The Mason has been subject to missile attack for the third time (Reuters): U.S. warship targeted in failed missile attack from Yemen: official. The conclusion of Houthi Missile Attacks on U.S. Destroyer…  is that the attacks are an Iranian weapons system test, intended to test the viability of the Chinese C-802 missile with specific Iranian tactics.

The conclusion requires the assumption of rational purpose, which is not necessarily true. But unlike suicide attacks or sprays of bullets, the C-802 in Yemen is part of a distributed command-and-control system, the most complex kind. Keeping the missiles operational requires a constant supply of consumables, such as batteries, and calibration with specialized equipment. This entails a supply line that reaches back to Iran, and ultimately China. Yemen has no industrial base. There are no Radio Shacks in Yemen (back in the 80’s, the U.S. military was known to resort to weekend runs to Radio Shack for temporary patch-ups of support gear.)

This further supports the assertions of the Houthis that, if they were not totally ignorant, neither are they the prime movers in the attempt to damage a $1BN warship. But Iran has staked their military strategy on asymmetric warfare, in the ability to deny the Persian Gulf to the U.S. Navy. For Iran, the launches are the crucial test of a highly rational actor.

Apart from the qualitative horrors of war,  the goal of asymmetric warfare is to do more dollar damage to the adversary than received in return. The unit cost of the C-802 is not quotable. But as a figure we can plug into a calculation, $400K per unit is reasonable. It’s about an order of magnitude more than the cost of some Chinese antiaircraft missiles. If the Iranians can score one hit on the Mason with 2000 missiles, they break even.

But even among highly rational actors such as Iran, there are fine gradations. Has the test been structured simply to sink a ship? The answer lies in the degree of sophistication of Iran’s military-industrial complex, about which open sources are not very informative. It cannot be determined by the alleged specifications of their weapons systems, or their ingenuity at keeping their F-14 Tomcats flying. It is a different ball of wax.

In an open loop deployment of a weapons system, the system is tested in the lab and on the range.  But the reports from the battlefield are crude by comparison: Hit, or miss?  But in operation, the most sophisticated weapons engage in an electronic dialog of lies with the adversary. To analyze the dialog requires both sides of the conversation.  This is why the U.S. flies the RC-135 “Rivet Joint” in the Baltic Sea, and why it infuriates the Russians so much. The distance from Russian airspace distracts from the real issue, which is the information acquired in a stimulated two-way dialog with Russian weapons systems.

I  don’t want  to make an estimate that unintentionally damages the security interests of the U.S.  But it is possible to speculate further while remaining within the bounds of knowledge public to the world’s militaries. The sophistication of the effort of Iran’s military-industrial complex currently deployed to Iran has one of these characterizations:

• A simple test by the IRG of their effectiveness in power projection; an open loop weapons test.
• A crude attempt at data collection, such as CEPs (circular error probabilities).
• Some basic ECM capture — the “dialog of lies” between weapons systems.
• Complete characterization and capture of the events, allowing Iranian weaponeers to efficiently optimize control system parameters and radar parameters. This is closed loop.

The goal is an affordable kill ratio, which  could be very low, by western standards a complete failure. The problem for the U.S. is summarized by the saying, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

This is an intelligence  question of the highest importance. It would be tempting to write more, but I don’t want to inadvertently be of assistance to an adversary.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, the preeminent think tank on the subject, has released The Kremlin Playbook; Understanding Russian Influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

In contrast to classic Soviet subversion, the methods used to extend Russian influence in the contested states could be judged to have a  remarkable degree of overlap with domestic Russian methods of control.

As companion reading to the CSIS report, you are invited to download Putin’s Character and the Intersection of Russia, available from academia.edu. With comparison to the findings of the CSIS report, you are invited to reach your own conclusion on this question:

To what degree is current Russian subversion in eastern Europe an extension of domestic methods of control?

Reuters: Navy destroyer targeted again by Yemen’s Houthis. Unlike the Sunday attack, electronic countermeasures alone were not sufficient to insure against impact, so two SM-2 missiles were launched, and one short-range Sea Sparrow. Popular Mechanics offers an everyman explanation of countermeasures. This is for the reader who would like just a little bit more, permitting a prediction of the actual culprit.

