Russian Spies, and American Pop Culture

The Russian 11 has been a funny diversion on the daily news this week. Mowscow Center's inability to understand American culture continues to astound, but perhaps this inability is bureaucratically useful. Russia's political elites probably relate more to the mafia's secretiveness than the academia's openness.

Looking at the pictures of Anna Chapman, I was struck by a thought: It will be deliciously ironic, if Ms Chapman wins her trial, and then promptly becomes a media personality. She and her cohorts will get book deals, appear in reality TV competitions, commentate on CNN and Fox News, and maybe even start their own training school/consultancy on the Beltway circuit. This espionage arrest may be the biggest break of their lives, second only to getting assigned to the US. Christopher Mestos may well regret his bail-jumping in Cyprus.

SVR employees will fight for an American assignment, if only they can replicate the celebrity status that the Russian 11 are now enjoying. Being a foreign spy in America is now another path to Hollywood.

PS: I want to clarify that, even if Chapman, et al, got convicted, they may still have a celebrity career.  In fact, as known media personalities and registered foreign agents, they might get more recruiting leads/volunteers from their elevated social status.  So, like the Chinese idiom, this arrest may be the lost horse [apparent mishap] that is a blessing in disguise.  And I added links and labels.

Russia: Climbing the Export Tree?

Galrahn at Information Dissemination analyzes more news on the Russian Mistral LHD purchase and talk about the Russian shipbuilding industry and why it is importing French shipbuilding technology. He also talks about the US Senate reaction to this pending purchase.

I have earlier talked about the Mistral purchase as reviving the historic Franco-Russian relationship. Galrahn's discussions reminds me that France may be actively pursuing this geo-political realignment as well. France is betting on Russia becoming the next China.

For all the abuses of the Soviet era, it has left Russia with a relatively well-educated work force familiar with modern manufacturing technology. Although Russian quality control was deplorable, its heavy industries sustained the mighty Red Army for decades. Even today Russian metallurgy is still state of the art. Compared to India and Brazil, Russia is probably best prepared to take on China in mass manufacturing. Moreover, China itself is trying to climb the export tree and leaving the export manufacturing business behind. If France injects capital and technology into Russia, it stands to profit from Russia's re-industrialization and China's de-exportation.

At the same time, France is trying to balance a multipolar world. From France's perspective, an economically ascendant Russia is a nice counter against China. Russia is a potential ally who shares France's distrust of both the US and China. With the communist party still popular in both countries, they share a social affinity as well.

Therefore France hopes to re-industrialize Russia, starting with its ship-building sector. They may be working on a Korean model, where the heavy industries spin off into the light manufacturing industries. There are certainly many challenges, not the least of which is Russia's demographic collapse. But the time is right for a geo-economic/political partnership between France and Russia.

USAF's Near Ridiculous Push for Unmanned Cargo Aircraft

USAF just put out an RFI for an unmanned cargo aircraft. The specifications are: 500-3,000 lbs, 500 nautical miles, 250 knots, V/STOL up to 300 feet runway, etc, etc.

As I see it, that's a pretty ridiculous set of specifications for an unmanned aircraft. If you're going to have a payload of up to 3,000 lbs, you have room for a pilot. The USAF could use a commercial off-the-shelf prop-driven aircraft that would meet all of the specs (other than the unmanned part). They could spend the money saved on a strapped-down auto-pilot unit, later, that could fly the plane. Voila, immediate capability in the field! This is the USAF re-inventing the wheel the USAF-way.

Speaking of re-inventing the wheel, here is a blast from the past: The Soviet Antonov-2 biplane cargo aircraft. 3,000 lb, check [4,700lb "useful load"]. 500 nautical miles, check [456 nm, almost there]. V/STOL, check [30 miles per hour stall speed.] 250 knots, no [139 kn max].

Wiki quotes a serviceable An-2 at $30,000. That is probably cheaper than the salary we paid the USAF people during their RFI preparation.

