Archive for the 'Russia' Category

Update #2: I have great deal of respect for Richard Fernandez and his opinions.

The second part of the response is that an outsourced, privatized jihad will probably be increasingly met by privatized security regime based on reputation. With the government unwilling to profile in a increasingly vulnerable public space some entrepreneurs may create members-only events where attendance is limited to pre-cleared individuals who pay to have themselves vetted.

I think this has merit.

UPDATE: There have been three more arrests of young people with heavy Russian accents near U Mass. They had a car, a BMW, with the license plate “terrorista #1. Photos at the link.

One jihadist is dead and the other is in custody. The younger bomber’s wounds have not been described so it is impossible to say if he will survive. The emergency is over and now it is time to think about why this happened. It now appears that both young men were long time residents of this country and, at least the younger was a citizen. Both had registered to vote, according to Nexis. The older brother was married with a child. His wife had converted to Islam and, according to reports yesterday, was wearing a full chador when she was taken from their home protesting about a male FBI agent handling a Muslim woman. She was lucky, as one commenter observed, that she was not strip searched as Chechen women have been prominent in terrorism cases in Russia, sometimes as suicide bombers wearing bomb belts.

The majority [of suicide bombers] are male, but a huge fraction — over 40 percent — are women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus. Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global jihad.

I doubt the Times’ insistence on the absence of Islamist motives although Chechens have been at war with Russians for centuries. The suicide bomb is a common weapon for jihadists. The Palestinian “Mother of Martyrs” comes to mind.

Mariam Farhat, who said she wished she had 100 sons to die while attacking Israelis, died in a Gaza city hospital of health complications including lung ailments and kidney failure, health official Ashraf Al-Kidra said. She was 64.

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Sixty years ago one of the greatest monsters in history, a mass-murderer of tens of millions many times over, the yellow-eyed, “Kremlin mountaineer”  breathed his last.

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,
The murderer and peasant-slayer.
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,
His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.
Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -
fawning half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,
One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, to the eye or the groin.
And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.
- Osip Mandelstam

So great was the terror he had inflicted that many of his victims, dazed and bloodied by decades of fear, savage oppression and war, openly wept. The greatest fear of the late dictator’s closest henchmen and accomplices, who had more than likely escaped the conveyor belt of torture, gulag and execution only by their master’s death, was that the people would think that they had murdered their dear vozhd and would storm the Kremlin and tear them to pieces.
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(A reprise post from SSDB archives – about the legendary ‘teflon man’ broadcaster who shall be nameless here, although anyone who served in certain units will recognize the legend of whom I speak.)

And some things which should not have been forgotten… Have not been, because they are either funny or excellent cautionary tales. The Teflon Man, for instance: he bestrode the small world of military broadcasting, providing a rich legacy of horrible gaffes, cringe-inducing miscalculations and antics which reflected no credit whatever upon the unit to which he was attached. Spend more than a couple of years as an NCO in military broadcasting, and you will know everyone, or know of everyone, and the Teflon Man was a legend, like Bigfoot or Elvis, because nothing ever seemed to stick. He had more lives than the wily coyote, bouncing back time and time again from incidents that would have seen any other military broadcaster sent back to civilian life, working the overnight TV board shift for the last-rated station in Sheboygan or Bakersfield. Read the rest of this entry »

A few things have happened recently that have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up in economic terms. It feels like it did right before the crash in 2007-8, when we were still in the end stages of the bubble.

One – Japanese and Venezuelan devaluation

Japan (a thoroughly modern economy) and Venezuela (a semi-dictatorship oil economy) both recently devalued their currency. Japan was warned by the G7 (fat lot of good that will do) here about it:

The official said: “The G7 statement signaled concern about excess moves in the yen. The G7 is concerned about unilateral guidance on the yen. Japan will be in the spotlight at the G20 in Moscow this weekend.”

Venezuela did more of an “old school” devaluation, where the “official” rate is moved closer to what it really is trading for in the black market, and Bloomberg writes about it here.

Venezuela devalued its currency for the fifth time in nine years, a move that may undermine support for ailing President Hugo Chavez and his allies ahead of possible elections later this year… He ordered his government to weaken the exchange rate by 32 percent to 6.3 bolivars per dollar… A spending spree that almost tripled the fiscal deficit last year helped Chavez, 58, win a third six-year term. The devaluation can help narrow the budget deficit by increasing the amount of bolivars the government receives from oil exports. Yet the move also threatens to accelerate annual inflation that reached 22 percent in January.

I kept that whole paragraph in the block quote because it encapsulates all the elements of fiscal ruin so succinctly – profligate government spending, impact on commodities imported or exported (that move opposite of currencies), and the impact on inflation.

Two – The Chinese and Russians Aren’t Buying Our Debt – We Are

I had thought that the Chinese and other countries were big buyers of our debt which funds our budget deficit. But I was wrong. Per this WSJ article:

China’s holdings of $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasurys in November 2012—the most recent date for which we have a figure—are virtually unchanged from two years earlier, when they stood at $1.16 trillion. Beijing has purchased a lot of Treasurys over this period but many have been redeemed. Net new investment is essentially zero.

But if the Chinese aren’t buying our debt, who is? The answer – the US government.

The largest buyer of new U.S. Treasurys during the past three years has been not China but the U.S. Federal Reserve. In fiscal year 2011, for example, the Fed bought more than three-fourths of all new Treasury debt.

Here’s a challenge for you – try explaining to a child or someone unfamiliar with economics how it is that we can spend money that we don’t have, issue debt, and buy it back ourselves.
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This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world dangerously close to thermonuclear war.

I’m currently reading Rockets and People, the totally fascinating memoir of Soviet rocket developer Boris Chertok. A review of the whole thing will be forthcoming in the not too distant future.

Chertok’s career encompassed both military and space-exploration projects, and in late October 1962 he was focused on preparations for launching a Mars probe. On the morning of Oct 27, he was awakened by “a strange uneasiness.” After a quick breakfast, he headed for the missile assembly building, known as the MIK.