The simplest explanation of the most basic radar (radio-detection-and-ranging) is that some kind of radio signal is broadcast, or sent in the direction of a target, which echoes a very tiny amount of it back to the station. This description dates to before World War II. A system based solely upon it might have the ability to detect a bomber fleet several hundred miles away, but with barely enough precision for the RAF to send Spitfires to intercept. If one were to compare basic radar with the human eye, it would be a that of a person almost blind from cataracts. The bare radar image is not a point, but a cloud of uncertainty.

A radar system that can actually find a target requires the combination of:

• Frequencies.
• Pulses.
• Polarizations and modes.
• Scans, from one location, or integration (help) from multiple locations. Historically, the transmitter and the receiver have not always been in the same place.
• Detection in a cacophony of noise.
• Signal processing to remove all kinds of spurious indications, such as ground clutter.
• Estimation, linear stochastic  filtering, extracts the likely position of the target hiding within the echo cloud.

All of the above can be forged, faked by the target. This is ECM (electronic countermeasures.)

• Conversely, radar can potentially use the ECM signal of the target to gain information (locate) the target.
• Conversely again, two targets equipped with ECM can cooperate to make a phantom appear between them, guiding a missile to empty ocean.
• Conversely again, a radar station can change its parameters of operation in an unexpected way, defeating ECM unless it is agile.

The Chinese C-802 anti shipping missile is an old, widely exported weapon. As with most of these weapons, the actual, as opposed to advertised kill probability against a target with ECM is not publicly known. All antishipping missiles have two guidance systems:

• To get it on its way, the likely position of the ship can be programmed into the missile, which then knowingly adjusts for where it is and where it wants to be. The most simple type is inertial guidance. In more advanced systems, such as a hacked C-802, the missile can receive updated information in flight.
• As the missile approaches the ship, it switches to its own tiny radar set for terminal guidance. But it is hard for the missile to hear its radar echo, because the target is doing its best to yell louder — with false information.

The closer the missile gets to the ship before relying on its own radar, the greater the chance it will be able to hear its own, truthful echo. But it can have help. A large, stationary radar system can broadcast a signal which the missile’s radar receiver can listen to, in addition to its own weak transmitter. The C-802 missile has been widely hacked by small contractors — improved and customized in a multitude of ways.

In order to get around the ECM that frustrates shore based radar, the Houthis put some observers in tiny boats near the Mason. From the current open source reports,  these  possibilities cannot be distinguished:

• The boats were within optical range. Using something like a surveyor’s total station, the position of the Mason was obtained by optical triangulation.
• A radar station in Houthi territory, possibly for  civil aviation, was used to illuminate the Mason. The Houthi boats could have used directional antennas with widely available spectrum analyzers to perform a cruder-than-optical triangulation.

The attacks comprise an ingenious, if unsophisticated, attempt to leverage outmoded military technology against a sophisticated, high value target. The signature elements are:

• Small boats, potentially in large numbers.
• A low tech run around high-tech ECM.
• Possible innovative use of a technique derived from bistatic radar.
• The gadget on the boats, the product of a small industrial base, attempting an outside-the-box solution.
• A hacked Chinese missile.

The open source estimate is that this is an Iranian test of a “weapons system”, for which the Yemen conflict offers a scenario of perfect deniability.

In dollar cost of weapons expenditure, Iran won. Retaliation is likely in order to equalize expenditures.

Edit: As of 11:55 PM ET, Wed October 12, 2016, CNN reports “Three US strikes hit radar sites in Yemen, Pentagon says”.  The size and static nature of radar sites make easy targets. Some radars have limited mobility, but it’s a big trucking job. The strike is likely to be followed by a protracted effort to attrit the missile launchers, which are mobile.

The better known, famous aspect of intelligence is “clandestine.” By spying, information is obtained about the intentions of governing elites, and military and technological secrets. But while clandestine intelligence might give us a peak behind the curtain, it offers little of the stage itself, the masses of humanity. In the middle east, as elsewhere, the elites manipulate the masses, who in turn reflect back on the elites with what some call the zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times.”  If  the West is favorably distinguished from this dynamic, perhaps Walter Lippmann offers the best explanation of how western democracy actually works.

