Author Page for Robert Farley

Mao Mao

Counter-factuals are fun…

Modern scholarship on the history of the CCP has demonstrated that Mao rarely, if ever, had complete control over the Party machinery. He struggled through his entire tenure against competitors, both bureaucratic and ideological. Many of the decisions Mao made had strong support from the rest of the CCP, and emerged more from consensus that from authoritarian diktat. Nevertheless, the CCP and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bore the special imprint of Mao’s ideological conviction and genius for infighting.

What if Mao had died in 1949, shortly after the declaration of the existence of the People’s Republic of China? How might China’s domestic and foreign policy have fared in the absence of the Great Helmsman?

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Why Yes, I Would Like to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

As the Lars Ulrich of LGM, I get lots of electronic mail:

Well, if a medical degree in ophthalmology, combined with residence in Dallas, TX, isn’t enough to create interest in someone’s commentary about the election, then just what the heck is?

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The New Cyber Vendetta?

Interesting stuff from Brian Krebs:

More than 20 years after Gilmore first coined that turn of phrase, his most notable quotable has effectively been inverted — “Censorship can in fact route around the Internet.” The Internet can’t route around censorship when the censorship is all-pervasive and armed with, for all practical purposes, near-infinite reach and capacity. I call this rather unwelcome and hostile development the “The Democratization of Censorship.”

Allow me to explain how I arrived at this unsettling conclusion. As many of you know, my site was taken offline for the better part of this week. The outage came in the wake of a historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which hurled so much junk traffic at Krebsonsecurity.com that my DDoS protection provider Akamai chose to unmoor my site from its protective harbor.

Lots more on harnessing the internet-of-things to carry out unprecedentedly large DDOS attacks. The field of cyber-conflict studies is new, and obviously is adjusting to a rapidly evolving reality, but one of the more sober conclusions that far has been that states remain the central coercive actors. Krebs is suggesting that this may change. There are reasons for skepticism, but it’s worth a read.

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Fernandez

Damn, this is awful.

Miami Marlins ace Jose Fernandez was killed in a boating accident in Florida early Sunday morning.

Fernandez was 24 years old.

The Marlins announced that Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Braves was canceled.

“The Miami Marlins organization is devastated by the tragic loss of José Fernández. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this very difficult time,” the team said in a statement.

According to multiple reports, police received a call of a possible boating accident at 3 am ET. Authorities found a 30-foot boat overturned that had crashed into the rocks off Miami Beach. Three people were found dead and authorities were looking for survivors.

[SL] Highly recommended.

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Precision

A-26 Strike on Wonsan, Korean War. By USAF (photo 306-PS-51(10303)) – ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 541959. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=235495

I had the chance to speak with Matthew Rosenberg of  the New York Times about airstrikes, and why they sometimes go awry:

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Typhoon!

By Ronnie Macdonald from Chelmsford, United Kingdom – Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4 4, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25801124

A few thoughts on the Eurofighter Typhoon over at the National Interest:

The Eurofighter Typhoon has joined the Dassault Rafale, the Saab Gripen, andthe Sukhoi “Flanker” in pursuit of a growing niche in the international fighter market. These aircraft offer capabilities beyond the Generation 4 platforms developed in the 1970s, but don’t carry the costs and complications of stealth. While the Eurofighter has enjoyed outstanding technical success thus far, the market niche may not be large enough to sustain production over time.

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Rules Based Orders

Hugo Grotius. By Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=481348

My last two pieces at the Diplomat have delved into what it means to establish and defend an international “rules based order.”  Part I:

The steps that the United States and its partners take in the South China Sea (and elsewhere) to build multilateral understandings of, and expertise in, appropriate maritime procedures help constitute the thing that many refer to as “the rules based order.” Indeed, the usefulness of establishing multilateral maritime norms in Southeast Asia depends, to great extent, on whether there’s any value at all to constructing this “rules based order.”

And part II:

Generally speaking, the idea of a rules based order goes beyond these minimal injunctions, and tries to describe appropriate rules of state behavior. This includes appropriate forms of competition; prohibitions that states will face censure if they break. Such orders are invariably value-laden, reflecting the interests and nature of the states that establish them. And it is in these more complex versions that the most interesting debates over the existence of mutually-agreed orders happen.

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“Have the Jamarcus Russell hit Tehran hard”

We have a name for the USAF’s new bomber:

When the president calls & puts us into the fight, the #B21 #Raider will answer our nation’s call! @SecAF23https://t.co/KHVmvxtrLh

— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) September 19, 2016

I propose that individual B-21s be named after great Raider quarterbacks of yore:

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Links

To open your week…

• Spent the weekend in Nebraska.  It wasn’t pleasant.
  