At the gatehouse, there was usually a lone soldier on duty who would give my pass a cursory glance. Now suddenly I saw a group of soldiers wielding sub-machine guns, and they thoroughly scrutinized my pass. Finally they admitted me to the facility grounds and there, to my surprise, I again saw sub-machine-gun-wielding soldiers who had climbed up the fire escape to the roof of the MIK. Other groups of soldiers in full combat gear, even wearing gas masks, were running about the periphery of the secure area. When I stopped in at the MIK, I immediately saw that the “duty” R-7A combat missile, which had always been covered and standing up against the wall, which we had always ignored, was uncovered.

Chertok was greeted by his friend Colonel Kirillov, who was in charge of this launch facility. Kirollov did not greet Chertok with his usual genial smile, but with a "somber, melancholy expression."

Without releasing my hand that I’d extended for our handshake, he quietly said: “Boris Yevseyevich, I have something of urgent importance I must tell you”…We went into his office on the second floor. Here, visibly upset, Kirillov told me: “Last night I was summoned to headquarters to see the chief of the [Tyura-Tam] firing range. The chiefs of the directorates and commanders of the troop units were gathered there. We were told that the firing range must be brought into a state of battle readiness immediately. Due to the events in Cuba, air attacks, bombardment, and even U.S. airborne assaults are possible. All Air Defense Troops assets have already been put into combat readiness. Flights of our transport airplanes are forbidden. All facilities and launch sites have been put under heightened security. Highway transport is drastically restricted. But most important—I received the order to open an envelope that has been stored in a special safe and to act in accordance with its contents. According to the order, I must immediately prepare the duty combat missile at the engineering facility and mate the warhead located in a special depot, roll the missile out to the launch site, position it, test it, fuel it, aim it, and wait for a special launch command. All of this has already been executed at Site No. 31. I have also given all the necessary commands here at Site No. 2. Therefore, the crews have been removed from the Mars shot and shifted over to preparation of the combat missile. The nosecone and warhead will be delivered here in 2 hours.

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The political and academic historical world of the British Isles seems to have been plunged into mourning at the death of Professor Eric Hobsbawm CH (Companion of Honour), author of many hefty tomes and a life-long Marxist and Communist. People who would rightly excoriate any Holocaust denier weep copious tears over a man who has spent decades denying the crimes of Communism, supporting the most horrible totalitarian system in history, skating over such matters as collectivization, the show trials and the forcible take-over of Eastern Europe after the war and writing history that is pure Marxism. Well, not me, if I may use such an ungrammatical expression. Here is my take on the man.

Ginny, a colleague of mine, invited me to read the posts related to Pussy Riot and contribute to the discussion from my perspective as a non-Russian, ROCOR priest’s wife. I’ve learned a lot from what I’ve read, and do not in any way consider myself an expert on Russia or on Orthodoxy (after 15 years, I’m still working at praying with my heart and mind at the same time), but thought I might be able to provide some useful clarification and/or complication to the ongoing discussion.

RE: the position of the young women during their protest, and whether or not this constitutes “prayer.”

There’s been quite a bit posted about this already; the women are standing immediately in front of the royal gates of the central iconostasis of the church—a place generally reserved for clergy. Lay people only approach this part of the church when they are about to receive communion or be ordained, married, or buried. Thus, their very location in the church is provocative. Adding to this is the fact that they are facing the “wrong” direction (their making prostrations facing the people rather than the altar has been called “idolatry” by some.) Lay people (all of the time) and clergy (the majority of the time) face East—looking at the iconostasis which separates the “high place” (where the altar—which typically contains relics of saints—and the reserved sacrament are located). Even when the Epistle is being read, the reader faces East—away from the people. The exceptions to this are the reading of the Gospel by the priest (or deacon) which is done facing the people, and the dismissal blessings given by the priest. (Obviously, the priest also faces the people when communing them.) Thus, by their very position and the direction they were facing, these women violated the use of that space in significant ways. If they were not intending to “offend” Orthodox Christians, they chose an odd way to show it.

Audible, public prayer in an Orthodox service is formal and “set.” After all, the liturgy most often used is St. John Chrysostom’s—from the 4th century. This is not to say that there is no place for extemporaneous prayer in church—but private prayers are inaudible—prayed silently. Worship is communal work; it is not about expressing oneself. Whether or not one wants to consider the actual text of the song a prayer, within the context of an Orthodox church—whether or not a formal service was being offered at that time—it would be asking a great deal to expect an Orthodox Christian to consider their action a prayer.

RE: Orthodox prayers for political leaders

I am neither qualified nor desirous of judging the appropriateness of Patriarch Kirill’s relationship with Putin. I do think that when a church appears to publicly endorse a political regime, it risks becoming a legitimate site of political protest (and I wouldn’t have had a problem if PR had protested in front of the cathedral rather than in front of the iconostas). The only point I’d like to clarify here is that prayer for a political leader does not equal endorsement of his or her policies. It is standard in the litanies of Orthodox services to pray for both the leaders and military of the country to which the church belongs. This (I think) is more rightly understood as a prayer requesting God to act as He will regarding the political and military regimes of a country—or that they act in a way which God CAN bless—rather than a prayer demanding some kind of divine stamp of approval.

RE: Context

Without entering the debate about the degree to which Russia is an Orthodox nation, I should simply like to remind readers that hundreds of thousands of clergy and monastics, and tens of millions of Orthodox Christians were killed in Russia in the 20th century, including one elderly woman who was shot after having been seen crossing herself as a funeral procession went by. Given this fact and its relative historical nearness, God only knows what kind of trauma was experienced by those Orthodox Christians who were present when PR stormed into their place of worship. Their freedom to worship in peace was violated. (I wonder whether those who champion PR’s “rights” to protest Putin’s policies in this context would also champion the Wellsboro Baptists “rights” to protest American policies at veteran’s funerals.)

RE: ROC & ROCOR

Finally, as the wife of an unpaid priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, I would entreat readers not to confuse ROCOR with the Russian Orthodox Church. Communion has been restored between ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate, but their material circumstances are vastly different. You are unlikely to find any ROCOR bishops wearing expensive gold watches, and the vast majority of Russian Orthodox Churches in America are ROCOR. And since most ROCOR clergy are unpaid, and so must support themselves with secular jobs in addition to fulfilling their duties as priests, please do not be too surprised if they simply haven’t had the time to follow coverage of the PR controversy or participate in the conversation about it.