Perhaps surprisingly, clandestine intelligence informs poorly on this dynamic. It might tell us that a particular leader intends to manipulate public opinion in his country in a certain way, but it does not explain why the leader expects the zeitgeist to be receptive. Open source approaches are much better at this. The classic example is the rise of Adolf Hitler. The zeitgeist of German society was primed for the event, waiting only for someone to step into the role.

In Wall Street Journal: “Aleppo Is Obama’s Sarajevo”, I wrote,

Presently, the deaths of rebel atrocities number only a few dozen at a time, scarcely reported in the press. But what if they found it expeditious to kill more? The history of new revolutionary states is that of bloodbath.

If open source is truly a craft, the statement is insufficiently justified. The counter could be, “You’re assuming the worst about people; you have no objective, or even systematic justification.”

Open source imposes on the thinking of the liberal arts, drawing liberally and in bastardized fashion from mathematics and the hard sciences. We must, because the requirement is to actually decide something that can be practical input into further processes of decision. In  2000 years, philosophers couldn’t build a car. We don’t have 2000 years.

So, following the shining example of Lofti A. Zadeh, who invented fuzzy logic, we appropriate a concept from mathematics,  the “least upper bound”. Simplified and bastardized, this means some kind of a function, the LUB, that can be graphed above another function, or distribution, so that it is always greater. Things cannot go higher, or get better, than the least upper bound.

The LUB is offered by the (Reuters) Saudi attack on on a mourning ceremony that killed 140. I’ll now borrow Zadeh’s phrase “fuzzy logic” and repurpose it to get a LUB. This is not Zadeh’s system.

The LUB is a behavioral prediction, of  the level of Syrian rebel atrocities were they to assume a governing role. It asserts that the rebels cannot behave better than the bound. Think of the number of atrocities as a downward increasing arrow. Saudi Arabia, an advanced society, is used to generate the LUB. The “>” symbol is the math symbol for “greater than”, which is used here to signify both a higher moral plane and a more disciplined society:

• Saudi ethics are highly organized and rigorous, > (better) than Syria rebel ethics.
• Saudi military are highly disciplined > Syria rebel discipline.

This offers a 2-axis LUB. It asserts that the rebels cannot do better (behave better) than this. If you like, you can swap “<” for  “>” and replace LUB with GLB, the greatest lower bound. The number of rebel atrocities is now bounded from below, as in “cannot be less than.”

How much worse would the rebels be?  Here’s an off-the-cuff social theory:

• With centralization, the Saudis have a limited number of “actors”, where an actor is a nucleus of people who make a single decision.
• Each actor has a limited appetite for atrocity. Having killed 140, the responsible Saudi actor might not want more blood right away.
• The Syrian rebels contain many more independent actors.
• The potential for atrocity =  number-of-actors X the number of atrocities per actor.

The product  is much greater.

In  “Aleppo Is Obama’s Sarajevo”,  Daniel Henninger writes,

“The more fundamental failure is that Mr. Obama has refused to permit the arming of people who are willing to fight on their own behalf against a dictator committed to the mass slaughter of innocent civilians.”

Everything Henninger writes about in the WSJ article about  the cruelty of the siege is true. Depopulation is the goal of indiscriminate bombardment and starvation, because it facilitates military control. The Economist expresses the same sentiment in “Grozny rules in Aleppo”, with very reasonable concerns about what might have been done, and hasn’t.

It’s our desperate desire to identify the good side, and back it. But what if there isn’t any? Read Syria Policy Review Part 2 before you decide. The considerations do not simply involve religious doctrines. The crucial question is how the opposing forces would behave towards populations under their governance. Presently, the deaths of rebel atrocities number only a few dozen at a time, scarcely reported in the press. But what if they found it expeditious to kill more? The history of new revolutionary states is that of bloodbath.

Henninger’s article contains  a factual error with a big emotional payload. He writes,

The more fundamental failure is that Mr. Obama has refused to permit the arming of people who are willing to fight on their own behalf against a dictator committed to the mass slaughter of innocent civilians.

