News & commentary by Dave Maxwell. Edited and published by Daniel Riggs.
1. Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life
2. The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved
3. Opinion | We Got Afghanistan Wrong, but There’s Still Time to Learn Something
4. Malcolm Gladwell on the Hard Decisions of War (Book review by Tom Ricks)
5. Is Indonesia ready to tackle the growing challenge of female militants?
6. Wuhan lab helped Chinese army in secret project to find animal viruses
7. Opinion: CIA Agents in Thailand, Please Raise Your Hand
8. MI6 begins 'green spying' on big polluting countries
9. Chris Maier Nominated for ASD SO/LIC | SOF News
10. Why is Germany sending a frigate through the South China Sea?
11. Trump Blazed a Trail That Clears the Way for Biden
12. Kennan’s Containment Strategy: A Consensus on What Not to Do by Robert D. Kaplan
13. Some Right-Wing Troops Find Themselves Targeted by Their Own War Machine
14. Target Taiwan: Why China Is Desperate for Control of Taipei
15. As a military spouse, I suffered real and often debilitating secondary traumatic stress
16. Opinion | The Two Crises of Conservatism
17. America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses
18. Billion-Dollar Army Housing Project Begins Next Week at Five Bases
19. Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre Rescinded
20. A hybrid future may seem like the best of both worlds for work and life
21. The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol
1. Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life
The Washington Post · April 24, 2021
Seems interesting but I am not smart enough to understand the implications and the pros and cons of this, or whether there is something nefarious here or if this is important for national security and defense.
Is this just a clickbait headline?
Excerpts: “Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn’t sold any of it to a private party.
Dormant IP addresses can be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes, from disseminating spam to hacking into a computer system and downloading data, and the pilot program could allow the Defense Department to uncover if those activities are taking place using its addresses.
A person familiar with the pilot effort, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the program isn’t public, said it is important for the Defense Department to have “visibility and transparency” into its various cyber resources, including IP addresses, and manage the addresses properly so they will be available if and when the Pentagon wants to use them.
2. The big Pentagon internet mystery now partially solved
AP · by Frank Bajak
And I thought Al Gore created the Internet.
Excerpt: "Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.
3. Opinion | We Got Afghanistan Wrong, but There’s Still Time to Learn Something
Politico · by Jason Dempsey · April 25, 2021
We should have ended the mission with the punitive expedition and then turned it over to the new Afghan political leaders. And the pottery barn rule was misapplied.
Second, since we stayed on for the subsequent missing we should have followed this "principle:" "Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it. Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities."
Excerpts: “It will be painful to watch the devolution of the Afghan military, but the idea that this military is not already fractured is an illusion.
The loyalties of Afghan military officers have never neatly mapped onto the chain of command structure that we copy-and-pasted from our own military doctrine, but lie with either the politicians who got them their jobs or the tribes and ethnic groups that have sustained them through nearly forty years of fighting. As Ryan Evans and others have been suggesting since at least 2012, the fragmentation of the ANSF has never been a question of if, but when and, more important for our interests — how. So instead of ignoring these organic power structures in the hope that they will naturally go away, we must use the limited time we have left to back away and give them space to surface, identify those most aligned with our interests and provide them the support that fits their needs, not our ideals.
The American military feels naked without our watches, but with the Taliban we have seen what a force can do without them. As we withdraw we should trust and support our Afghan counterparts to do the same.
4. Malcolm Gladwell on the Hard Decisions of War (Book review by Tom Ricks)
The New York Times · by Thomas E. Ricks · April 25, 2021
Excerpts: “A novelty of this book is that Gladwell says it began as an audiobook and then became a written one, reversing the usual process. It is indeed a conversational work, almost garrulous at times, as when he reports that one psychologist “has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies — that some part of him or her has died along with the partner.” However, this chatty style also glides over some important historical questions.
Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller. When he is introducing characters and showing them in conflict, “The Bomber Mafia” is gripping. I enjoyed this short book thoroughly, and would have been happy if it had been twice as long. But when Gladwell leaps to provide superlative assessments, or draws broad lessons of history from isolated incidents, he makes me wary. Those large conclusions seemed unsubstantiated to me. Was Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, truly “responsible, more than anyone, for the extraordinary war machine that the United States built in the early years of the Second World War”? It certainly is arguable that others, like Gen. George C. Marshall, were just as important, but Gladwell simply tosses out the claim about Stimson and hurries on. Another example: Gladwell calls the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945, “the longest night of the war.” This unfortunate phrase, this unproven superlative, is repeated in the book’s unwieldy subtitle. I immediately thought, Oh yeah? What about the sailor whose ship is torpedoed and who hangs from debris in the water with no chance of rescue? Or the soldier in a minefield whose buddy is bleeding to death? What of the infinitely long nights of millions of concentration camp prisoners?
