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This still seems to be impractical, but an overflight attack by drones along the lines of this with downwards-firing shaped charge weapons might become a thing.
related: /2017/09/combat-resupply.html
The submarine contract wasn't a one-off. Australia is now officially paying Saudi Arabia-level (100+% higher than normal) prices for military goods & services imports. This is as close as irrefutable evidence for severe corruption as it gets.
[German] https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9f17f4ce
Selbstverständlich. So läuft das immer. Besser man schafft gar nicht erst das Missbrauchspotential. Solche Überwachungstechnik einzuführen in Anwesenheit von BKA, LKA, VS, BND ist wie Jungenschöre von katholischen Priestern leiten zu lassen.
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We have the rise of the nationalist "little pink" in China which drives the confrontational attitude of Chinese diplomacy that frequently violates protocol. Holding the Chinese POV as the "objective truth" by the professors, sounds a lot like the effects of this attitude in academia.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Pink if you want to look it up.
We are steering into a situation of block building and possibly WWIII between the US and China. In terms of GDP other Asian powers such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan still have low military spending levels, while the US pushes for a raise to 2% among her allies. Could it be that the US wants to settle the conflict with China in a hot war rather sooner than later? This would mean that the West is looking for confrontational issues to maximize flashpoints that can lead to such a war, like Ukraine. China is supporting the Russian position of limiting NATO expansion in Europe. It would mean, that Europe is unlikely to be able to stay neutral in this situation and we might see some PLA together with Russian forces in Europe. Your thoughts on this?
Regarding the misuse of digital data by the police in Germany, this seems to be a general problem in all Western countries. It looks like the US is leading the attitude in this regard and when democracy falls there, it'll be very much in danger of falling in other countries of the West. Why don't we see more of civil rights push against it?
ReplyDeleteGermany began with this slippery slope during the 70's, with laws reacting to Red Army Faction terror.
DeleteThe excuse had shifted to (foreigners') organised crime in the 90's, then Salafist terror in the early 2000's and afterwards the childfuckers became the favourite bogeyman to "justify" more spying and less privacy.
It looks like a grand strategy of salami slicing that continued for half a century, but it's really just bureaucracies pursuing their natural self-interest (more power, more authority, less limitations, pretending to be good guys for prestige...).
I was in a citizens' initiative against mass surveillance for a few years and then gave up because I concluded that fighting it means to swim against the stream. Any success is but a stop, never a reversal. They get their actions (and even laws) declared illegal by the a constitutional or European court, then they rebrand it and do the same, then courts stop them again, then they rebrand it and do it again (see Vorratsdatenspeicherung). And there's never a rollback on such things in Germany (Americans had a little rollback of some Patriot Act obscenities, but not a full one).
The only hope is to have legislative action to stop AND REVERSE it and the representative legislative system fails because the parliaments are by now puppets (of the ministries) who just say yes to bills written by the ministry bureaucracies and decided-on in the cabinet.
So we need law-giving (or even constitution-changing) plebiscites to stop (and reverse) this by a law that criminalizes such offences, with particularly severe punishment (more than 3 years jail without probation = removal from civil/military service and no pension for you!) for those who committed them while in service of the government.
Last but not least, I'd like to point out that our government almost certainly (99.99999% sure) permits other governments to spy on us instead of protecting our privacy. The NSA literally runs telecom listening bases in Germany. Our authorities permit foreign intelligence to intercept landline telecom in Germany. Only a fool would believe that they would refuse findings about us when offered, so de facto this is a method to circumvent whatever bans on domestic spying still exist.
Did I mention that the German state of Berlin alone intercepts and listens in on more than one million phone calls per year?
https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/mehr-als-eine-million-telefonate-in-berlin-ueberwacht
The Stasi -posterchild for surveillance state- listened to about the same quantity of phone calls in 1985 (1.2M), but the DDR had 4.5x as big a population. And two thirds of Stasi phone intercepts were about East-West communication, so much of that wasn't even domestic espionage but about communication between West Berlin and the West.
It's too slow-moving for most people to get agitated about. Numbers are hard.
"Demokratie braucht Demokraten" by Friedrich Ebert is violated if the institutions meant to uphold order in democracy routinely for decades circumvented the legally prescribed limits of their mandates. Our whole security apparatus does show these antidemocratic tendencies by finding ways to circumvent the constitutional law when doing their work.
DeleteSo either the civil rights framework of democracy is bollocks, because its idealism is incompatible with the functioning of a modern state or we have a mismanagement in policing approaches. I suspect that the later does play a role and that there's a group think issue in Western countries' institutions in this regard. Proliferation of tools by US institutions might play a role in this.
The 1970 also coincide with the widening wealth gap, the loss of competitiveness in the Soviet Union, a global technology slowdown, except microprocessor affiliated fields, and an increasing loss of influence of poorer voters compared to affluent voters. It could be argued that we had a decades long antidemocratic movement and our security apparatus shows the symptoms.
I suspect part of the solution towards more democractic institutions would be a different policing approach. What else could be done to rectify this, before security has democracy for lunch?
I looked it up. Certain changes of constitution and laws (phon interception) were passed in 1968.
DeleteSo this coincides with the last throes of the brown-infested early Bundesrepubli, but it continued in the 1970's under leadership by social democrats. The liberals prevented jack shit of this.
While I have many, many criticisms of the Australian defence procurement process, I'm not sure the latest Abrams purchase is evidence of corruption.
ReplyDeleteWho else could Australia buy modern MBTs from? I can only think of South Korea and Germany. South Korea should have been considered (noting that a purchase would mean 3 different tanks in 20 years) but European suppliers are not necessarily politically reliable, to a nation on the other side of the Earth like Australia. In this context, it's likely that Australia was always going to pay through the nose, for the privilege of having some certainty of spare parts supply, in the event of a conflict.
US, Turkey, Russia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Russia, Japan and PRC are producing usable MBTs.
DeleteI wouldn't rate the U.S. as a particularly reliable supplier. They habitually and arbitrarily impose economic sanctions on NATO allies and steal ("freeze") foreign property just as habitually and arbitrarily. They also regularly stop selling to you once they don't like your new head of government.
Israel was AFAIK the only country to ever have supply issues with French arms, and that's because they waged a war of aggression with them.
Finally, let's remember that Australia has fairly new M1A1s in service that are still fine and need at most some military off-the-shelf upgrade package, mostly for sensors.
There were a strong (obviously not strong enough...) party within Defence who wanted to go for the Leopard 2.
ReplyDelete