The “Syrian people”, which means only people who have the misfortune to live there, are not the fighters of Aleppo. Aleppo is not the Paris Commune. It was noted in 2013  that the composition of fighters had a high proportion of foreign jihadis. This has doubtless shifted towards a more domestic weighting, as the reward of Paradise becomes too imminent.

But the fighters of Aleppo are not the denizens of Aleppo. The residents stay, not because they like the rebels, but because they are justifiably frightened that the regime will slaughter them, or drive them into the desert to die. Ras-Al-Ayn, one of the principal death camps of the Armenian Genocide, is only 170 miles to the east.

Perhaps the current administration carried the concepts of disengagement, and “lead from behind”, too far. But a remarkable aspect of American post-WWII foreign policy has been that most of it was fruitless,  the expensive follies of our advanced civilization and values — compared, at least, to most of the rest of the world.  The triumph of Containment was not to be repeated.

So  a more vigorous approach at the outset, one which preserved more of the dignity and reputation of the United States of America, might have resulted in a very similar endpoint of human suffering. The problem then was the inability to identify leaders who  shared our values and could also command the allegiance of fighters, most of whom had  jihadist inclinations. There have always been Syrian patriots of intellect and political capacity, but lacking a popular base. This is the perpetual Arab tragedy.

The Syria conflict is very typical of history,  between the primitive dynamism of the rebels and the more advanced social structure of Iran pressing in from the east. The more advanced civilization usually wins. This is likely the root of the current administration’s determined passivity.

Like Henninger, I feel a personal outrage that is hard to suppress. I see a duel-to-the-death between two monsters, superimposed in a double image on the helpless trampled underfoot. Had the rebels been given MANPADs a few years ago, the Russian ambassador to the U.N. might not be able to state (Yahoo),

“Had it not been for our involvement in Syria it might well be that the black flags would be flying over Damascus,” Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin told reporters in New York. “It could well be. This is the reality of the situation.”

Turkey makes MANPADs under license, and the Gulf States can buy them. The U.S. has not openly objected to the transfer. A choice not to supply them would be  entirely up to Sunni states, religious compatriots of the rebels. The reasons for denial, should they ever come to light, could be useful to incorporate into our own thinking.

This post is titled as if to imagine that Vladimir Putin reads this blog. It is public knowledge that he reads the Internet widely.  The F.B.I. reports that American “Russia analysts” are of interest, because Russian intelligence thinks that the group is a good aggregate source of what American decision makers really think. They seem to think that the information gleaned is more useful than  the presentations of mass media.

So it’s not out of the question. This post is prompted by two events. Sputnik News carries a warning by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova:

My task is to explain why it is so important to remain in line with agreements. If the US launches a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian army, it will lead to terrible, tectonic shifts not only on the territory of this country but also in the region in general,” Zakharova said during a talk show, which is to be broadcast fully later on Saturday by the TV Tsentr channel.

The other event, almost in anticipation of the above, is (Reuters) the suspension of the plutonium cleanup program, which is so urgent it was signed in 2000 and took 10 years to get going. This is pie-in-the-face stuff. Putin just threw a lemon-meringue with whipped cream topping.

I hardly envision myself as a peacemaker, but the U.S. mass media has been villifying Putin so broadly, it might have finally gotten under his K.G.B. hardened skin. I am very much against broad vilification. Putin might not understand that it is just a U.S. electoral tradition, and that he should feel honored by his inclusion. The foreign policy issues that have caused U.S. — Russia relations to plummet are enumerable and substantial. Whatever Putin has done with democracy in Russia is not one of the crucial considerations.

Ukraine is one issue of substance. The other is Syria. This is about Syria.

American policy has thus far exhibited a relative lack of sensitivity about the possibility that Syria could be taken over by a Salafi jihadist regime that, in time, and with inevitable acts of terrorism, could ignite the Russian Caucasus, and even the greater 14% of Russia’s Muslim population. But is hard to gauge the threat of U.S. policy in Syria, because nobody in the U.S. State Department knows what the policy is. There is a difference between “position statements”, paper policies, and actionable judgments. This is why Secretary Kerry lost the argument for use of force against the Syrian regime.