In case you’ve missed them, here are links, in chronological order, to several views of the ongoing controversy:

TM Lutas

Helen Szamuely, Post 1 (and also, and also)

Charles Cameron, Post 1

Charles Cameron, Post 2

John O’Sullivan

Helen Szamuely, Post 2

UPDATE:

Zenpundit

Pussy Riot IV: Exorcising Madonna

Pussy Riot V: Kasparov

UPDATE 2:

The Pussy Riots Seen from Texas by an ROCOR Priest’s Wife

Orthodoxy is not a religion that is widely understood in the West. So it’s actually the rare pundit that catches how offensive what this punk riot group was doing actually was. There’s a subtitled version of the video that helps. The video misses the positional problems. The picture screen, called an iconostasis is something like the old altar rails of Catholicism but with fairly elaborate rituals surrounding the structure. There are three doors, the center one is called the holy doors. As a lay person you’re not even supposed to walk in front of that door. It’s viewed as disrespectful, even sacrilegious. So the people in charge of order and discipline were a bit stuck because these girls were dancing in the sanctuary, in front of the iconostasis and extracting them actually meant that they had to break the rules too. Several times a Pussy Riot girl bowed and did a full prostration. One does these things towards the altar in Orthodoxy. Reversing this as the protesters did is viewed as idolatry. Who, exactly, are they bowing to? That’s the genesis of the “devil dancing” talk in their trial.

Putin may have been a target but he certainly wasn’t the target. Their attack had a much wider range of victims. This was an attack on Orthodoxy, an attack on symphonia, the concept of church and state in complementary roles and mutual respect, and also an attack on Putin.

The maximum sentence was seven years for the crime of hooliganism. The prosecutors asked for three. The judge set sentence at two.

In the US, the results might not have been very different except for the name of the crime on the charge sheet. Simple criminal trespass in Indiana where I live is punishable between 6 months and 3 years with a fine up to $10,000. As this wasn’t Pussy Riot’s first case of trespass and outrageous behavior, this is exactly the sort of case that would tilt towards the heavier end of the penalty range.

Don’t worry! The report probably isn’t true and anyway it’s not like it was an Israeli submarine or something really bad like that.

Originally posted 3/29/2009

Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin’s Russia
by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov

A fascinating look at the Soviet economic system in the 1930s, as viewed from the front lines of that system.

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov was released from a labor camp in 1935, and was fortunate to find a job as a book-keeper in a sawmill. When the factory manager, Grigory Neposedov (a pseudonym) was assigned to run a larger and more modern factory (also a sawmill), he took Gennady with him.

Although he had almost no formal education, Neposedov was an excellent plant manager. As Gennady describes him:

He was unable to move quietly. Skinny and short, he moved around the plant so quickly that he seemed to be running, not walking. Keeping pace with the director, the fat chief mechanic would be steeped in perspiration…He rarely sat in his office, and if he needed to sign some paper or other, you had to look for him in the mechanic’s office, in the shops, or in the basement under the shops, where the transmission belts and motors that powered the work stations were located…This enthusiasm of his, this ability to lose himself completely in a genuine creative exertion, to give his all selflessly, was contagious. It was impossible to be around Neposedov without being infected by his energy; he roused everyone, set them on fire. And if he did not succeed in shaking someone up, it could unmistakely be said that such a person was dead or a complete blob.

With his enthusiasm and dedication to his factory, Neposedov comes across almost as a Soviet version of Hank Reardon (the steel mill owner in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), with this difference–Nepodesov could throw himself as enthusiastically into bureaucratic manipulation as into his technical and leadership work. All of his skills would be needed to make this factory a success.

Although the sawmill had modern equipment, it was producing at only a fraction of its design capacity. One of the problems was energy: the plant was powered by a 200HP steam engine, and whoever had built the place had spent almost all of the budget on other equipment, leaving very little for the boiler. The original boiler that came with the plant turned out to be useless, and was replaced with a salvaged boiler..this worked, but was not in good shape and produced only about half the steam needed to run the engine–and the plant–at full power.

At this point in history, and in this particular corner of the Soviet economy, the amount that was available to be paid to workers was strongly related to the output of a plant. And workers at this sawmill were becoming increasingly desperate, on the point of actual starvation. Neposedov, aided by Gennady, pusued a three-part program of improvement: (1)fix the boiler, (2)improve the workflow (as we would now call it) within the plant, and (3)put in place an incentive system for the workers.

New “pipes” for the boiler were somehow obtained (I think “pipes” in this context refers to boiler flues) and the workflow was continuously analyzed and improved. The most interesting part of the story, though, deals with the incentive program. The plant manager apparently had discretion to put such programs in place as long as he could pay for them out of increased output. (As the book describes it, there were extensive accounting systems in place throughout the Soviet economy–indeed, Lenin had once gone so far as to say “Socialism is accounting.” The accounting seems a bit similar to what you would find in a multidivisional American company with extensive intracompany transactions.) The incentive system that Gennady designed for this sawmill was based on very sharp pay increases for the workers when production exceeded target–so that, for example, you could double your pay by producing only 25% over target. (Actually, the plan paid collectively by group and by shift, rather than on an individual basis.)

The incentive plan, together with the repaired steam boiler, resulted in very high production–140%, then 160% of target–and correspondingly high pay for the workers. Gennady had some nervous moments when he feared he had made a mistake in the calculations and the cost of the additional wages would exceed the amount generated by the new production….a mistake like this could easily have landed him back in Siberia, or worse. But it turned out that the new system was indeed sustainable.

The local Communist Party leadership, while pleased with the increased production, was disturbed that the propaganda buzzwords of the day were not being implemented. “Socialist competition” was hot at the time, and the Party organizer insisted on competition at the individual worker levels, not just the group and shift level.