5. Is Indonesia ready to tackle the growing challenge of female militants?
aseantoday.com · April 23, 2021
Excerpts: “Some analysts say that the fact that women’s perspectives are missing from Indonesia’s counterterrorism approach indicates a major policy failure. “At the BNPT, for example, there are no women at the [decision-making] level, so it is difficult to have a woman’s perspectives,” Dwi Rubiyanti Kholifa, director of the Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN), told BenarNews.
Officials working at the BNPT “don’t have a gender perspective in their analysis,” she added.
Male experts working at the BNPT don’t seem to understand that “some women carry out a terrorist attack for penance, some for recognition, some for a sense of empowerment, while some were driven by gender injustice and inequality,” Dwi said.
“Women are increasingly important [for militant groups] because of the absence of men who have been arrested or have died,” Wawan Hari Purwanto, a deputy at Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency (BIN) said.
6. Wuhan lab helped Chinese army in secret project to find animal viruses
Daily Mail · by Ian Birrell · April 24, 2021
Smoking gun or sensational reporting?
7. Opinion: CIA Agents in Thailand, Please Raise Your Hand
khaosodenglish.com · April 24, 2021
I wish we were good enough and smart enough to have an intelligence asset (if not an intelligence officer spotting , assessing, and recruiting intelligence assets) in a country for 35 years.
8. MI6 begins 'green spying' on big polluting countries
The Telegraph · by Jack Hardy
Excerpts: “He indicated that British spies will make China the focus of much of their climate-related espionage by pointing out that Beijing is “certainly the largest emitter” of carbon.
“Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space,” he told Times Radio.
“Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.”
9. Chris Maier Nominated for ASD SO/LIC | SOF News
sof.news · by SOF News · April 24, 2021
I do not know him. He seems to have a strong CT background. Will he embrace the two SOF trinities?
1. Irregular Warfare, Unconventional Warfare, Support to Political Warfare
2. Comparative advantage of SOF: Influence, Governance, Support to Indigenous Forces and Populations
(while maintaining exquisite capabilities for the no fail CT and CP national missions)
10. Why is Germany sending a frigate through the South China Sea?
SCMP · by Arnaud Boehmann · April 20, 2021
Really? "But Berlin is not trying to intimidate Beijing. Its real message is for Germany’s regional allies – Japan, Australia and the US "
11. Trump Blazed a Trail That Clears the Way for Biden
Bloomberg · by Noah Smith · April 20, 2021
Excerpts: “Trump’s break with orthodoxy wasn’t complete, of course. In many ways he governed as a typical Republican, cutting taxes and regulation and increasing work requirements for welfare programs. But on trade and industrial policy, he blazed a trail by neutering his own party’s opposition to change. On these topics, a fair number of conservative think tanks and politicians are joining the bandwagon.
Perhaps that’s how big policy changes ultimately happen. Carter won’t go down in history as the great champion of deregulation, nor Hoover of big government. And if Biden ultimately succeeds in reorienting American economic policy away from free trade in a systematic and effective manner, he’ll likely be the one who gets associated with that shift by future generations. But it was Trump’s stumbling, erratic approach that paved the way.
12. Kennan’s Containment Strategy: A Consensus on What Not to Do
The National Interest · by Robert D. Kaplan · April 24, 2021
A very long read.
A depressing conclusion for all of us who hope for a US grand strategy. But we must grasp this: "an implicit understanding of what the American people can tolerate and what they can afford.""