In Syria Policy Review Part 2, I all but called the Syrian opposition a frenemy. While the relationship between Russia and Assad is one of trust, the U.S. relationship  with the rebels is not. This is why the Syrian opposition has not received game-changing weapons. The U.S. is unwilling to risk civil aviation deaths to ensure their survival. The Gulf nations may have other ideas about MANPADs, especially if they can be “safed” by technical measures against the threat.

This bears on the now contemplated U.S. use of force against the regime. But Russian thinkers may be curious as to why we are so concerned about the fate of our frenemy. Here the Russian side exhibits an  insensitivity reciprocal to the American. It has to do with tradition in war, and how it carries into peace. The Russian tradition of war, which we have seen in Chechnya, is that the civilians caught in the middle may in some instances be considered expendable. This has certainly been the Alawite tradition in crushing Islamist uprisings of both the past and present.

So the American apprehension is that if our frenemies are vanquished, the Sunni population of Syria, who are the majority, will continue to suffer with all the horrors of the past and present.  Assad cannot be trusted to do otherwise. If a poll were taken of the State Department, this might be the dominant concern. Who could presently believe in a “free and democratic Syria”? A slaughterhouse can’t be democratized.

The treatment of civilians in Aleppo should have been a showcase of Assad’s future intentions towards the majority Sunnis of Syria. But it has been a horror show. (CNN: Sunday’s airstrike was the latest in a growing list of systematic attacks on hospitals throughout Syria.) With this in mind, what choice has the U.S. but to continue conditional support of our frenemies? If U.S. force is used, it is likely to be used conditionally, to even the odds, not crush the regime.

The U.S. has not been hypocritical with respect to targeting civilians. U.S. mission planning teams, tasked with assisting the Saudi Arabia in Yemen, were withdrawn due to civilian targeting that was not adequately explained.

See bitch slap. More and more, the U.S./Russia tone resembles a bad marriage.

Reuters: “I am serving notice now to the Americans, this will be the last military exercise,” Duterte said during a visit to Vietnam. “Jointly, Philippines-U.S.: the last one.”

The significance cannot be overstated. While Reuters interprets this event as “fissures”, it is far more significant. It is a rupture.

The only mitigation of the bad news is that Duterte’s persona has not at this point completely infused and displaced the previous ethos of the Philippines’ government since the Marcos dictatorships: liberal, friendly, inefficient, tolerant, and corrupt. But given Duterte’s ability to actuate an extrajudicial war on drugs, the displacement may happen. Liberal Philippine politics seems in a pushover situation.

This is also the big issue of U.S. presidential election: the tradition of liberal democracy challenged by authoritarian promises of prosperity that would presumably result from greater order, at the cost of constitutional sacrifices dimly appreciated by large swathes of the electorate. Memories are short. The political pendulum oscillates with a period on the order of a generation.

The oscillation occurs spontaneously. It does not have to have a cause. But the timing is probably influenced by a rising China, the preeminent example of economic and social success under an authoritarian, elitist regime. The Philippines, in its short existence, has always been a poor country, struggling with a self-inflicted stigma of cultural dependency. This is why the U.S. Naval Base at Subic Bay was closed in 1992, though the closure was certainly catalyzed by some high profile crimes of American servicemen.

Duterte’s statements, predating his election, suggest his specific thinking. He wants Chinese money. He wants a railroad. He is unwilling to sacrifice  potential prosperity, even as a Chinese vassal state, for the abstraction of geopolitics.

So the future trajectory of U.S. / Philippines relations is stunningly derivable from open sources by appropriate consideration of Duterte’s history, demeanor, and personality. Duterte is a pragmatist in the extreme. He has no interest in the formal structures of either domestic government or foreign relations. He is more like a U.S. big city mayor from the early-to-mid twentieth century. Richard J. Daley comes to mind, though it remains to be seen whether Duterte’s course will follow the dictum, “Power corrupts…” Every once in a while, we find an honest  (personally) man.  But like a Daley, he already has a machine that can steamroller the institutions of Philippines government.

Arguably, Duterte’s apparent willingness to make the Phillippines a vassal state, and his authoritarian fix for social problems, could result in greater prosperity and happiness for the majority of Filipinos. The political history of the country suggests that Duterte’s tenure could be lifelong.