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The historical Russian (using the USSR and Czarist Russia as a proxy for Russia) military generally featured the following characteristics:

1. A heavy emphasis on conscripts, with all males who had any sort of connection or means of escaping service, doing so, since the conditions were horribly and brutally bad
2. A “shell” organization of units with only a few active duty soldiers, to be filled out by reservists at mobilization
3. A vast inventory of equipment of various vintages (i.e. old tanks, planes, artillery) that the reservists would use when called up for service
4. In the old “Soviet” military, many of the soldiers were from regions where they did not speak Russian and communication was often poor. This may be partially mitigated today by the fact that many of these former republics of the Soviet Union have now split off into separate countries and are no longer part of the Russian military organization
5. The Russian navy faces particularly difficult conditions because each of the fronts has to operate independently because they are not interconnected, or make vast sea voyages in order to join forces. This contributed to the defeat at Tsushima in 1905, for example

These concepts began to falter after the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. The lightning US victory against conventional forces in the various Iraq wars and the Russian military’s poor performance in the military conflict against Chechnya led the Russians to consider new methodologies.

The inaugural issue of “Modern War“, which is a new magazine (to begin in September, 2012) by the publishers of the excellent magazine “Strategy and Tactics“, covers the reorganization of the Russian military and is highly recommended for anyone interested in the field. They sent me an issue (since I used to be a subscriber) and I hope it will be on the newsstand soon if you have one near you.

The article is called “Russia’s Ongoing Military Reorganization” by Bruce Costello. It describes the following changes to the historical Russian model:

1. Russian forces are to be kept in a state of rapid readiness, fully mobilized, equipped and ready for battle
2. The number of units will correspondingly be significantly reduced
3. Unnecessary equipment and non-fighting organization ranks (officers) will be eliminated (or reduced, in the case of officers)
4. There will be four OSD (Operational Strategic Districts) which will jointly command the land, sea and air units in those districts rather than being independently managed (the rocket forces will remain centrally controlled)
5. The brigade will be the unit size of choice, and reconnaissance will be embedded in the unit along with sufficient communication gear to meet the mission
6. The Russians are moving to purchase foreign arms where needed, such as a French amphibious ship, a dramatic departure from former practice
7. There is to be more of an emphasis on professional troops rather than conscripts. There are various sources on the effectiveness of this move from a conscript army to a professional army, but apparently the goal is to have 1/3 of the troops as conscripts (rotating out every 12 months) with the remaining 2/3 professional and long serving soldiers. The article didn’t emphasize this transition enough, from my perspective, since it is a crucial element of the change-over.

As a keen student of military history it is very odd seeing Russia moving to a semi-professional army staffed in a “ready” mode. It also is unusual that they are considering buying foreign arms since the Soviet Union was able to manufacture pretty much everything at the height of the USSR (although the former Czarist Russians and inter-war USSR did purchase foreign equipment, particularly for ideas on home grown designs). Times change, and these changes are reaching even historically consistent organizations such as the Russian military. It is difficult for me to remain neutral on these changes if they make the Russian military more effective; the Russian military has historically not been deployed in alignment with the interests of the US or the West. Note their current backing of odious Assad in Syria, a reaction to their client Gaddafi meeting his end thanks in part by the backing of NATO and their air and sea assets.

Cross posted at LITGM

The nation of Poland and hundreds of thousands of Polish-Americans were outraged when President Obama referred last week to “Polish Death Camps” in a speech awarding a medal of freedom to a Polish American named Jan Kozielewski who was smuggled into a death camp and brought evidence of the Holocaust to President Roosevelt. Evidence that was ignored.

There is a back story to this controversy that is only now starting to come out. In 2009, President Obama cancelled US missile sites that were intended to defend Poland and Czech Republic against Iranian missiles. The action was taken at the Russians’ request without even notifying the Polish government. That crisis began when the US promised to install such a missile site in 2008. After Obama took office, He cancelled the agreement without bothering to notify the Poles.

Subsequently, Walesa refused to meet with Obama when he was on a visit to Poland. He said,” ‘It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me,’ Walesa told news station TVN24.”

The European reaction was negative.

The president hadn’t even had a chance to redecorate the Oval Office before he felt the need, in fall of 2009, to appease Moscow by scrapping plans to build a missile defense shield protecting Poland and the Czech Republic from attack by Russia, Iran or any other aggressor.

This is what American voters get when they elect to the presidency an underexperienced man weighed down by an oversized ego.

Now, Obama, who has been shown to be a petty man,

got his revenge on Walesa by barring him from the ceremony.That was no gaffe. TelePrompTers don’t make gaffes.

Dan and I have the habit of sending boxes of books back and forth after reading them, and I recently received a large contingent of books which was much appreciated. We both are trying to stay away from military history reading to the extent we can because we’ve read so much of it over the years. In this instance I take the book “Gulag” which is an excellent history of that horrible system of jails and concentration camps that were used to repress the Russia people (and their satellites), and utilize its otherwise completely depressing contents to support our direct lighting system for tomato plants.

A positive use for this important but incredibly depressing book. On the other side I should balance it out with the Black Book of Communism.

Cross posted at LITGM

Saw this book on the new-books-for-kids table at the local library, and it looked unusual enough that I picked it up and checked it out. The story covers 2 days in the life of Sasha Zaichik, a boy who lives in Russia sometime during the Stalin era.

Far too little attention has been paid–by academics, the film industry, and the media in general–to the crimes committed in the name of Communism. Claire Berlinski, in her post a hidden history of evil, notes the astonishing lack on interest in copies of secret Kremlin archives that have been smuggled out of Russia. “I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” says one former Soviet dissident. “Editors shrug indifferently: So what? Who cares?”

So I applaud Eugene Velchin for writing this book, Henry Holt & Co for publishing it, and the American Library Association for giving it a Newberry Honor award.

Sasha is 10 years old, devoted to Communism and to his father, who works as an official of the secret police. He has finally reached the age at which he is eligible to become a member of the Young Pioneers, and is looking forward to the ceremony at which he will receive the red scarf signifying his membership in this organization.

Then his father is arrested…

A quick and gripping read, with illustrations by the author.

Yelchin has a synopsis of the book, with background information and photos, on his website. Link here.

