect certainty to the maker of the chip. (Is there a way around this? Read down.)

Can a chip die be scanned, perhaps by a synchrotron light source, to recover the mask and completely analyze the functionality? As Huawei becomes self-sufficient in chips, reference masks will become unavailable. As chip geometries continue to shrink, with the move to 3D, scanning  becomes a very hard problem.

There remains one question. Exploits of the second type, if discovered, seem to inextricably implicate the attacker. With the application of great cleverness, is there a way to disguise this?  I think there is. Think spread-spectrum and slow data rates.

GCHQ, you may think you’ve done due diligence, but this is an error. Think of what we can do, and in your imagination, go one better.

The readership indicators for Providing for the Common Defense; Report of National Defense Strategy Commission, Part 1and  Part 2 suggest that undermining the report is not a pleasant concept.  This is sometimes happens when speaking truth to power. It’s not pleasant to me either.

The U.S. military needs not only the best weapons but also the best circumstances in which to fight. This acquires urgency with the pending fact that in coming years, we may face a potential adversary with greater industrial capacity than our own. This has not occurred since the American Revolutionary War, which was a defense on native soil. It was not the case in World War II, when U.S. industrial capacity alone vastly exceeded that of the entire Axis.

To say that defense of the China seas will become nonviable is not the same as to say we should acknowledge the compromised international status of those seas. It is the consequence of the choice of regional nations to advance economic integration with China in spite of competing territorial claims. It’s something to work around, if not through.

Remarkably, China sliced off a sliver of Philippine territory without deflecting a trajectory away from the U.S. towards China. Empty bellies take precedence, and there are plenty in Asia who want to be part of the China miracle, national sovereignty be damned.

The real battle involves soft power. There seems to be a new awareness that even in SE Asia,  marketing of the U.S. as an alternative involves client economic opportunity first, with client security a distant second. This is precisely the game China has been  playing  for 20 years. Now we’re playing catch up.

We’ll continue with Markov chains and the Kolmogorov equation in a bit.