This severely weakens  U.S. military posture in the region. There is no alternative but to draw the line further out.

When order is missing, it is craved. When order displaces freedom, freedom is craved. So goes the pendulum.

Reuters: Gulf may arm rebels now Syria truce is dead: U.S. officials.

I haven’t published Syria Policy Review Part 3, because readers are preoccupied with the presidential election and domestic incidents of violence. Like you, I wish the problems of the rest of the world simply didn’t exist.

But a post from May,  Isis Attacks Russian Base T4; The Kremlin’s Missing Musical Notes might now be worth another look. At that time, I wrote:

But with all that, the U.S. is too sane to give MANPADs to the Syrian opposition. Other regional powers, to whom the Russian presence is a more existential threat, could break the unspoken compact.ROKETSTAN, a Turkish company, manufactures Stingers under license.

The purpose of the citation is not to give myself a pat on the back. But if I foresaw this, any government with a competent foreign policy research arm, or bureau, as the Russians call it, should have had the same anticipation. And the lack should be viewed as a severe deficiency.

This blog has at least a few Russian readers of significance. My question to you, rhetorically, of course, is, what were you thinking? Have you ever heard the poker expression, “overplaying a hand?”

I also wrote,

American policy is not exempt from criticism. Failing to recognize that hope is inadequate justification for  foreign policy, it lacks a prospect for the Russians to grasp. And with their musical limitations, the Russians are apparently unable to synthesize it themselves.

Those of us who deplore our relative lack of cunning compared to the Russians could enjoy a brief moment of schadenfreund, before we resume dolorous contemplation of U.S. policy, which seems almost instantaneously superseded by events.

Quoting The Telegraph,

Two US officials said on Tuesday night they had intelligence confirming that two Russian Sukhoi SU-24 warplanes were in the skies above the aid convoy at the precise time it was struck, and that the conclusion was that Russia was to blame.

 It’s worth quoting RT, because, as a state channel, their explanation is the Russian exculpation:

The Russian Center for Reconciliation said that it had used drones to accompany the convoy because its route passed through territory controlled by the rebels, but only to a certain point…“Russian and Syrian warplanes did not carry out any airstrikes on a UN humanitarian aid convoy in the southwest of Aleppo,”  Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement Tuesday….“Around 13:40 Moscow time (10:40 GMT) the aid convoy successfully reached the destination. The Russian side did not monitor the convoy after this and its movements were only known by the militants who were in control of the area,” Konashenkov added…The Defense Ministry spokesman said that the Russian military had been looking at video footage…“We have closely studied the video footage from where the incident took place and we did not find any signs of any ammunition having hit the convoy. There are no craters, while the vehicles have their chassis intact and they have not been severely damaged, which would have been the case from an airstrike,” Konashenkov said.

Several refutations are immediate:

•  Unlike gravity bombs, rockets that strike trucks do not generally leave craters, unless the trucks themselves contain munitions that result in large secondary explosions.
• The damage is not compatible with a heavy high-explosive warhead, one of the three choices for the KH-23 ground attack missile.  But it is compatible with another choice, a fragmentation warhead, which is the logical loadout for attack of unprotected positions, providing greater area coverage.
• A relatively new tool, Google Search, is a remarkably useful tool for assessment of psychological perspectives. The search term is “Russians take responsibility for tragedy.” See what you come up with, from any time period.

But was it intentional, an act of revenge for   the mistaken U.S. bombing of Assad’s army? One additional detail of the Russian excuse is noteworthy, the Russian claim that the convoy was escorted by terrorists. Reuters reports , and quoting The Telegraph,

Russia’s defence ministry released drone footage late on Tuesday that it says showed a pickup truck carrying militants and hauling a heavy mortar driving alongside the convoy before it was bombed…In a statement posted on its Facebook page last night, the Russian defence ministry said the drone footage cast “new details on the incident.”…”It is clearly visible how terrorists deploy a pickup with a large calibre mortar alongside the convoy,” the ministry said. 

