Monday, September 20, 2004

LOL.  CT. The Bush administration has found a way to fund the war in Iraq.  Use RICO to go after the tobacco companies for $280 billion. 6:42:14 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

More on Hostages as a Tool of War  10 Turkish employees working in Iraq for a construction company (Vinsan) are being held hostage by the Salafist Brigades of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq.  They were mostly working as truck drivers for the company.  The company is one of 21 companies working on an Iraqi road project.  The demand:  the company withdraw from Iraq in three days.  This is yet another example of "Halliburton" targeting (which has radically distorted the markets for reconstruction and military support services).  Seven Turkish companies have already withdrawn from Iraq due to global guerrilla pressure (which provides a positive feedback loop for this activity). It is also claimed that 15 Iraqi national guardsmen are being held as hostages by another group.  It's unclear how this can be converted into leverage to disrupt the market for "security services" in Iraq (I am writing up something on undermining "US exports of security services" for my global guerrillas site). It is clear that the Iraq's bazaar of violence is both continuing its pattern of innovation and reinforcing success.  Please note that almost all of this is under the radar of the US stabilization effort in Iraq. 1:08:16 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Full reproduction of someone else's weblog on an open server via RSS is wrong.  This article demonstrates the harm to the real site owner.  If you provide an RSS aggregation service, please lock up your aggregator page so that only the designated user can see it. 12:28:55 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Christopher.  "Iraq is a powderkeg..." 9:48:50 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Telegraph.  Microwave weapons are getting play in Iraq.  See Homemade Microwave Weapons for more. The non-lethal weapons, which use high-powered electromagnetic beams, will be fitted to vehicles already in Iraq, which will allow the system to be introduced as early as next year. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, where the systems were developed, took part in testing the weapon and was subjected to the microwave beam which has a range of one kilometre. "It just feels like your skin is on fire," he said. "[But] when you get out of the path of the beam, or shut off the beam, everything goes back to normal. There's no residual pain." The armoured vehicles will be named Sheriffs once they have been modified to carry the microwave weapons, known as the Active Denial System (ADS). Col Hall said that US army and US marine corps units should receive four to six ADS equipped Sheriffs by September 2005.  In another development, the Sheriffs will be fitted with Gunslinger, a rapid-fire gun currently under development that will detect enemy snipers and automatically fire back at them. 9:41:37 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

Outline of Martin Van Creveld's future wars presentation.  Excellent.  Items I particularly liked: The vast bulk of the weapon systems we are currently buying (and spending tens of billions doing so) are nearly useless.  Agreed! Aerostats (Zeppelins!).  I've been talking about this for a while.  My defense contractor friends initially laughed, but are now starting to see movement in this area.  However, these systems aren't sexy enough to attract the big funding despite their amazing value in today's warfare (they are also great for high capacity wireless bandwidth). A facility in local languages is today's most important military tool. Assad's Machiavellian rules.  Don't threaten first.  Surpise (what we didn't do with al Sadr and Fallujah).  Strike hard so that you don't need to do it twice.  Don't appologize.  Have someone else do it for you if possible. 9:27:48 AM    Comment_ Trackback []