Attack: Helicopter vs OV-10

It's nice to see the return of the OV-10. I know that it's an Army fad to have a fleet of anti-tank helicopters. Hell, we even convinced the Russians and the Chinese to build such a fleet. However, pound for pound, and dollar for dollar, an attack helicopter is much less capable than a light attack aircraft. All armies would be better served to relegate their anti-tank mission to light attack aircrafts.

In terms of the runway requirement, the modern attack helicopter company occupies such a large area that it is simple to plop a runway down the middle. If you think about the payload of an AH-64 (about 2 tons), it is a ridiculously expensive platform for the payload. This article summarizes many of the advantages of a light attack aircraft over an attack helicopter.

The reason the Americans started down the road of an attack helicopter fad, was because the Key West agreement took away the Army's fixed-wing attack aircrafts. So the political agreement steered the Army into the rotary wing CAS alternative. For some reason (maybe Fire Bird?) this political compromise became an international military fad, still going strong. The Israeli have one; the Russians have 3; the Chinese and the Indians are working on it.

This fad proves that groupthink will transcend bureaucratic boundaries. It is so sad it is scary.

Clarifications on Russia and Western Europe

An anonymous commenter responded to my thoughts on the Mistral order. He objected to my analysis because

I think Russia's present security preoccupations are NATO expansion towards
Russia's Near Abroad. Islam is a very minor threat to Russia, and entire
point of the SCO is to manage Sino-Russian interests without butting heads.

I responded:

Yes, Russians are pre-occupied with NATO expansion. However, as Defense
Secretary Gates has said, there's the war you're preparing for, and there's the
war that you're actually fighting.Yes, NATO is expanding. However, that does not
pose a security threat, per se, to Russia. Rather, it is more over spheres of
influence, prestige, and control.

In addition, NATO expansion is driven, in large part, by former Warsaw
countries such as Poland and Czech. If you think about intentions, these Central
European countries are more hostile toward Russia than, say, England and France
are. England and France may object to Russian internal politics on humanitarian
grounds, but that could change if Russia becomes more Westernized. Poles and
Czechs, on the other hand, will forever hold Russians in suspicion.

So geostrategically, England and France may be rekindling their strategic
relationship with Russia. Here I am thinking on historical timescales of
decades. Historians in the 22nd Century may well mark this Mistral order as the
start of the trend.

Ref SCO and China: For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the SCO,
Russia is deeply worried about China due to the demographics. With the sporadic
anti-Chinese riots and actions in Moscow, and the de-facto Chinese colonization
of Russian Far East, China is Russia's biggest security risk at this moment.

As Russia is fighting its Muslim minorities right now, Islamic insurgency is
Russia's biggest security task. The war you're fighting today, like I said.

Chinese Weapon Engineering Textbooks

Just came back from a personal trip to Beijing. The bookstores there are very impressive. Of course they have the small hole-in-the-wall, mom-and-pop bookstores. The super-bookstores, though, are multi-story affairs. They have at least three floors dedicated to books, one or two floors for CDs and DVDs, and floor space for stationery and other products. The bookstore in Sidan district has 1.5 floors for consumer electronics, with a focus on electronic dictionaries. Each of these floors is about the size of a one-floor Barnes & Nobles. And these stores are all packed! The three super-stores I visited are all filled with people browsing and purchasing books. Even on a weekday during school hours the stores are still busy. I just don't know if I can go back to Barnes and Nobles anymore after this trip.

One particularly impressive area is in the engineering textbooks. As an engineer, I just had to go check that out. If you go to a Barnes & Nobles here in the states, you will find about 8 to 16 shelves (1-2 short aisles) for engineering, programming, and "technology" books. In the Beijing super stores, the engineering section takes up at least a quarter of a floor. Mechanical engineering itself takes up at least 8 shelves. Food processing/manufacturing takes up several shelves, too. Even weapons/military/aero/astro engineering has about 3 to 4 shelves, more if you include the shipbuilding shelves. Civil engineering and architecture/construction occupies half of the whole engineering section, which is notable from an American perspective, where the undergrad civil engineering departments are usually the small departments in the engineering schools (approx 10-20 students/class year).