So what do we do with denials that smack of  O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, resonating with the street classic, “I didn’t do it, but if I did, I was drunk”? Perhaps counter-intuitively, open source analysis requires developing the argument of the adversary. If you want to get fancy about it, we could quote Hegel ‘s thesis, antithesis, synthesis. By this process, we at least partially free ourselves from our personal biases.

The conclusion that the act  was intentional from the highest level weakens a little with the extended playout of Russian excuses. Typical Russian propaganda, prepared ahead of time, doesn’t pay much attention to temporal plausibility. It is also weakened by characteristics of  the Russian military about which the popular media is not very informative.

Of all the subjects covered in the popular press, military reporting is  the weakest, and unintentionally deceptive. For politicians as well as journalists, weapons systems are a kind of toy store, as well as  jobs programs for the elves that make them. Consequently, most of the world’s militaries are “hollow”, meaning that they are incapable of actualizing the incredible specifications their weapons systems are alleged to have.

Modern warfare is not composed of isolated weapons systems. They are complex syntheses of man and machine, not simply at the tip of the spear, as in the cockpit, but encompassing logistics, communications, and decision making that forms a kind of inverted pyramid. The pyramid is broad, heavy, and substantial, narrowing to the tiny needle of the warplane the carries out the attack.

The beginning of the modern pyramid dates back to 1937, in the U.K., in the design of air defense control that ultimately lead to victory in the Battle of Britain. Development in the West of operations research (OR), has been continual since that time.  The vast technological and procedural knowledge is continually augmented and passed on in our war colleges, which are nothing like the blog-fests of the major news sites. It is a serious, highly intellectual affair that eludes casual interest.

For the Russians, this is very new. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, the advanced concepts of the West could not even be considered because Soviet doctrine was one of central control of relatively simple elements that were not expected to exhibit intelligent, initiative-born behavior. In lieu of modern, almost instantaneous command pyramid communication and control, the Russians relied on simple “standing orders.” Since that time, the Russians have embarked on drastic modernization, not simply of military hardware, but of the doctrines that run the whole enterprise. They haven’t had a lot of practice.

The video of drone footage provided by the Russian and exhibited by The Telegraph shows what the Russians call a “large caliber mortar”, towed alongside the stopped convoy. It cannot excuse the subsequent attack. But given the level of ability of Russian command-and-control, it may explain. The far better U.S. command-and-control system did not prevent the U.S. accidental bombing. Quoting CNN,

That’s a working theory of how US, British, Danish and Australian aircraft may have incorrectly assessed intelligence and targeted the site that killed more than 60 Syrian personnel near Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria. The UK Ministry of Defence is saying it used drones in the strike.

And U.S. command-and-control, intelligence gathering, analysis, and decision has been honed to perfect pitch since the 1991 Gulf War.

The open source conclusion is that this was a Russian command-and-control misfire, approved at a level incompetent to make the decision.

Few are the countries strong enough to admit mistakes. Russia is not one of them. What remains to be seen is their sensitivity to human suffering.

The five intelligence  crowd sourcing programs funded by IARPA had a common structure: a game, with “players”, such as yours truly, who made predictions by manipulating pie charts representing outcomes. Hidden in the bowels of the recycled software that ran these sites was a “market”, so that players were actually buying and selling shares in the outcomes of questions.

Each question had a meticulously devised set of outcomes. The purpose of the meticulousness was to insure that, come hell or high water, the eventual outcome would be one of the choices offered to the player. But the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. In some cases, the question was invalidated, with no points or penalty to the player.

Happily, this has not happened this time. With the capture of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a well-written question would have had a valid outcome. We can now conclude that the bombings were terrorism. If you would like to continue to play the “game”, you may now wish to consider the following subsidiary question.

Is there a cell, or is Rahami a lone wolf? All of the information which has so far been arrayed to answer the original question, about a terror act, can be applied to this new question. As with the original question, your judgment will be formed from consideration and weighting of:

• Forensics, available in open source, such as what has been revealed about the crime scenes.
• Competence of the perpetrator and the technology used.
• The resources of an individual.
• The resources of a group.
• How a group action might differ from one planned and executed by an individual.
• Possible hybridization of the two, meaning, an atypical profile.
• Anything else you can think up.

Have fun!