Yahoo. Quoting, “The defence ministry of the self-proclaimed Lugansk republic confirmed that Alexey Mozgovoy, the commander of a police battalion in the war-torn region, was among the dead and said it was hunting for the assailants behind the attack.”

So let’s round up the usual suspects. Russia makes the list, and here’s a helpful guide to the others: A Guide to the Warlords of Ukraine’s ‘Separatist Republics’

There has been of a lot of friction between the various rebel commanders, so they cannot be excluded. A Ukraine based site, unian.info, says the Russian GRU killed Mozgovoy, because he would not obey orders from Moscow. But every interest has a conceivable motive to name someone other than the actual. A rebel commander would name either Ukraine, or a rival, which avoids irritating Moscow and also weakens the rival.

But quoting from a 5/24 article in The Independent, “Over the past six months, several of the most unwieldy rebel leaders have been removed – and many assume Mr Mozgovoi is next on the list. It is well known that Mr Mozgovoi is on difficult terms with the Kremlin-annointed leader of the Luhansk republic, Igor Plotnitsky.”

Why he was on difficult terms is concisely described by the title: Ukraine crisis: Separatist rebel commander Aleksey Mozgovoi says he is ‘ready for more deaths’ – and warns ceasefire with Kiev won’t hold.  Mozgovoy’s assassination accords with a pattern of murders that overlap in time with the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and includes the execution of one, and possibly more, of Chechnya ruler Kadyrov’s men, discussed in Chechnya threatens Russia; Expansionist Complex.

A reasonable surmise is that the murder of Nemtsov catalyzed thought in the Kremlin, particularly Putin’s own, that the Expansionist Complex now poses more of a threat to Russia than Ukraine ever did. The situation has evolved into the political equivalent of a thunderstorm supercell, in which the natural tendency to dissipate is thwarted by cyclonic updraft. The unexpected energy supply owes to the instability of North Caucasus, evidenced by Kadyrov’s men doing a hit for the separatists. So Moscow may now  try for a frozen conflict.

As early as 9/2014, an article in the International Business Times, with Novaya Gazeta as a source, claimed “Cash-Strapped Russia Won’t Support Ukrainian Separatist Regions Of Donetsk And Luhansk.” The article cites financial burden, but the danger of  imported political instability is more compelling. Moscow would have to kill off every member of the rebel leadership who has  a mind of his own, and try to absorb the others, who would remain security risks. And as a reservoir of disaffection, the general population would not be without risk.

A purge is not as practical as it seems. Despite the occasional assassination, Russia has become, compared to what it was before, a humanitarian state. We abhor some of the methods, such as extrajudicial execution. But Russia is nothing like it was before. The mind of today’s Russian has not been brutalized by purges. It has merely been deceived by Russian news media. Whatever type of the state Vladimir Putin desires to construct, it is distinct from the totalitarian familiar.

A purge  would not kill their ghosts, which  would live in the minds of others, brutalized by knowledge of the deed. And the Caucasus is a graveyard of ghosts yearning to escape from the grave.

One purpose of this blog is to make transferable the skill of open source analysis. In the service of that goal, pseudo derivations of  the conclusions are provided. This is not to say that the mental process is so formal. Since the 1980’s, the limitations of the “expert system” based on formal methods have been laid bare.  Such systems do not approach the general problem solving ability of the human expert, although they can exceed it in specialized areas. Computer chess is one such example, but chess is a game with formal rules.

Open source intelligence has no formal rules. It is an occupation of neural networks, and has been long before the term was known. A humanist who is acquainted only with the useless system of formal logic would benefit from a look at Ludwig Wittgenstein and Franz Zwicky.

Wittgenstein destroyed the concept of formal language as a complete system of communication. His Tractatus is only 75 pages in length, yet he is regarded as one of the first rank philosophers of the 20th century. That should tell you something. That he did not provide a replacement for the destroyed concept of language is the mark of an honest man. Whether you understand the payload of Tractatus after the first 30 pages, or remain puzzled after the whole 75, is a point of self-discovery.

The Wikipedia page on Franz Zwicky places him as a Caltech astronomer. But Zwicky also designed jet and rocket engines, an incredibly complex undertaking, and hypothesized the existence of dark matter using the virial theorem. Having addressed these problems, he then studied how he solved them, which he described as the method of general morphological analysis. The Wikipedia article on this is questionable, but the method itself is an important suggestion as to how neural networks might be coupled to create a mind capable of complex strategies.