The military engineering books seem good. You get some fluff there, like a "modern weapon catalog" that is the size of a pocket book, but the rest are pretty solid. I saw "Principles of Submarine Design", "Principles of Fire Control System Design", "Design of Automatic Firearms", and "Introduction to Propellant Design", to name a few. I flipped through these books and they all seemed to cover the basics, with plenty of equations to start component designs and instructions on how to make the design tradeoffs. Good textbooks. It is sad that books like these are not more accessible to the American public, or even the American engineering students.

Because of the current Chinese emphasis on space flights and ballistic missiles, rocketry is pretty big in the military/aero&astro engineering book section. The books cover all segments of rocket/missile design. They even have an "Artillery Rocket Design" translated from the original Russian textbook.

All in all, it was very impressive visiting these bookstores. They are definitely on the to-see list for anybody visiting Beijing.

Does any of you know how the bookstores are like in India's major cities? How are their engineering books selling?

PS: edited for grammar

The Recession and Neo-Fascism/Et-al-isms

David Brooks at New York Times had an interesting article up today on the "Formerly Middle Class". His main thesis is that, as these formerly middle class people lose their jobs and their middle class symbols, they will become angry, pessimistic, and vulnerable to extremist messages.

This column reminded me of Today's ISMS: Socialism, Capitalism, Fascism, Communism, and Libertarianism by Ebenstein. In it, Ebenstein said of Fascism that its footsoldiers are of the Lower Middle Class, because they have worked the hardest to move themselves out of the lower class. So they embrace the social conventions and traditions. At the same time, because they are lower on the economic scale, they are more vulnerable to losing their status. Therefore they are more militant against economic redistribution schemes. Fascism exploits their vulnerabilities against Communism, even though both are more similar than different in practice.

With this in mind, we can look at a post-Great-Recession World 10 years from now: In China, India, Brazil, and Russia, (and East Europe), we can expect to see a rise in Nationalistic Fascist groups in their respective countries. They will militate against their traditional enemies: Japan/Korea, Pakistan, Germany/Europe, Paraguay(?), et al. And the United States will be the Public Enemy # Uno in many of those places as well.

As the "Emerging Markets" slide back into 3rd World-ness, we can also expect a re-surgence in Communist philosophies. Both Communism and Fascism are products of the turbulent economic times of the last turn of the century. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I may have to order that nuclear fall-out shelter I've been thinking about. With a possibly Islamic-ruled Pakistan and Nationalistic Fascist India facing each other, the Doomsday Clock is edging toward armageddon.

The USAF's Acquisition Crisis and AAMs

Whew! The election is finally over with. Let's hope Obama is more of a Clinton-style triangulator instead of a Carter-ish indecisive vision guy as Todd Zywicki said here.

Regardless, Stephen Trimble yesterday highlighted some great comments from a fighter jock here, that generated a lot of comments. One of the interesting points is the low probability of kill ratio of the AIM-120 against a jamming target. If the USAF is going up against any semi-near-peer competitor, it will not have superiority. Sure, the F-22 is great. But the key to making the F-22, and its Beyond-Visual-Range tactic, work, is the AIM-120. If the F-22 supercruises into the fight, fires the AMRAAMs, and get out of Dodge, he survives. But his target will survive, too, if the missiles fail to lock onto the target due to jamming. And what's that called, if neither side gets a kill? Parity, not Superiority.

This, coupled with the USAF fiscal death spiral that ELP and others have been documenting, means that the USAF needs to change its acquisition strategy right now. If it keeps going down the current path, it will run out of money, people, and fighters. The USAF will get a smaller and smaller slice of the budget pie, along with the rest of the DoD, because that is the American budgetary future. The USAF cannot out-compete the AARP. The USAF is also getting less retention. And it is prematurely retiring its F-teens to bank on the unproven F-35. The USAF will become operationally irrelevant if it keeps going as it is.