Conclusion: "GIVEN ALL of this, the possibilities of creating unity around a grand strategy tied to American national interests are rather small. Kennan’s clubby world is gone forever. However, there does exist a substantial community of defense and security experts oriented around the Pentagon, that still use “we” instead of “they” when referring to Americans. This defense community is sufficiently homogeneous in its goals and values, despite the many differences of opinion within it, because there is an overriding assumption in this community that U.S. interests should be primary and that America faces a variety of new and old threats that must be countered. In Kennan’s day, the primary threat was the Soviet Union and world communism. In this new era, the primary threat is China and its particular brand of authoritarianism, mixed as it is with high-technology surveillance and economic and military aggression. China has gone from a post-Mao enlightened authoritarianism which the American business, policy, and media establishments tolerated and were somewhat comfortable with, to becoming a sharp-edged dictatorship under one man, Xi Jinping, armed with a cult of personality. The dream of gradually luring China into a post-Cold War, made-in-America system of globalization is over. This new China represents a stark and unambiguous threat. Like Kennan’s Long Telegram and X article, a successful grand strategy towards China should describe the root of the problem, the sources of Chinese regime behavior, and lay out a plan emphasizing what not to do. Concentrating on what not to do will eliminate extreme viewpoints, and identify practical constraints on our China policy: constraints originating, as with Kennan’s containment theory, with an implicit understanding of what the American people can tolerate and what they can afford."
13. Some Right-Wing Troops Find Themselves Targeted by Their Own War Machine
The Intercept · by Mike Giglio · April 25, 2021
We have to get this counter-extremism in the military right otherwise we risk playing right into the extremists' narratives and radicalizing even greater numbers than the very small number that already exists and harming, perhaps irrepairably, the good order and discipline of the military.
14. Target Taiwan: Why China Is Desperate for Control of Taipei
The National Interest · by Patrick Mendis and Joey Wang · April 24, 2021
Conclusion: “Indeed, the defense of Taiwan is more than symbolic for the United States and its overall commitment to Asia. Retreating from this commitment will not only mean irreversible damage to U.S. credibility, but it will also validate Beijing’s belief of an America in decline, and that the United States is on its own way to a “century of humiliation.”
15. As a military spouse, I suffered real and often debilitating secondary traumatic stress
Consider this.
16. Opinion | The Two Crises of Conservatism
The New York Times · by Ross Douthat · April 24, 2021
Excerpts: “But that might not be enough. In the end, conservatives need to believe the things they love can flourish within the liberal order, and it isn’t irrational to turn reactionary if things you thought you were conserving fall away.
So the question for the right isn’t one of commitment, but capacity. Can conservative energies be turned away from fratricide and lib-baiting and used to rebuild the structures and institutions and habits whose decline has pushed the right toward crisis? And will liberal institutions, in their increasingly ideological form, allow or encourage that to happen, or stand permanently in its way?
In prior columns I’ve stressed how the weakness of conservatism makes it hard to imagine a successful right-wing insurrection or coup against the liberal order.
But weakness has rippling consequences too, and a conservatism defined by despair and disillusionment could remain central to liberalism’s crises for many years to come.
17. America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses
The Atlantic · by Caitlin Dickerson · April 5, 2021
A short history of US immigration that most do not want to think about.
Excerpts: “In describing its own immigration plan as a racial-equity initiative, the Biden administration is nodding at a more complex view of our history. But opposition to the proposal, predictably, has echoed the past. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called it “a disaster” that “does nothing to secure our borders, yet grants mass amnesty, welfare benefits … to over 11 million people.” On Fox News, Laura Ingraham said that Democrats pushing for the plan were “enticing illegals to bust through our borders, exploit our resources, and commit crimes.”
Once you begin to notice examples of how the past is still present, they become difficult to ignore. Trump enacted the most stringent border closure of his administration by citing the threat of disease, even though COVID‑19 outbreaks were far worse inside the United States than just outside its borders (in fact, Americans were actively deporting the virus abroad). His persistent blaming of the Chinese for outbreaks in the U.S. helped incite violence against Asian Americans that continues today, mirroring similar attacks from centuries past.
In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones.
18. Billion-Dollar Army Housing Project Begins Next Week at Five Bases
military.com · by Rose L. Thayer · April 24, 2021
19. Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Massacre Rescinded
The New York Times · by Mark Walker · April 23, 2021
20. A hybrid future may seem like the best of both worlds for work and life
Axios · by Bryan Walsh
Consider the future of work post pandemic.
21. The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol
The Washington Post · by Patricia McCormick · April 19, 2021
A story behind the story that I did not know. I was around the same age as she was and I had no idea of her age from the photo. I wonder why the author did not mention Neil Young's song "Ohio" (with the line "four dead in Ohio"). I remember being taught the song by the college camp counselors at wrestling camp a year or two later. I wonder how she feels every time she hears that song today.
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"The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue."
- Edward R. Murrow
"As long as anger, paranoia and misinformation drive our political debate, there are unhinged souls among us who will feel justified in turning to violent remedies for imagined threats."
- David Horsey
"While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations."
- Newton Lee