• Why isn’t China seeing more success on the international arms market?
• Washington experiments with an alternative punishment strategy. Curious; anyone have experience with this from the public defender point of view?
• F-5 vs. MiG-21 in Budget Fighter Showdown!
• The NorK missile fleet…
• I doubt I’ll see Snowden, but I don’t doubt that Oliver Stone is singularly inappropriate for expressing the complications of the story.

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Decisions…

Last week I wrote a pair of pieces for the National Interest on decision-making early in World War II.  First, on the French decision to surrender:

But what if key figures (such as Marshal Philippe Petain) had viewed the situation differently?  If the French government had decided to go into exile in the Empire, rather than re-establish itself in the German protectorate at Vichy, then the rest of World War II might have gone very differently.

Second, on the German decision to declare war on the United States:

Scholars and analysts have long wondered whether this represented one of the great “what-ifs” of World War II; could the Germans have kept the United States out of the war, or at least undercut popular support for fighting in the European Theater, by declining to join the Japanese offensive?

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Immediacy

F-15A Eagle of the 101st Fighter Squadron flying over New York City after September 11, 2001. U.S. Air Force photo by Lt. Col. Bill Ramsay – http://www.af.mil/photos/media_search.asp?q=102nd, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3767162

I quite enjoyed this long oral history of Air Force One on 9/11; it clarified quite a few questions regarding what seemed to be the slow response of the group immediately around George W. Bush to the attacks, and the confusion that ensued across the rest of the day.  Long story short, the people around the President performed as if they were in a crisis that they had only imperfectly anticipated and prepared for.  Aspects of the response (concern that Al Qaeda could track Air Force One, or even the electronics carried by the Secret Service team) sound absurd in retrospect, but at the time seemed within the realm of plausibility.  In particular, the account suggests that two of the most common critiques of the GWB team’s performance on 9/11- that they were slow to respond to the initial reports in Florida, and that they were slow to return to DC- aren’t entirely fair.  With respect to the former, the short delay in the elementary school had absolutely no impact on the broader response, and with regard to the latter there was considerable disagreement on Air Force One as to where the plane should be headed.  One exchange that reflects the confusion:

Maj. Scott Crogg: It was very somber [at the air base]. We got these cryptic messages from Southeast Air Defense Sector. We knew we’re on the hook now—it might not be for Air Force One, but for anything. Houston’s the fifth-largest metro region, it’s got all this oil and gas infrastructure. I asked maintenance to put live missiles and arm up the guns. Two heat-seeking missiles and rounds from a 20-mm gun isn’t a lot to take on a hijacked plane, but it was the best we could do.

Andy Card: Then we hear that Flight 93’s gone down. We’re all wondering, Did we do that? It wasn’t a big deal on the plane. It lingered deepest in the president’s conscience. Most people on the plane hadn’t been privy to that conversation.

Col. Mark Tillman: All of us thought, we assumed we shot it down.

Another interesting tidbit; limitations on communications technology in 2001 meant that the people on Air Force One knew less about what was going on than people watching at home in their living rooms. The aircraft had pretty good contact with the relevant military and civil authorities around the country, but those authorities had very little idea what was going on; they were all watching CNN, trying to piece bits together.  This resulted in a President and immediate staff that was less well-informed than your typical viewer at home.

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National Security “Town Hall”?

USS Intrepid, April 1945, after being struck by a kamikaze. Which is still probably not as bad as Trump. U.S. Navy, photographed from USS Alaska (CB-1).  Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=977644

Oh Sweet Jeebus do I have to watch this?

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, for the first time in 2016 presidential election campaign, will take the same stage on the same night as NBC News holds a Town Hall event that will stream live from New York City Wednesday — a Town Hall that will air 19 days ahead of the first official presidential debate, and will focus squarely on issues related to the military.

Because the event is a network-sponsored Town Hall, however, and not a formal debate, Clinton and Trump will never appear on stage together during the NBC broadcast as they field questions from “an audience comprised mainly of military veterans and active service members,” according to the veteran’s advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which will co-sponsor the Town Hall.

There is nothing even faintly interesting to me about the national security “conversation” between Clinton and Trump.  The only way they could get me to watch is by putting this thing on an aircraft carrier or a battleship…

The Town Hall will stream live from the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum — a military museum aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid, on the Hudson River in New York, New York. Airtime is scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 5 p.m. Pacific. The television broadcast can be seen simultaneously on the NBC network, as well as on the affiliated cable news outlet MSNBC.

Fuck.

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