The USAF keeps saying that the F-22s (with AMRAAM) will secure the skies and allow the F-35s to do their job, but it doesn't have enough F-22s, and will never get more. The F-35s (and some legacy F-teens) will have to take on air-to-air missions. We know that AMRAAM, as is, doesn't work in a jamming environment. The USAF has to immediately embark on an AMRAAM replacement program right now. Being that even missile programs take more than 4 years to go from the lab to the flightline, the more the USAF wastes its time, the more time it gives semi-near-peers to become peers. The new Advanced AAM Program [doesn't that sound familiar? :] has a simple goal, Give the F-35 a decisive advantage over the current 4.5th Gen fighters (Eurofighter, Su-35+, et al). The corollary effect will give the F-teens and F-22 superiority over everybody else.

In the mean time, the USAF can get some cheap fixes: Put a Sidewinder seeker and an RF homing seeker on the AMRAAM for seeker diveristy in the inventory. Integrate and buy the Meteor to improve the kill ratio and foster cross-Atlantic solidarity. Try the datalink to improve jamming resistance. Or have the AMRAAM talk to other AMRAAMs in its volley to sift through the noise.

Unfortunately, the USAF has been peddling the F-35 as its savior for too long now. Politically, it cannot admit otherwise and change course, without killing many officer careers. The Obama administration seems unlikely to rock the USAF boat, because its focus, and its expertise, is on COIN and the ground fight. The Obama administration may not have the intellectual and political capital to fight the USAF.

If Dr. Gates stays on as DefSec, he might be able to turn the USAF around, due to his USAF background as a missileer and his distance from the F-35 game. However, he is planning on leaving, and there are other people that want the job. All in all, the future looks bleak for the
USAF.

On the other hand, the USN faces a similar issue with its underpowered F-18. The USN Tomcat association has long lobbied for an AIM-54 Phoenix replacement. The USN aviation budget is in much less trouble due to its volume buy of the F-18E/F, and is in a better position to advocate a new AAAM program. If the USN succeeds in deploying the AAAM, you can be sure that the USAF will jump on board.

It is a sad day when the USAF has to depend on the USN to rescue it from air-to-air irrelevance. However, this analysis is yet another piece of vindication for Inter-Service Rivalry and support for duplication in Roles and Missions.

Sorry for the html. Has to use email submission.

Edit: fixed the html.

Edit 2: I saw the Joint Dual Role Air Dominance Missile. I hope that the Air to Air requirements are sufficiently robust, and that the ARM/AGM requirements take a back seat, as they should be. However, with an in-service date beyond 2020, it is clear that the USN and USAF needs an interim solution, as I've outlined above.

China Finally Responds to Ossetia

A belated update to my previous post on Ossetia: China, through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, has taken a stand on the Ossetia conflict. The SCO will support the current ceasefire and the conflict resolution.

As predicted, China has taken the neutral third party stance. Words are cheap. We'll have to wait to see if China will back up words with deeds, ie Deploy peacekeepers to replace the Russians, etc.

And we're still waiting on India to make a move here.

Thanks to Galrahn for noting this first.

The Asian Geopolitical Implications of the Ossetian War

Figured I should put in my 2 cents about the Ossetian War here. I don't have anything to add to the news out there. But this conflict is glaring in the absence of some major players.

China and India aspire to super power status. The Ossetian War presented many opportunities to a power looking for good press: Russia took a side, America the other. A third way to mediate the crisis, as a semi-neutral third party, is an obvious opening. At the end of hostilities there will be a need for peacekeepers/observers to enforce the ceasefire, for which China and India has plenty of bodies to deploy, and which will be a great occassion for photo ops in a low-risk environment. The role of a mediator does not require any commitments and has a great return on international good will.

Both China and India are for "Non-intervention", "territorial integrity", etc. China in particular can use another friend to face off Russia. At the same time, both countries have a huge diaspora population abroad and can use that to relate to Russia.

Of course, France took the diplomatic opening and is working to mediate a ceasefire. India and China should have been jumping on the bandwagon and everything. Yet there is nary a peep from either of them. One wonders why.