Security
The powered armored battlesuit is a staple of science fiction, and is getting increasing attention from real militaries. They are the future of warfare in Friedman’s The Next 100 Years. But how close are they to reality? The science fiction site Io9 has broken down the capabilities of the battlesuit in “Iron Man,” and how much it would cost to replicate (sort of) such a suit. Their breakdown:
- Exoskeleton — $10 million
- Head-up display — $54 million
- Portable power source — $36 million
- Jet packs — $400,000
- Wearable computers — $20,000
- TOTAL: $100 million
Io9 correctly notes that this is roughly the cost of an F35 fighter plane. Given that such a suit has capabilities much greater than such a fighter plane, why aren’t we making them? Because we can’t.
- Power: We don’t have anything that can generate anything like the output of Iron Man’s power pack, so the suit would be far weaker than the movie version.
- Flight: Because of the power problem, a flying suit could not fly long or far.
- Armor: Today’s exoskeletons are not armored. Even if we could build a powerful suit, it could not stand up against even small-arms fire, much less cannons and missiles. And the more we armor present-day exoskeletons, the slower and clumsier they’d be.
On the positive side, one could build a highly capable head-up display for a fraction of $54 million, so the battlesuit wearer would be able to see which insurgent with a $200 AK-47 knockoff was going to take him down.
The power and armor problems are not insurmountable, but a battlesuit that is fast, agile, powerful, and armored still seems to be decades away.
(Image courtesy BobbyProm, Flickr)
The AP reported last week that some “Tea Party” leaders and Oklahoma legislators are discussing forming a militia to defend against encroachment by the federal government.
There are other indicators that extremism is finding new purchase.
In February, a man used his light plane to launch a terrorist suicide attack on a government office in Austin, Texas. He appeared to be a troubled man acting alone, but that is the case with many people who are also political terrorists, such as the Fort Hood shooter Major Hassan. Stack invoked politics directly as a motive:
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.
Stack is citing classic insurgency theory as well: trigger an overreaction that fuels a rebellion.
His manifesto is also highly reminiscent of much of the rhetoric emanating from factions of the Tea Party movement, which brings us to the question: is that movement symptomatic of a threat to American stability? There are a number of worrying signs:
- Scale: There has been a right wing of this ilk for decades, but this incarnation seems larger and has more tendrils into the “mainstream.” If even a tiny fraction of turned toward violence, they might number in the tens of thousands.
- Celebration of violence: Tea Partiers have formed ties with “militia” groups that have preparing for violence as their central activity.
- Lack of restraining mechanism: In the past, mainstream media and the Republican Party provided dampers on the spread of right-wing radicalism. Now, extremists can confirm their views with them own media (which includes some corporate media entities as well). And the most of the Republican Party is either silent in the face of extremism, or actively panders to or reinforces it.
- Irrationality: The strong role of anger, and the strange visions of socialism and / or fascism, are also worrying. One could have a perfectly rational (or at least reality-based, if passionate) movement that favored radically downsizing government, but this doesn’t seem to be that movement. Many seem to have headed straight for the black helicopter rabbit holes.
Foreign terrorists can do the US harm; domestic extremism is orders of magnitude more dangerous, as it can undermine fundamental stability.
And the danger does not have to involve violence: a competent and trusted government is rare in the world, and one’s of America’s biggest competitive advantages. Destroying that trust and dismantling that competence would deal a severe blow to American prospects.
The Economist held a debate earlier this week about taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
In favor of military action was General Chuck F. Wald, a director at Deloitte. Dr. Emily Landau, a senior research associate at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, opposed the option.
For military action
General Wald offered these forecasts:
Wired reports that the Air Force is developing tiny, armed drones.
The articles quotes a military document reporting the development of “a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.” Such a system could allow precision and stealth, with small charges replacing relatively indiscriminate munitions such as the Hellfire missile.
Such systems could be enhanced much further. They might use small projectiles rather than explosives, and their targeting could be refined. Before too long, a killer MAV might even use facial recognition (with shades of the hunter-seeker anticipated in Dune).
Non-state combatants may have their own options that could rapidly equal many military capabilities. See this drone helicopter with visual feed and augmented reality gaming options for a hint.
