Trade news

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Just for those with interest in economics:

The U.S. trade balance deficit is collapsing, down from $ 56.690 billion to $ 40.442 billion in just one month (October to November).

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/trad_time_series.xls

That's a remarkable drop, and the November level wasn't seen since late 2003.
The change is only in goods trade, not in the services balance.

The global deleveraging movement might finally include a correction of trade imbalances of the USA and UK. Australia 's trade balance turned black last summer.
Small problem here: The UK's trade balance didn't improve yet.

I'm not optimistic about the trade balances of the southern EU members. The Euro might prevent such a correction (due to a lack of pressure from the currency exchange rate).

A reduction of imbalances is good news for everyone - the period of change will be unpleasant for many nations, though.
Many U.S.Americans worried a lot about their imports from the PR China and the latter's economic growth. Healthy trade balances could reduce both concerns a bit.

S O

edit 2009-02-14:

The December figure surprised me; only a marginal drop to about $ 39.9 billion deficit, I expected 25-35.
The November figure was corrected to about 41.6.
A monthly deficit of $ 40 billion would still be almost half a trillion annual deficit, way too much.

The Israel conflicts and our fallibility

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Al Jazeera is the only major news corporation that has its own correspondents in Gaza as far as I know, the others can only look into Gaza from outside or rely on few independent journalists.

That's an optimal setup for Israel to spin its war, like it (and the Arabs) always spin the stories about the conflicts about Israel.

I found (hat tip to Don Vandergriff, he also added links to it) an Al Jazeera English article ("Who will save Israel from itself?") that sums up my secondary research findings about the conflict that mostly don't make it into our news.

I would like to add to it that there's some evidence about Israel soldiers using Arabs as human shields, almost Apartheid-like discrimination of Arabs in Israel, Red Cross reports about how Hezbollah did apparently NOT use human shields in 2006 and last but not least the definition of 'human shields' that does not prohibit that combatants stay in settlements like Hamas does in the Gaza Strip.

I'm no anti-Semite and couldn't care less about the tiny nation of Israel if it wasn't involved in so many troubles. It's the troublemaker next door for NATO, and a source of alienation between European NATO members and their southern Neighbors - Arabs. A defensive alliance wants and deserves a calm neighborhood.

I believe that this decade-old conflict was and is heavily misrepresented by lobbyists, media and pundits - and that Israel has an edge in manipulating Western opinion over their Arab opponents due to their cultural familiarity and unity.
No, that's not anti-semitism. You (well, at least I) don't need to 'hate' or be 'anti-' to criticize. Criticism is an expression of pluralism and freedom.


It's difficult to admit for many people, but we're not always siding with the 'good boys', sometimes we do even side with the wrong party of a conflict.
The Kosovo conflict was likely one such example of our failure, the Israel conflict is another one (except for France and few other nations, who turned away from Israel and kept neutrality after 1967) and many, many de-colonialization and post-colonialism conflicts in which we supported whoever claimed to be contra-socialist were additional taints in the history of our Western states.

No nation is exceptional - every nation is and all humans are fallible.
Nobody can subscribe to never make a mistake or to be always 'good'.

S O

Dangerous national links

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Links between states and organizations can cause a lot of trouble.

One example is an alliance with a trouble-making state, another example are links between states and organizations like Iran-Hezbollah.
Troubles can also arise from economic links, as we observed when the global economic crisis had an epidemic expansion through economic links in many states of the world.

Links are not bad in themselves; states should merely avoid to add too much systemic risks on themselves.

I'd like to criticize one type of link especially much; unbalanced trade relations.

Much has been written about raw material (energy) dependency links, and it's certainly a good idea to diversify the raw material supply. That's not the only example, though.

Imbalanced trade balances are a general and very powerful problem as well. States with a strongly positive trade balance are in danger of connecting their economy too much to unhealthy economies (economies with negative trade balance). A strong trade surplus is usually being considered as a sign of an especially healthy' economy - but that's wrong in my opinion. Healthy is balanced - a strong surplus is an indicator of strong links to unhealthy economies. This means that a strong export country like PR China, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Switzerland or Norway is strongly linked to 'unhealthy' economies like USA, Spain, UK, Australia, Italy or Greece (which have strong trade balance deficits) - with the expectation of running in trouble if the latter finally (almost unavoidably) run into trouble.

This isn't the only problem of a strongly positive trade balance - many problems surround this topic (long term considerations, macroeconomic investment rate, retirement savings/demographic development) - the bottom line is that a (near-)balanced trade balance is simply favorable.

Sadly, we've got a terrible national custom in Germany; we cheer trade balance surpluses.

We have actually a law that urges our government to strive for a balanced trade balance (StabG, 1967), but that requirement is in some conflict with others of the same law, that reduces its effectiveness.