The highfalutin introduction done with, watch a Vice video, The Yakuza’s Ties to the Right Wing. You’ll see most of the elements of the post World War I German right wing: the lost territories to be regained, the authoritarian impulse, represented as Japanese version of honoring the “Leader”; the various factions: thinkers, politicians, and brown shirts; factional conflict; the search for civic respectability by providing services; the desire to kill; the desire for conflict. Racism, which is denied, is replaced by an equivalent, xenophobia.

Since virulent nationalism with the right wing shadow is one of the most popular and persistent national delusions, grocking the Vice video will enhance your predictive toolkit much more than knowing the interminable history of conflict on the plains of Poland. The take-away, the thing to be extracted, is Zwicky’s morphology–the shape of the problem, once all the cultural influences are subtracted. That this is Japan makes this easy, because the Western norms, so easy to gloss over, are replaced by jarringly different customs, as in the banquet towards the end of the video.

With the cultural norms subtracted, and Zwicky’s morphology squirreled away in your memory banks, it will usefully come to mind when examining three extant or brewing troubles: Russian, German, and Indian nationalism.

It is not impossible to desire that Bashar al-Assad should remain in power until ISIS is so drained by defeat in Iraq that the Syrian part can be vanquished by Sunni allies of the U.S.  This is called a pipe dream. Last year, it had a little more reality, and even more the year before that. This is mentioned in the interest of understanding the trend.

Perhaps the strategists hope to deal with ISIS-in-Syria later. But the word “hope” should never be used in government except in the context of selection between alternative strategies. In this case, the strategy of training the “good” Syrian opposition has been more than overtaken by events. It has been run over by a truck. The loss of Palmyra describes a situation that could result in the partition of Syria between ISIS and Hezbollah.

With Iraq,  useful adjustments to strategy are feasible, if victory, or achievement of strategic objectives, are replaced by the concept of contained chaos. In terms of any conventionally defined goal, the existing Syria strategy is completely unworkable.  So tinkering will not work. There is a complex diplomatic problem to be solved. The Secretary of State who solves it will Vulcan mind-meld with the key players: el-Sisi of Egypt, Erdoğan of Turkey, Abdullah II of Jordan, Iran’s proxy–Hezbollah, and the U.S.

The above list includes people who might have done a bad thing or two to former presidents and journalists. It includes hostile entities, and unreasonable entities.  In the context of established policies, these unfortunate facts cause any derived solution to be “unthinkable.”  To whom it may concern: You’ll just have to deal with it.

No specifics can be offered, because the assembly of a pan-Arab army (with Turkish add-on) is a very human endeavor. For any other part of the world, my helpful suggestion would be lots of Havana cigars and  Macallan Lalique 55 Year Old Single Malt.

Can you find the misprint? Click to enlarge. Hint: It’s one of those subliminal hate things.

Copied from the Reuters “home” tab, at 1:20 a.m. E.S.T., 5/21/2015.

Back in the day, close air support implied identification of targets by compass coordinates and visual features, largely by ground observers without specialist training, relayed in real time to loitering aircraft. This is an obsolete conception. For a suitable replacement, think of an embedded team that provides air traffic control, and electronically determined target coordinates created by a variety of designation gadgets, suitable for direct input into the launch system of a precision guided weapon.

“Advisers in Iraq: What They Do, What They Can Do” offers examples of how deployment of a Tactical Air Control Party can positively modify the effectiveness of ground troops. With rag-tag militias, the effect can be so profound as to almost verify the discredited notion that wars can be won with air power. Wars cannot be so won, but battles can.

The precision and scope of a Tac Air Support Party is readily evident on the ground. A precision guided strike leaves a characteristic footprint, and Iraqi troops are talkers. The absence of the talk suggests that  Iraqi troops have not had more than occasional benefit of this force multiplier.

The taking of Ramadi by ISIS forces that are reported to have formed a massed concentration before the attack suggests that something is missing from U.S. strategy.  Concentrations are targets of opportunity. This does not immediately lead to the conclusion by Lindsay Graham that 10,000 U.S. ground troops are appropriate. But the Administration strategy contains an undefined hole.  To date, responses  have  provisioned  inadequate force, and deferred too much to the forms imposed on our thinking by the traditions of Western diplomacy. Although relevant to us, those traditions are irrelevant to the actors.