Cross-posted at zenpundit.com

PRAGATI - the Indian National Interest Review has published my review of John Lewis Gaddis’ biography George F. Kennan: An American Life 

The creative art of strategy 

….Into the breach strides eminent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, offering a magisterial 784 page biography, a quarter- century in the making, George F. Kennan: An American Life. Gaddis, a noted historian of the Cold War and critic of revisionist interpretations of American foreign policy, has produced his magnum opus, distilling not only the essence of Kennan’s career, but the origins of his grand strategic worldview that were part and parcel the self-critical and lonely isolation that made Kennan such an acute observer of foreign societies and a myopic student of his own.

Gaddis, who is a co-founder of the elite Grand Strategy Program at Yale University, had such a long intellectual association with his subject, having been appointed Kennan’s biographer in 1982, that one wonders on theories of strategy at times where George Kennan ends and John Lewis Gaddis begins. Giving Kennan the supreme compliment among strategists, that he possessed in the years of the Long Telegram and the Policy Planning Staff, Clausewitz’s Coup d’oeil, Gaddis does not shy away from explaining Kennan’s human imperfections to the reader that made the diplomat a study in contradictions….

Read the rest here.

Cross-posted from zenpundit.com

Mr. Nyet 

World affairs are much more like spider’s web than the neat little drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet. In the latter,  the contents of each drawer are cleanly isolated and conveniently compartmentalized. What you do with the contents of one drawer today has no bearing on what you do next week with those of another. By contrast, with a spider’s web, when you touch a web at any point, not only do you find it to be sticky in a fragile sort of way, but your touch sends vibrations through every centimeter of the lattice.

Which alerts the spiders.

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As Russia and China stand steadfastly by their ally Syria in spirit and in more material ways (like Russia supporting them with ammunition) it is important to realize how poisonous their world view actually is. There really is a critical moral distance between the US and Western values and those of the Russians and Chinese, which presume that regime stability at all costs as the absolute pinnacle of a governments’ function.

Here is a great set of satellite photos that show the use of heavy artillery (towed and self-propelled) along with rocket artillery that the Russians provided against civilian targets, basically just regular cities that happen to not be favored by Assad and his cronies in power.

Along with the photos comes some pithy but extremely true commentary about how there is no fair or logical manner to compare the “free Syrian Army” which Assad (and Russia and China) link to “terrorists” and “foreign elements” to those of the regime since Assad chooses to use these massive and powerful weapons against unarmed civilians. Frankly it is mind-boggling that a military, one entrusted to PROTECT its own citizens, would possibly use these horrendously powerful weapons against civilian areas.

Where did the Syrians get the idea to direct the massive firepower of modern artillery against unarmed civilians, who can’t possibly fight back (i.e. they don’t have airplanes or their own artillery for counter battery fire)? I am just speculating, but Russia’s own use of heavy artillery when they completely leveled THEIR OWN CITY of Grozny in Chechnya would be a logical example. This article describes the Soviet experience with Grozny and how eventually they were able to “win” the battle in the third battle for Grozny with the use of heavy artillery and the corresponding high casualty rate for non-combatants (civilians). It should be noted that these tactics would be unthinkable to Western leaders and collateral deaths of civilians are minimized whenever possible.

It is important that young people who read the media understand that these sorts of differences, that by standing steadfast with a brutal thug of an un-elected ruler who uses heavy artillery against his own, unarmed civilians and using their UN veto to ensure that this continues – that is the behavior of the Russians (and by their veto too, the Chinese, although they haven’t done anything like Grozny or Assad’s atrocities in recent years). They are not like us. And a world in which their values play a prominent role wouldn’t be a better world, or an “equivalent” world – it would be a barbaric Hobbsian world of the gangster-state.

In a previous post, I asked a question about leverages in terms of foreign policy:

A key–an essential–question on leverages at Abu Muqawama (Dr. Andrew Exum):

Where things get tricky is when one tries to decide what to do about that. The principle problem is one that has been in my head watching more violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Egypt: the very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a “moral” stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours — or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain’s security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.

Okay, so we have leverage with an Army cracking down on its own people, an Army fattened on US military aid and training. I thought bilateral military training was supposed to mitigate the worst instincts of some armies? Isn’t that the theory? What does it mean to have leverage? To what end? To what purpose? I don’t know the answer and I don’t think anyone does, so Dr. Exum has a point. We have no strategy (link goes to Zen) within which to place “trade offs”. Well, if we do, I can’t see it.

Greg Scoblete at The Compass (RealClearWorld) asks the question in a much better fashion (I enjoy reading that blog, whether I agree or disagree with specific points):

But all of this begs an important question – leverage for what? The idea is that the U.S. invests in places like Bahrain and Egypt because it needs or wants something in return. During the Cold War, it was keeping these states out of the Soviet orbit. In the 1990s and beyond, it was ensuring these states remained friendly with Israel and accommodative to U.S. military power in the region. Today, what? What is it that U.S. policy requires from Egypt and Bahrain that necessitates supporting these regimes during these brutal crack downs?

How should we view American policy toward the Middle East? What is the larger strategic framework within which we ought to view the various relationships? What is the optimal posture for the United States? Folks, I don’t know. I’d love to know your opinions on the subject.

Kapler the Brave

Alexei Kapler was the bravest of men.

How brave?

Put it this way: there are two kinds of brave:

• Brave
• Alexei Kapler brave.

Alexei Kapler was Alexei Kapler brave.

By profession, Kapler was a screenwriter, journalist, director, and actor. By avocation, he was an accomplished womanizer. One night, Kapler, a man of forty years, met a sixteen year old girl at a party. This young woman was intelligent, strong-willed, attractive, and sad. It was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. No one seemed to remember. Kapler was happy to listen, comfort, sympathize, and seduce.

Since his new conquest came from a sheltered background, Kapler decided to show her the wild side of life. He lent her forbidden adult books. He took her dancing, took her to see avaunt garde theater, and took her to meet outrageous people at outrageous parties. Kapler was a man of the world, witty, knowledgeable, a skilled raconteur. The young woman was swept off her feet by this urbane sophisticate. There were problems though: Kepler was married. And he was having an affair with a sixteen year old girl.