We should care more about systemic risks in alliances and economic relations than to just discuss energy source dependencies.
Foreign economic troubles can affect our own economies only as much as we are linked to them.
Foreign aggressive governments and their conflicts with others won't become our conflicts if we don't side/ally with them.

Sven Ortmann

The transferability of lessons learned

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The men of the 3rd Batallion, 8th Marine Regiment, based at Camp Lejeune, are discovering in their first two months in Afghanistan that the tactics they learned in nearly six years of combat in Iraq are of little value here — and may even inhibit their ability to fight their Taliban foes.

"U.S. Marines find Iraq tactics don't work in Afghanistan" Sure, every conflict is different - but imagine; if two COIN wars at the same time against Sunni insurgents have so much difference - what's the value of recent lessons learned for very different conflicts like more conventional warfare? Many systems and tactics that seem to be 'modern' and combat-proven may be ( or are with certainty useless for modern conventional warfare, but become coining lessons for a generation of officers and career NCOs. The availability of plenty air and indirect fire support for units and sub-units - even single squads - is unrealistic in conventional warfare. The much-cheered Predator/Reaper UAVs would be toast. I saw an official requirement for a Predator successor that didn't even ask for relevance/survivability in major conventional war. Fragmentation protection (possibly for the whole body, not just the torso and head) might be more important and life-saving in conventional war than hard body armor. There's a historical precedent that should help to illuminate the problem; the Boer wars. The European forces drew more conclusions from the Boer Wars than from the remote Russian-Japanese War of 1904/1905 before 1914. 'Boer tactics' (dispersion, dragoons, long-range rifle fire) were appreciated - but an extremely misleading preparation for the First World War. Dragoons were no better than regular infantry on the Western Front and at Gallipolli, long-range rifle fire was almost extinct during the war and loose dispersed formations weren't enough to counter the firepower of modern artillery and machine guns. The Boer Wars were no good preparation for the really important (First World) war that was really about state sovereignty. The mildly relevant Iraq and Afghanistan War might ruin our ground forces for a generation. Some people claim that ground forces can prepare for major conventional war and wage/win counter-insurgency wars at the same time (and receive fierce criticism). I don't believe that this is possible - unless we keep much of our ground forces out of the COIN business and focused on the most noble and justifiable military mission; defense of the national sovereignty and collective security. Extremely realistic exercises/experiments and a more thorough education of officers and career NCOs in military history and modern art of war than ever might help, too.

 

S O

Happy New Year - belated, but with a message

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No more champagne
And the fireworks are through
Here we are, me and you
Feeling lost and feeling blue
Its the end of the party
And the morning seems so grey
So unlike yesterday
Now's the time for us to say...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

Sometimes I see
How the brave new world arrives
And I see how it thrives
In the ashes of our lives
Oh yes, man is a fool
And he thinks hell be okay
Dragging on, feet of clay
Never knowing hes astray
Keeps on going anyway...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

Seems to me now
That the dreams we had before
Are all dead, nothing more
Than confetti on the floor
Its the end of a decade
In another ten years time
Who can say what well find
What lies waiting down the line
In the end of eighty-nine...

Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbour is a friend
Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't we might as well lay down and die
You and I

In the end of eighty-nine ... the Berlin Wall came down, the signal for the end of the Cold War. Two more years and the concern about being nuked and dying of radiation sickness faded. We became (and still are) an alliance that wasn't challenged any more, that could save incredible amounts of their societies' capabilities for peaceful means instead of an arms race.

The peace dividend didn't last for long, though - sophisticated societies still seem to have a terrible deficiency - they thirst for a common, preferably external, foe.

Mankind has an even more terrible weaknesses; people get used to what they have - and want more. They also get used to a low level of threat - and begin to take even minor threats as seriously as truly terrible threats in more dire situations.

Finally, 'winners' see little reason to question their ways, and fail to work on their weak spots.

Think back to '92 when we were suddenly free of fear of World War 3. A time when we had to choose the path for the future - and all the vitality and strength as societies to work on a really great future, as we had dreamed of for decades. The epic arms race and standoff of the Cold War had ended.
We didn't become hysterical about 'threats' that were on average less likely to kill us than lightnings. Not in the early nineties.

We would have laughed the idea that we should fear idiots in caves and meagre huts during the eighties.

We exchanged one insanity for another - with only about a decade of sanity in between.

Sven Ortmann

New conflict reason: Fishes

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Let me to connect Kotare's post "The years of living recklessly" about the unsustainable exploitation of fish resources and Johann Hari's article "You Are Being Lied to About Pirates" that's basically a 'foreign industrial fishing ships ruin the Somali fish resources illegally and force Somali fishermen to become pirates story' to a common picture.

This picture looks like fishes are one soon very scarce, yet very important resources (like for example fresh water, crude oil & arable land) and the weak/poor countries won't be able to cope with the problems.