An email  link, contact@intel9.us, has been added for contact out of the public eye. Because of the need to know who the dialog is with, please provide a phone number and expect a call. Queries from the U.S. academic and intelligence establishments are welcome. If you are not in that category, the public forum is still open to you.

Please do not use this as a “tip line.” This blog is about open source intelligence. Tips cannot be used here in any way, shape, or form. Private consultation cannot be provided, with the possible exception of U.S. institutions of sterling quality.

If you are an academic, your interest in this blog should be in the methods used,  provided to help make analysis a teachable skill.

Quoting the Guardian, “Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has told his security forces to open fire on Russian federal troops if they operate in the region without his approval.”

Kadyrov’s order was provoked by the killing of a suspect (correction: to be precise, it’s claimed he threw himself on a grenade), according to Russian media, by federal forces based in Chechnya (map, region 2), and forces from Stavropol Krai (Map, region 7). So rarely useful, deduction shines:

1.  Kadyrov runs assassination squads both inside Russia and outside (see the Guardian article.)
2. In Chechnya, you are either a friend of Kadyrov, or you are in risk of being dead.
3. The Kremlin wanted somebody dead inside Chechnya, but Kadyrov would not do the hit. Perhaps he could not even be asked to.

Ergo, the man was an ally of Kadyrov. And one ally of Kadyrov, Zaur Dadayev, has already been implicated in the killing of Boris Nemetsov.

For Kadyrov to refuse to kill someone, or be unapproachable for the job, is so exceptional, it amounts to protection. This event, the killing in Chechnya,  Kadyrov’s reaction, and the prior murder of Boris Nemetsov, are temporally and spatially connected. See the map; Chechnya, and Stavropol Krai are not adjacent to Ukraine, but not that far away either.

As home to the most virulent Muslim extremism, Chechnya presents the constant threat of internal terrorism, as well as export of militants to foreign hot spots.  Kadyrov keeps the lid on with personally inspired brutality. In reward for neutralizing the internal threat to Russia, Kadyrov rules Chechnya like an independent vassal state. One man rule, with all the ego satisfaction of the despot, is the only pay big enough.

In the post Wesley Clark, Ukraine, & Russian Expansionist Complex, it’s asserted, “But it appears that there now exists in Russia an expansionist complex, not localized purely to a faction, that by process of diffusion may now be uncontrollable.”

The argument for a Russian expansionist complex resembles what mathematicians call a “nonconstructive proof.” Without identification of the actors, It is  based upon the tendency of nationalistic sentiment to spawn centrifugal forces in the post revolutionary period, with two motivations:  personal ambition, and “who owns the dream”. In the U.S., there was the Burr Conspiracy; in Nazi Germany, the Night of the Long Knives, in France, Napoleon. In Russia, the two motives combine.

The identification of  Kadyrov as a linchpin of the expansionist complex is circumstantial, based on:

• Deductive argument per above, suggesting that the individual killed by Russian cops was protected by Kadyrov.
• Temporal coincidence with the Nemetsov murder and the Ukraine conflict.
• Spatial coincidence ( proximity with the Ukraine.)
• Likely culpability of more than one individual “belonging” to Kadyrov in the murder of Nemetsov, who was opposed to Russia’s Ukraine involvement.

Circumstantial reasoning is weaker than the mathematician’s nonconstructive proof, but in the U.S., a murder conviction can be completely circumstantial. And given Kadyrov’s absolute control of Chechnya, he either sanctioned the hit on Nemetsov,  was inattentive, or had mutinous subordinates. Kadyrov says that if Dadayev is one of the killers, he acted on his own, though Dadyev may just be a fall guy.

The use of a deductive format does not imply certainty of analysis. Without a motive, choice from the three possibilities is vague. But membership in the expansionist complex offers a motive, a quid pro quo with other members of the complex. As Kadyrov has subdued through brutality a population with tendencies toward rebellion and extremism, he is an unusual person. He lives very close to death, and deflects it by inflicting it on others. History offers examples of lethargic despots, such as Papa Doc, but the energy required to subdue a population with the violent potential of Chechnya does not permit lethargy. This suggests Kadyrov is the other type of despot, with the impulse to expand his absolute domain.

Kadyrov has already achieved the remarkable. Chechnya, which, technically, lost two wars with Russia, is now an enclave, an independent vassal state completely contained within Russia,. The expansionist despot, like Hannibal Lecter, desires to escape his prison.

How can he escape?

I’m interested in establishing diplomatic relations with I.R. departments in the swath of the U.S. known as the Eastern Megalopolis, from D.C. to Boston.

