Military Corruption

Strategy Page has an important article on a form of military corruption that is growing in the US. Unfortunately, some people don't seem to intuitively get how the phenomenon of micromanagement on the field of battle is corrupt and the article doesn't lay out its "j'accuse" thesis clearly enough to make it clear to all. Senior military officials and politicians are offloading their career risk of something bad happening in the field by stretching out the OODA loop of combat troops. This increases the chance that people die and a given combat mission fails. Protecting the career of a president or a flag rank officer with the blood of some private out in the field is corrupt, offensively so. Even if nobody dies and the cost is merely extending a firefight by half an hour, that is half an hour extra that the team is playing the PTSD game of russian roulette. There is no cost free way to micromanage. There are just ways to do it that are visibly cost free for the people in DC.

Here's the comment I put at the article:

We know that delays getting wounded to medical care increase deaths beyond what is unavoidable. The "golden hour" is something that has been identified as a metric that is important and that's right and proper. But micromanagement kills too and that appears not to be as universally recognized with no metrics to track it and blame to apportion when it happens. It is stretching out the combatants OODA loop which increases the chance we lose or at least take greater casualties than otherwise necessary. 

We need to measure the phenomenon and attach consequences to the abuse. The computing power needed to do this is available. When command knows that there is a timer going on every time they stick their nose in and that their names will attach to casualties caused by their intervention, the problem of micromanagement will shrink because we will have a feedback loop to punish those who engage in inappropriate intervention. 

The fact that we have not embedded this feedback loop and are increasing the risk enlisted and junior officers take unnecessarily is a corrupt offloading of risk from seniors who are engaging in career protection to juniors who bleed for it.

HT: Instapundit

Militia Software - I

It seems pretty likely that a number of foreign governments are running cell phone interceptor towers in DC. Were our government on the ball, I would expect these towers to be taken down quickly and consequences issued either in diplomatic expulsions, EMP shenanigans, or some other nasty deterrent that would ensure the safety of our government's communications from prying foreign governments. This apparently has not happened, with the towers being discovered by a private company touting an expensive anti-interception phone technology who reported it to the FCC and let the rest of us know via press release.

An individual firm or even the spy chasers have a limited number of people to run around and seek out these interceptor towers. But making a phone app that identifies local towers and alarms on the appearance of new ones shouldn't be that hard or expensive. Widely release that app and you have a way to pick up the spies no matter where they are. Applications like Llama provide a functional model for finding signal and AntennaSearch provides a database to filter out existing towers.

This is a militia activity that is in response to a real threat actually being deployed against the US. You don't have to run around in camo or make any large sacrifice, just run an app occasionally on the smartphone you already own. It will make it hazardous for foreign enemies to deploy the technology against us. It will also catch domestic enemies deploying the technology in violation of the law. Legitimate use by law enforcement will have paperwork filed and the reports of this software will file will hit that paperwork and not raise alarms.

A Republican Form of Government

Every two years, the federal government certifies that the 50 states have an acceptable form of government. This sounds odder than it is. Article 4 Section 4 obliges the federal government to guarantee "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government". Luther v Borden, a case over the Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island established that this guarantee is non-justiciable, that the Supreme Court cannot intervene.

This guarantee is what was used to overthrow the elected governments of the Confederate states after the civil war and put the Army in charge under Reconstruction. With the passage of the 14th amendment, the equal protection clause of that amendment became the dominant way for the federal government to control states who strayed too far from american ideals. Yet this dependence on the 14th amendment is convenience, not any sort of overthrow of the clause.

These days the interesting theoretical question about this clause is whether there is any sort of government that does not violate equal protection but does constitute a violation of the republican form of government guarantee. It seems clear that it is. The establishment of a system that made the votes of the people essentially worthless would seem such a trigger but only if the situation became intolerable enough to provoke rebellion.

The interesting practical question is whether there is a threat that could actually trigger it. The most likely big issue seems to me to be government pensions swallowing up governments. Past a certain point, government ceases to be anything meaningful beyond cutting transfer payment checks. The will of the people is functionally nullified. For this to actually become an issue, only the Congress could step in either by simply not recognizing the validity of a state's federal representatives or by more involved legislation like the reconstruction act of 1867.

NATO Nuclear Sharing

NATO's recently reaffirmed policy of nuclear sharing means that the US loans out nuclear weapons to trusted members of the alliance. The US maintains the weapons in peacetime. During war conditions, control goes to the government where the weapons are stationed. One response to the Ukraine crisis is to extend the nuclear sharing program to NATO member states like Poland and Romania. The smaller and weaker the member, the more aggressive the response will be perceived in Moscow and the greater the risk of problems with the deployment.

Poland is probably the safest bet but it's also the least threatened. The Baltic states are the most in-your-face option and Romania is probably the most on-point and the most subtle of warnings due to the interplay between Romania and Moldova.

Are US forces in Ukraine?

The Rostec group issued a release Friday claiming that one of its communications jammers disrupted a US drone communications link and caused the drone to come down. The US denies that a drone was lost from the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade. The news reports don't get at the interesting questions.

The drone that Rostec claimed was intercepted, the MQ-5B has a mission radius of 150km. There are no non-Ukrainian launch points that such a plane could have launched from. The conclusion seems obvious that the US has forces in Ukraine, whether they were military forces as claimed by Rostec or civilian intelligence agencies deploying the plane. Pentagon spokesman Eileen Lainez refused comment on the incident saying she was unauthorized to speak about intelligence departments.

There is a public US military presence in Ukraine at present. The Open Skies Treaty enforcement plane is currently in Kiev. Nobody seems to be publicly asking the Ukrainian government what US forces are authorized to be in their country. It seems like it's the simple questions that journalists skip asking.