Hiding the affair from her family was a must. Hiding it from the girl’s father was especially important. Kapler was a smooth enough operator that he might have kept their affair secret from the girl’s father under normal circumstances. Unfortunately for him, this girl’s father had a particularly suspicious temperament. While something like this temperament is not unusual in any father of a sixteen year old girl, this father was different:

He could have phones tapped.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.

I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.

******

I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly.  He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.

Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:

That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)

Damn, that is beautiful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Carter Doctrine:”The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. The doctrine was a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and was intended to deter the Soviet Union—the Cold War adversary of the United States—from seeking hegemony in the Gulf. After stating that Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil,” Carter proclaimed:….”

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers. We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

– Zenpundit, The Nine-Eleven Century

1. Canada and oil sands: “Bituminous sands, colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially “tar” due to its similar appearance, odour, and colour). Oil sands are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.[1]”

2. Israel and Natural Gas: “In recent years, Israel has found and begun developing massive natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. There is much more wealth underwater– the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Levant Basin contains as much as 122 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas — and all countries around the basin want a piece of the action.”

3. Russian state oil and American oil companies: “America’s largest oil company last week reached an historic agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft. ExxonMobil now will take the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft collapsed earlier this year.”

4. Dakotas and oil reserves: “America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.”

5. Bloom boxes: “One example to illustrate why the future is proving elusive in the USA: There is a stand-alone electricity providing unit called the Bloom Energy Server or “Bloom Box” — small, simple to use — which can power any home or commercial building. The wondrous box has already been test-driven; Google, eBay and a number of other Fortune 500 companies have a few Bloom Boxes and they’re saving fortunes in electrical bills.

In other words, the Bloom Box can make America’s electricity grid obsolete. There are only two things holding the box back from being installed in every residential, commercial and government space in the USA:

a) Bloom Energy, the company that makes the box, doesn’t have large manufacturing capacity.

b) The U.S. energy industry doesn’t want to be shoved around by a box. (The same for much of the ‘Green Jobs’ sector that the federal government has been pushing hard. The Bloom Box technology makes windmill and solar panel technologies obsolete.”

The GOP debates have been intellectually vapid and the fault does not lie entirely with our lightweight media moderators. Ladies and gentlemen, you are “auditioning” for the toughest job in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, you are genuinely interesting and accomplished people. Be leaders. Hire some decent speech coaches, do a little background wonky reading and show us your vision for the future.

Update: I made a few edits for clarity. Thanks for the comments, everyone. I don’t know squat about this topic. Carl from Chicago is definitely the “go to” guy on energy topics around here but I’ve been bored with the debates and wanted to blog about that for some time now. Also, I don’t know what the whole “ladies and gentlemen” thing is about. It’s kinda affected. Incorrect, too. Only one lady has been involved in the formal debates….so far….

I have long believed that the biggest problem we have in this country is that the government and the businesses that have captured the regulatory state have become one seamless monstrosity.

A lot of people have had a hard time getting their heads around this.

Lefties like to think that “business” is evil but that “government” regulates it to protect the people from pollution and defective products, etc.

Righties like to think that “business” = free enterprise, menaced by the evil “government” that is driving it to extinction.

Both are mostly wrong.

The government has turned into an amalgamation of iron triangles — regulators, legislators (or actually their staffs) and industries that are regulated. These work in tandem to their mutual advantage at the expense of the taxpayer and of truly entrepreneurial and innovative businesses. It is in the joint interest of this business/government crony capitalist complex to crush out potential rivals and created government sponsored, protected and subsidized monopolists.

This is precisely the hazard the USA was founded to fight against. The American Revolution was provoked by British monopolists authorized by the Crown — crony capitalism, 18th Century style. The founding generation was acutely aware of this problem. Further the major thinkers influencing 19th Century liberal thought in the USA, Canada and Britain were all focused on this problem: Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. (See the brilliant book The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone by Robert Kelley, which explains this now-forgotten history.)

The greatest threat to our liberty is the uniting of government power and private greed, and that is exactly what we are facing now.

The creation of a regulatory state meant its inevitable capture by the industries it supposedly regulated. I remember having a life-changing intellectual moment when I read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson as an undergrad at the University of Chicago. (If you have not read this, you must do so. Really.) George Stigler’s analysis of the regulatory state was consistent with this picture. (See, e.g. The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation.) Once you see how this works, it is obvious that this process is inevitable.

The political class that services this machine has come to be known in Chicago as The Combine. Both parties service the machine, with no substantial difference between them. The Democrats tend to have more of what our co-blogger Carl from Chicago, in an excellent and prescient post, called stone-cold redistributionists, but neither party has any interest in making any basic changes in these arrangements. Mr. Bush, with the bank bailouts, then Mr. Obama, with Solyndra being just one of many egregious examples from him, has taken this process to a new level.

During the Cold War, people would argue that the United States and the Soviet Union were “converging.” The argument went that the Soviet Union would liberalize and become more humane, while the USA would become more socialistic, and we would all end up looking something like a utopian notion of Sweden. This did not happen. The Soviet Union fell apart. Mr. Fukuyama famously asserted that liberal democracy had “won” and that the ideological struggles of modernity were over, and history had ended.

But what if the final state is not democratic capitalism? What if convergence is right after all? What if Soviet communism fell apart and turned into a mafia state run by an alliance of government and favored businesses, which control the country by corruption and intimidation, a nomenklatura that strips out all the value in the country on behalf of a well-connected elite, immiserating everyone else. This amoral, vicious, greed-driven, undemocratic dystopia is what we are now converging toward. It is an Orwellian future, with an Inner Party of senior politicians and business executives, an Outer Party of government employees and business managers, and a vast, despoiled, proletariat with no opportunities, or assets or future. It sounds like the world Mr. Obama is brazenly pushing us toward. It also sounds like a future that no Republican has so far dared to point to, to name, to denounce and to oppose — because they would prefer to be in on the game than take the risks inherent in opposing it.

So, Fukuyama was right: We are approaching a single form of governance around the world. Unfortunately, it turns out, it’s fascism.

Until Gov. Palin’s speech on September 4, 2011, in Indianola, Iowa.