The not-very-furtive motive is: it could be interesting.

The authors of the pivot might prefer euphemistic phrasing, such as, “For decades, U.S. naval presence has helped to keep the peace in the western Pacific…”

The use of hard power to “manage China”  has roots in gunboat diplomacy, which was the traditional way for the European powers to deal with the weak China of the Qing dynasty.  In the 90’s and early 2000’s, defense columnists were heard to use the phrase “manage China” to justify development of the Zumwalt class destroyer.  When the pace of China’s development made a reprise of The Sand Pebbles unlikely, the build was cut from 29 to 3.

It was a brave decision by Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations. The program should never have progressed that far. But rather than an example of military bloat, it represents a failure to extrapolate a threat climate into the future.  In 1995, the Zumwalt might have survived off the shores of China. In 2005, it could not. It took three more years for Roughead to axe it. And this is not a singular error, it is a systematic one, the result of a continuing inability to extrapolate China’s trajectory.

China’s visceral awareness of the U.S. carriers as the lynchpin of power projection came about during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. In March of 1996, the Nimitz group sailed through the Strait, and there wasn’t a weapon in the Chinese arsenal that could do anything about it. In 1996, the carriers were an incontestable projection of U.S. power. They were, from the perspective of weapons targeting, invisible to the shore radars of the day. This was accomplished by phase-locked jamming signals broadcast by multiple ships, both hiding the ships and creating phantoms in their stead. Although the U.S. Navy has more large surface combatant ships than any time since World War II, the increased order of battle is nullified by an asymmetric threat. Most of the above-surface threat could be effectively countered by the free-electron laser, but the power requirements of the weapon are greatly in excess of the Nimitz Class of carriers. The Gerald R. Ford class anticipates this weapon, but it will take many years for replacement of the current fleet.

Against the underwater supercavitating torpedo, and  the supersonic cruise missile, there are no current countermeasures with the kind of kill ratio you’d like. If you were with an infantry platoon, with bullets whizzing past, would you feel comfortable if told that the chances that any particular bullet had your name on it was one in a hundred?  This belongs to the pithy argument for quantity: “Quantity has a quality all its own.” See the Congressional Research Report.

While the cruise missiles and torpedos may evoke spears against muskets, China developed their own version of a grand-slam weapon, the DF-21 anti-carrier ballistic missile. It is guided by satellite synthetic aperture radar operating at much shorter frequencies than land based radar, producing actual images of the target. With a conventional warhead, the kinetic energy of the kill vehicle would severely damage a carrier. With a small nuclear weapon, a single missile could take out an entire carrier battle group.

The modern relevance of the loss of strength gradient, devised by Kenneth E. Boulding in 1962, comes into play. “Gradient” is an exaggeration of exactitude, since, in asymmetric conflicts with unsophisticated adversaries, the U.S. and allies have projected tremendous force. But against a sophisticated adversary, when the first strike advantage does not come into play, it probably has practical, if not mathematical, validity. The South China Sea is very close to China, very far from us, and the carrier is no longer the invulnerable vehicle of force projection.

For every measure, there is a countermeasure. A favorite word  in the weaponeer’s trade  is daedal, reference with admiration to the intricacies of a weapon system. It is the fruit of an engineering establishment that brought most of the modern world into being. This kind of human resource was once exclusive to the U.S. and Western Europe, but it has diffused on many levels. Problems of what formerly were dark arts, such as terrain-guided cruise missiles, are being solved in third world countries.

The  advantage in technology which the U.S. formerly enjoyed is in a state of relative decline. The counter of  Boulding’s law by advanced technology will shortly become untenable.  For every measure, daedal will produce a countermeasure, but these pairs cannot restore the advantage previously enjoyed, which was that of a technologically sophisticated civilization against one unsophisticated.

The costs of miscalculating the trajectory of China are both tactical and strategic. The tactical cost manifests  in the failure to extrapolate the viability of a weapon system. Without the costs of the Zumwalt program, notwithstanding “paralysis in government”, there might be money for another viable weapon.

This is the problem of power projection. But the subject ignites, in many, a hypnotic fear  that makes us want to reach for a bigger gun.  Perhaps fear defines our game, without agreement by the other player as to the definition. This incurs the strategic cost. Since statements of diplomacy almost have the tradition of deception,  China’s strategists may not  intend any more misdirection than is par for the course.