Hobbyists have already developed model aircraft with intercontinental capabilities, and it is quite unlikely that governments are currently capable of stopping an albatross-size vehicle flying low over the ocean or a border.
Applications go beyond warfare, of course. See this post about human rights monitoring and journalism, for instance.
(Picture courtesy US Air Force)
Yemen has now joined the list of prominent theaters in the battle against Islamist extremism. This is no surprise to anyone who had noted its place in governance rankings.
Where next? Here’s the basic list: the 20 least-stable countries in the world, with those in play in that battle in red, and others with large Muslim populations in green.
It’s not that simple, of course, as receptivity to extremism varies widely, and recruitment can go on anywhere, as the apparent Nigerian underwear bomber illustrates, again. But this is a starter list of places that might matter in terms of instability, and where global Islamic groups might look to build safe havens.
Other than Bangladesh, they are all in Africa. Some, such as Sudan and Kenya, could serve to expand existing zones of instability. Others could provide new foci: Nigeria forms the border between West and Central Africa, and has about 60 million Muslims. Recent polling data suggests that about 26 million of these are potentially sympathetic to extremist causes.
Io9 has a useful review of George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years.
We’re in for the return of Cold War politics, the rise of new dominant powers, and a full-blown space war, according to a new book. What are the chances his dire predictions will come true?
In the details, the chances are virtually nil, of course. But this book should be judged more on the broad outlines than on the scenario particulars.
Suspiciously, it is the same future that Friedman always sees: 19th-century style realpolitik, with great powers contending violently for position. That is hardly inevitable, as ideological, economic, and military factors that enabled that environment are no longer in place. Great powers have not fought each other directly for over 50 years, a gap that cannot be found in previous centuries. Indeed, a variety of factors could tip the world toward full-blown peace in coming decades.
As for the details:
Conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.
Friedman’s casual dismissal of China, India, and Brazil should raise some eyebrows. He plausibly explains why Russia might falter, but seems to drop the others either to be deliberately contrarian, or out of deep faith in the determinative power of geography.
It is geography which seems to anoint Turkey, Japan, and Poland. Turkey bears watching, as this blog has noted. As for Poland and Japan, they suffer from the same demographic malady as Russia. Poland is embedded in the pacifying embrace of Europe, and is expected to lose two million people by 2030. Japan cannot be counted out, but is also shrinking already.
How will countries fight at mid-century?
Warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view.
That is not a bad forecast for conflict, though other paths are possible. Some would point to nanotechnologies and biotech weapons.
As for the overall book, as Io9 suggests, it is a better introduction to “realist” thinking than an actual guide to coming developments.
(Image by FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
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Radiolab recently asked the question, “Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all?” Passerby confronted with this query were skeptical, citing “human nature.”
Now, “once and for all” is an extreme criterion, but most people seem to take the question to mean, “Is peace possible? Might wars stop?” And a variety of factors suggest that this could happen, possibly within decades.
The drivers are diverse:
- Decline of violence — Violence is less tolerated globally, within cultures and between them. Behaviors in warfare that were routine a few decades ago — such as targeting civilians — are now deeply controversial. The number of states that engage in large-scale, serious human rights violations has also greatly declined, and abusers receive global attention. (See this Stephen Pinker article for more.)
- Decline of state-to-state warfare — The Catholic Church itself was more likely to engage in armed violence only a few centuries ago than are most dictatorships now. Even “civilized” states routinely attacked each other in the recent past, but this happens more and more rarely. (This is one reason the US invasion of Iraq was widely seen as such an aberration, and as morally repugnant.)
- Democracy and freedom — Both have been spreading in recent decades; even authoritarian states such as China have far more social freedom than they did in the past. This trend reduces pent-up frustration against governments that can result in violence, and provides outlets for self-determination, one of the more common causes of war.
- Transparency — Formal or crowdsourced media have an ever-growing reach, and fewer and fewer things will happen outside the reach of the camera lens. In a couple of decades, 80-90% of the world’s population will be carrying the equivalent of their own broadcast stations, upping the price to be paid in public opinion for those engaged in conflict or oppression.