… there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

Please listen to this speech, or read it, if you have not done so already.

Today, Instapundit linked to a Facebook post entitled “Crony Capitalism on Steroids.”

She is pounding the same drum.

She is apparently going to make this theme the main focus of a Presidential campaign.

Say what you like about Mrs. Palin. She is the only person in public life who has successfully identified the threat, named it, shone a spotlight on it, denounced it, and begun to threaten it.

This is the first faint flicker of hope I have seen that our political order can be reformed democratically without a massive, system-wide failure happening first. Maybe the other candidates will be forced to respond to these denunciations, maybe there will be a populist response to this challenge raised by Gov. Palin. I hope so.

We do live in interesting times, and they just got a lot more interesting.

UPDATE: Paul Ryan had this excellent speech linked on Instapundit. Here’s an excerpt:

… if we surrender more control over our economy to the governing class – then life in America will become defined by a new kind of class warfare: A class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society at the expense of working Americans, entrepreneurs, and the small businesswoman who has the gall to take on the corporate chieftain.

My highlighting. Sounds familiar.

More of this, please. Faster, please.

Detente’s greatest achievement was the opening of consistent contact between the United States and the USSR in the early 1970s—a gradually intensifying engagement on many levels and in many areas that, as it grew over the years, would slowly but widely open the Soviet Union to information, contacts, and ideas from the West and would facilitate an ongoing East-West dialogue that would influence the thinking of many Soviet officials and citizens.

- From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War by Robert M. Gates. (I am currently reading this book).

Indeed Washington’s on-again off-again attention to the region, driven by relatively short term developments like the Soviet-Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the war against terror, makes Iranian and Chinese overtures appealing to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.

- A Sino-Persian grab for the Indian Ocean? by Jamsheed K. Choksy (Small Wars Journal)

Earlier this month the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, twisted his mouth into the shape of a pretzel to explain why it was okay for the U.S. to support Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal but not okay to support North Korea’s arsenal and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He also saw no problem with the United States as much declaring war on India when he sympathized with Pakistan’s need to use nuclear weapons against India in order to feel safe.
 
Then Americans wonder why Pyongyang and Tehran laugh at Washington’s lectures on nuclear proliferation. The leaders of both regimes have been doing clandestine nuke business with Pakistan for decades. They know Pakistan is the biggest nuclear weapons proliferator on the planet — and so does Mullen, who is the highest ranking military officer in the USA and as such is the principal military advisor to the President of the United States, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.
 
That’s not the half of the double standard America has practiced with regard to Pakistan. Barely a day goes by that the American news media doesn’t warn of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran because of the regime’s end-of-time religious views, which American news analyst John Batchelor has termed “hallucinatory.”
 
It doesn’t get more hallucinatory than the views of Pakistani media mogul, Majeed Nizami, the owner of the Nawa-i-Waqt, The Nation, and Waqt TV channel. During a recent speech at a function given in his honor he declared that Pakistan’s missiles and nuclear bombs were superior to “India’s ghosts,” and that unleashing nuclear war against India was imperative. “Don’t worry if a couple of our cities are also destroyed in the process.”
 
That would be the same Nation newspaper that cites the United States government as being behind every terrorist incident in the world, including the Times Square attack.
 
If you think Nizami is an isolated nut case, you don’t know much about him, or Pakistan. He is the true face of the most powerful factions in Pakistan including its military leaders.
 
But in the view of the U.S. government and news media it’s okay for Pakistan’s military to hold hallucinatory views whereas it’s not okay for Iran’s leaders because, well, because.
 
It’s the same for anti-Semitic views that abound in Pakistan. In the same article that discussed Nizami’s view that nuclear Armageddon was the ticket to peace in South Asia, Pakistani journalist Shakil Chaudhary reported on a June 18 column in Nizami’s Nawa-i-Waqt paper in which Lt. Gen. Abdul Qayyum (ret), former chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills, approvingly quoted Adolph Hitler as saying: “I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them so that you can know why I was killing them.”

- He ain’t heavy, he’s my genocidal, hallucinatory, two-faced ‘ally’ by blogger Pundita.

Why do you suppose certain factions in DC appear so adamant on retaining Pakistan as a “strategic asset” post 9-11 and post Abbottabad? CBz blogger Joseph Fouche recently posted a nice piece about the tendency for some to see patterns and intrigues when mere muddle may well explain reality. Sadly, I am prone to this….

So what exactly is our muddle? Is what I’ve posted above overstated and alarmist? State and USAID want to keep its various lucrative aid programs? The Pentagon/DOD want to keep its favorite “proxy” Army for future use against any kind of “sino-islamic” alliance – or Russia or Iran? Tons of money (supposedly….take all of this with a grain of salt) sloshing around DC from various foreign entities, such as the Saudis or the Pak Mil/ISI? Plain old strategic “incompetence” typical of a big, energetic and free-wheeling democracy?

What other rationales might be keeping warring DC factions up at night? Placating the Saudis and keeping the oil flowing? Monitoring Pakistani nukes? (Okay, this one for sure). Preventing even more proliferation via Pakistani-Saudi transfers?

The world is three dimensional and complicated with various currents pulling our policy makers in different directions. I’d be delighted to hear creative thinking on any of these topics by one of the Republican presidential candidates. Your thoughts? Opinions? Relevent anecdotes, articles, films, or books?

Help a gal out, people.

Welcome to the big leagues, rookie!

Rand Simberg reports that the Russians have suddenly become concerned about the safety of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket when used as a supply vessel for the International Space Station … now that that rocket seriously threatens the near-term Russian monopoly in heavy lift transport of people and materiel.

SpaceX’‘s story, for those who aren’t space enthusiasts, is a tale of new technology, dot-com money, and threatened “iron rice bowls” from one end of the high-technology world to the other.

Started in 2002 by Elon Musk with money he acquired after co-founding PayPal, Musk’s vision was to develop a new American liquid-fueled rocket engine and use economies of production and scale to reduce per-pound launch costs to a fraction of current commercial rates. Rather than a game of giant consortia, he thought that a relatively small private company could launch commercial rockets safely and much more cheaply.