The game is not about hard power; it’s about soft.  With failure to understand this,  our score, when it comes to “game-set-match”, will be  entirely our own fault.

Next: hard versus soft.

If you tire of the gastronomic travel tours of the Sunday Times, try Paul Theroux, who replaces complaisant companions with a bottle of booze (The Old Patagonian Express), and with a canoe in The Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux is above neither praise or criticism, but his sardonic observations about the smaller islands of Oceania, which he navigated largely by canoe, and alone, have the ring of truth, if possibly skewed. The islands Theroux describes are not happy, conforming to the general tendency of humans to make a hell out of paradise.

It’s important to take a guess at the accuracy of his observations. I think they’re pretty good. These small places have character, which can no more be neglected than the heritage of Chinese mythology described by Henry Kissinger. Theroux describes a Melanesia and Polynesia whose inhabitants hate the sight of the sea, vomiting on ferries that cross harbors and small straits. Fear of the sea could not be predicted from the history of those historic seafarers, who traveled thousands of miles in open boats guided by stars. But the sea is now not an opportunity, but an obstacle,  source of the terrors of tsunamis and typhoons. Perhaps some gene of exaggerated fear kept them alive, when they had to go and come back, go, and come back…

So they turn their backs to the sea, try to pretend it doesn’t exist, focusing instead on their land and their squabbles, in a word, being human. And there we have the paradox of small nations. The ratio of border length to land area gives greater relative exposure to the outside, so they tend  to curl up in  protective balls of self-absorption, of which the small islands of Oceania are the extreme. The larger island nations  tend also towards inward attention. The larger the nation, the more likely to project. Russia, the largest country, devours Ukraine. The Philippines, tiny in area (but not population) by comparison, voice effete protests against Chinese, who expand by planting stakes on land reclaimed from the sea. The atolls have always been there, ignored by Manila except as some vague future promise. Only Vietnam threatens China with a fleet of submarines. But China drills in territory disputed by Vietnam, and Vietnam merely complains.

Complaints! Every member of ASEAN bordering on this sea disputes economic zones, atolls, and islets with the others. There is not a shred of cooperation against their common adversary, which happens to be their largest trading partner. A few years ago, some pundits averred that the Asian tradition of consensus prior to agreement might not be correctly understood by western diplomats. But the disputants may not understand it themselves. Sometimes a charade shrouds a meaningful process, and sometimes, a charade is just a charade. Part of this charade are claims against Japan by the Republic of China, a country that occupies the island of Formosa, the whole of which is claimed by The People’s Republic of China. It’s a very convoluted charade!

Philippines Armed Forces chief Gen. Gregorio Catapang Jr. said, “We are really amazed by the pace of China’s reclamation. It’s fast but I hope it’s not furious, …We are in a very difficult situation because now, they are reclaiming the Mischief Reef. If they reclaim Mischief Reef, we will be cut off,” he added. The Philippines calls Mischief Reef Panganiban Reef.

In composition of U.S. foreign policy, the passivity of these nations, and their preference for isolated individuality, cannot be ignored. As facts of behavior, they are as important as facts on the ground. To be effective, the pivot towards Asia must catalyze an alliance. But the ASEAN nations squabble among themselves with competing claims. The Philippines have asked ASEAN to take a stand. Perhaps there will be a statement, against the facts on the reclaimed ground China is creating. China has insisted that each dispute is purely bilateral. Surely, they could not be thinking, divide et impera!

The lack of cohesion against what some  perceive as a major threat to the international order is not simply the result of the competing claims. With a few multicultural exceptions, Southeast Asia is a place of pervasive ethnic separatism,  expressed by the word communalism, which in southeast Asia has a definition markedly different from the western, conveying the desire of various groups for ethnic and political isolation from other groups. Homogenous groups that already have separation, such as Japan, manifest a xenophobia to keep it that way. In a broader sense, most of these countries have some kind of a creation myth or heavenly mandate as their form of “exceptionalism.” And the inseparable companion of superiority is antipathy to “the other.”

This is the cultural backdrop of the pivot towards Asia. The lenses diplomacy and negotiation, if relied upon too much as a framework of thought, fail to capture the human angle, and so can’t catalyze the  goal. In chemistry, catalysis is the promotion of a chemical reaction by an element that is not itself consumed. In the absence of catalysis, a foreign policy  consumes resources without commensurate benefit. Cost/benefit analysis, a concept of economics, has always been the weak sister of diplomacy.

Next: power projection.