- Rising wealth — Wealthy states are less violent, internally and externally. Middle classes are more educated, less likely to support authoritarianism, and have much more invested in stability. Setting aside artificial oil economies, no countries with a per capita income of more than $30,000 have significant human rights issues — and many countries are headed for that level of wealth in coming decades.
- Human nature — It is not a prohibitive obstacle. We need look no farther than Scandinavia: the same genetic pool that produced the Vikings, who engaged in savage violence from Greenland to Russia only a millennia ago, now yields peoples with essentially zero chance of waging aggressive war. Their genomes have probably barely changed: it is their social and physical environments that have shifted.
Peace is hardly inevitable, of course. Any number of factors could produce more rounds of wars:
- New or resurgent scarcities could pit nations against each other, fighting over energy or water, for example. Many forecast that climate change and population pressure could drive this result.
- Western values that have slowly evolved to make war less likely might be replaced in the international system by other perspectives as the 21st century wears on.
- A sufficiently serious calamity — peak oil combined with a severe climate shift, for instance — might rip away the social underpinnings of more peaceful societies, setting humanity back centuries.
- Humanity may begin to modify itself, creating new divisions; willingness to use genetic enhancement is one possibility.
Still, peace might break out, and it might do so relatively soon.
(Image courtesy cell105, Flickr)
Follow on Twitter: @Geofutures
Researchers are creating digitized versions of cities from thousands of photos that people have shared online, Physorg.com reports.
The program used 150,000 photos of Rome to create a 3-D digital rendering of the city, for instance.
This capability is another step toward truly open-source intelligence: publicly available images and other information will be able to generate increasingly detailed snapshots of places, people, and particular moments. And the ability to analyze this information will steadily democratize, and grow more powerful: Google is experimenting with facial recognition software that could reveal the locations and activities of millions of people who aren’t even the primary subject of a given photo, as just one example.
This idea has historic antecedents, by the way. During WW II, the OSS collected American’s tourist photos of Europe, cataloged them and made them partially machine-accessible, and used them to plan bombing raids. (Nicholson Baker, “Deadline,” New Yorker, July 24, 2000, 47.)
(Tip from @Changeist)
(Image: Creative Commons from gruntzooki, Flickr)
Iran may now have enough nuclear fuel “to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon,” the New York Times reported this week.
However, design work on an actual nuclear weapon may have been halted in 2003, and “it is unclear how many months — or even years — it would take Iran to complete that final design work, and then build a warhead that could fit atop its long-range missiles.” This makes the US believe it would have ample warning if Iran actually began pursuing a nuclear weapon in earnest — the Times notes that the official estimate is that Iran could have a bomb between 2010 and 2015, with later dates in that range more likely.
It also remains unclear how much effect the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would have. NPR explored this issue late in August.
- Experts interviewed for that story suggest, as others have, that Iran is not ruled by a suicidal regime, and could likely be deterred, just as more radical regimes (such as Mao’s China) have been in the past.
- “If Iran gets the bomb, we’re going to have a period of experimentation in the beginning, where Iran is trying to figure out how much power this new capability has conferred,” says Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, noting that this could lead to a confrontation stemming from miscalculation.
- Mike Shuster of NPR notes: “If Iran does eventually build nuclear weapons, its deterrent is unlikely to grow beyond a handful of bombs. Iran’s own supply of natural uranium is believed to be quite small and dwindling already. Acquiring uranium from other nations could be difficult if Iran sought to keep it secret.”
The Economist reports that the concept of “responsibility to protect” — the idea that countries have a responsibility and right to protect people when their own governments cannot or will not — is facing increased resistance at the UN.
Smaller Third World countries such as Nicaragua are leading the counterattack, characterizing the notion instead as the right to intervene — and a right which would only in practice be held by the rich and powerful. (Nicaragua’s role is yet another case of history coming back to haunt the United States, which characterized its proxy war on the Central American country in the 1980s as support for “freedom fighters.”)
The responsibility to protect may be crucial in securing a future in which human rights are broadly protected, but it will make only slow progress at best: too many small countries are suspicious that it will be only an excuse, not a principle, and too many more powerful players — including China, India, and Turkey — may be too worried that it might someday be brought up in the context of their own self-determination and human rights issues.
(Image copyright Futureatlas.com — usable with attribution and link)