In the early years, the Falcon 1 rocket, using a new Merlin engine designed and manufactured by SpaceX, was subject to several flight failures that insiders largely attributed to lack of company access to the vast body of engineering lore used in past rocket launches. Not enough engineers. Not enough expertise. Whether that was true or not, the Falcon 1 (single engine) rocket had its first successful launch-to-orbit in 2008. Six years from blank piece of paper to orbit. Nonetheless, Musk has often been dismissed by other commercial space launch organizations as a dilettante, wasting his own money on a venture that would never amount to much, and would certainly never deliver any service cheaper than the giant aerospace companies of Russia, China, the EU, and the United States.

All that started to change when less than two years after the successful launch of the Falcon 1 rocket, SpaceX’s new Falcon 9 (running 9 Merlin engines in tandem) was able to reach orbit. Suddenly SpaceX had a rocket big enough to deliver serious weight to space, and compete with the biggest commercial and state-sponsored launch services. Musk’s philosophy of rocket modularization (and cost reduction) had been proven out. A mere six months later, the company launched a second Falcon 9 to orbit with a pressurized “Dragon” capsule on top. SpaceX became the first private firm to launch and recover a crew-capable space capsule, with a splash-down off the Pacific coast of the US. To successfully launch a brand-new model of rocket, twice, with complete success, defies the laws of probability in the space launch industry. Maybe Musk really had stumbled onto a new way of designing, manufacturing, and operating rockets.

The idea that a private firm could deliver cargo, let alone crews, to the International Space Station at a fraction of the cost of the Space Shuttle or Russian Soyuz capsules would have been inconceivable a decade ago. And yet here we are in 2011 with an American dot-com multi-millionaire announcing new rockets and successfully delivering them.

Just recently, SpaceX announced plans to develop the “Falcon Heavy” which would run three Falcon 9s (3×9=27 engines) as a single first stage, delivering a proposed 117,000 pounds to Low Earth Orbit … more than the capacity of all other currently available commercial heavy-lift rockets. More, in fact, than has ever been lifted in single launches since the Saturn V carried the Apollo moon missions star-wards. First launch of the Falcon Heavy is scheduled for 2013, from Vandenburg Air Force Base. Characteristically, Musk isn’t shy about his dream for the Falcon Heavy. Hypothetical trips to the Moon, to Mars, to an asteroid, now fill his speeches.

Musk’s earlier claims of “game-changer” technology and corporate process appear to be coming true. If he delivers on his recent promises with anything near the success rate of his earlier claims, almost every space-faring nation or corporation is going to be deeply affected.

Let’s be clear, also. Musk has played the taxpayer-dollar game skillfully as he’s found initial technical success and grown his company’s staff and technical capacity. He’s received several multi-million dollar contracts from NASA for demonstration flights and future cargo delivery to the Space Station. He’s parked his corporate facilities in California (HQ and manufacturing), Texas (engine test-stand), and Florida (Cape Canaveral launch facilities) … covering his political bases by hedging good relations with US senators who already know what kind of money and jobs are created by space industry. The only senator not to dip his beak, as far as I can tell, was from Alabama (Huntsville). So Mr. Musk knows his domestic politics, or has learned its harsh anti-market lessons. And he’s successfully squared the circle of NASA bureaucracy, launching rockets on the one hand, and reassuring various government agencies that he should be allowed to.

But the opening salvo by the Russians is a prelude to a new playing field that Musk will need to master. International politics.

There are a lot of rocket engineers around the world who’ll be out of work if Elon Musk and his company can deliver cargo and people to space for half of what it costs the current aerospace giants. And even the Russians and Chinese, who can subsidize launch costs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, still can’t afford to give away those launches indefinitely. Both nations operate in the market economy to the extent that they can, at the very least, estimate their per-launch losses trying to undercut SpaceX’s prices.

As an amateur who’s thrilled by the appearance of a private space industry in the last ten years, I enthused about SpaceX’s successful December launch to an colleague (ex-military) who specializes in high-tech project management. His response was “now the sabotage begins.”

And he may well be right. Whether Musk has been smart, or just plain lucky, the progress of SpaceX over the last decade has been (to my mind) dramatic. My sense is that it’s a matter of capital investment leveraging a backlog of knowledge (in technology and operational process). As long as he was a unproven minnow at the government trough, he could be ignored. Now however, SpaceX is getting big enough to put a dent in established companies’ profits and executive bonuses. There’s no reason why nations or large corporations could not have duplicated what Musk has done … but they either had no incentive or had organizational and social impediments. An “installed base.”

At the moment, they don’t seem to be trying to beat him with comparable technology. And he doesn’t seem to want to be bought out. So what competitive strategy is left? Political impediments are cheapest. Intellectual property theft is likely but it still takes time to turn that into a competing product. And what if the technology is just a part of the equation. What if workforce optimization and “one rich, risk-taking, boss” are the essential components of SpaceX’s rapid success? Will sabotage of SpaceX rockets be the only route to slowing the company down? Fulfilling, conveniently, Russian “concerns.”

Up until now, Musk has been calculating costs based on his technical requirements for design and manufacture (with a fudge factor for domestic political arbitrage). I rather doubt he’s also factored in the burgeoning security apparatus he’ll need to wrap around SpaceX’s activities to inhibit industrial espionage and/or industrial sabotage. And as he takes on more government contracts (both military and civilian), no doubt the bureaucratic restrictions on payload handling and the extra demands for operational oversight will boost company costs dramatically. Will SpaceX be strangled by a combination of bureaucrats, thieves, and saboteurs?

It’d be disheartening to see SpaceX costs slowly but surely reach equilibrium with pricing in the rest of the industry. But there’s no doubt that, left to itself, the private space industry will make some wealthy men incredibly rich, and some aerospace executives unemployed. How clever people respond to that challenge will be interesting to watch.

Enough SpaceX technology appearing in other countries in bootleg form, and enough “unexplained” failures of those really big (really expensive) SpaceX rockets, will spell a new and grimmer phase of the private space business. More and more “iron rice bowls” are being broken by SpaceX with each passing year. Hope Elon’s brushing up on his Sun Tzu.