I'm no friend of 4GW and 'failed state' concepts, but it seems to me as if many countries should better renew the search for a low tech sustainable development, separate from the global economy - and not integrated.
The United Nations should meanwhile learn to enforce rules like fishing rights for the weak before the shit hits the fan.

Sven Ortmann

The Israeli army and long-time military reputation

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Sic Semper Tyrannis has an interesting description/analysis of the IDF's army.
It's very much focused on the small unit level (plus some political implications) and you could read Martin van Creveld's book "The Sword and the Olive" for additional hints on the IDF.

I planned to write a mini article like "The IDF army is overrated" since a year, but waited for a moment when I'm especially willing to provoke the inevitable right-wing trolls that appear at such articles.

The IDF was successful in 1967 and 1973, but had really, really serious problems in 1973 despite air superiority (the Arabs achieved strategic surprise, though). It didn't implement combined arms tactics (armor/artillery/infantry cooperation) completely till the Yom Kippur War and had many shortcomings at that time.
Its track record post-1973 is a rather mediocre one and it had changed itself very much as early as the late 70's.

Israel and its army are in my opinion a warning example that military reputation of long gone decades should not be valued highly. The French were Europe's terror in 1815 but began a string of military disappointments less than two generations later. The Red Army of the early 20's was beaten by the Polish Army, but was the second most powerful army since the mid-30's (despite the embarrassment of the Winter War).

Extrapolations from the past are prone to ignore changes - we should not base our national/collective security policy on questionable things like 'military reputation'. It's necessary to evaluate thoroughly and to communicate the results to the public (which needs to be convinced to afford the military, after all).

S O

The value of life

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The news media keeps irritating me when it reports about (para)military conflicts. They report about the killing in a highly disturbing manner.

The news people imply a kind of hierarchy in the value of human life:

1st children
2nd women and elderly
3rd civilians in general
4th 'unintentionally' killed civilians in general
5th noncombatant security forces
6th female combatants (maybe 5th)
7th male combatants
8th "bad side" combatants in general
9th terrorists

OK, I understand that the life of terrorists isn't highly valued in news, but what's about the other hierarchy levels?

Why is a soldier's death less terrible than a woman's death?

Just an example:
Case A)
A conscript in uniform serves during the last day of his basic military service term and gets killed by an artillery rocket.
Case B)
The same person gets killed by an artillery rocket, but the next day when he's a civilian.

Seriously, I see no difference.

Soldiers are neither magically more guilty of something than civilians nor are they magically much more capable of defending their life and health. I mean - they usually wouldn't have died if they could have saved their lives, right?

There's also the problem of conscription. Many soldiers don't want to serve and don't want war while many civilian idiots and extremists want war. Why the hell should we consider the death of a soldier as a lesser tragedy than the death of a civilian?

Why is the death of a 70 year old man (with an average remaining life expectation of usually less than 15 years) a greater tragedy than the death of a 18 year old soldier?

Why is the death of a man less of a tragedy than the death of a woman? We've got women in military service, even as combat personnel. It's about time to grant equal rights and duties - also if that means to remove advantages of women. A man's life is no less valuable than a woman's life!

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris):

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
[...]

Many perceptions and rules about what's OK and what's not acceptable in warfare deserve to be changed - the human rights tell us that humans are equal. Why not in warfare?

S O

Update on Stimulus packages / military spending timing

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Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor, published an article in the WSJ on Christmas about the same point that I wrote about ten days earlier:

The current taste for stimulus package spending does not favor military budget cuts, but increases - and the best way to do so would be to soon pay for what needs to be paid sometime later anyway.

He didn't write about a need for budget adjustments (down) to sustainable levels, though.

I've got to object against his "The greater terrorist threat fully justifies these additional funds." as well.

Anyway, I'd like to focus on the good news; the idea (which is obviously a parallel invention of probably many thousand people) might be used with good effect.

S O


edit: 2009-01-17: The idea took off this month.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2399
2009-01-02

http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/2...-would-be.html
2009-01-07

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0108/p01s03-usmi.html
2009-01-08

http://solari.com/blog/?p=1983
2009-01-09

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Econo...6614384&page=1
2009-01-11

Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles

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Defense Technology International reports in its new issue (p.25) about PRC's development of an Anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM or AShBM) with radar seeker - a version of a Dong Feng-21 (DF-21) IRBM. The article also mentions the development of a radar-guided version of an otherwise quite cheap artillery rocket (WS-2, 400mm, 200 km or more, six on a truck).

Sea-skimmer anti-ship missiles like Exocet changed the face of naval warfare and claimed several victims in the few naval actions since 1982. Such missiles avoided the rather primitive anti-air of most ships by flying too close to the sea. They were (and still usually are) subsonic, dependent on 2D radar, have a rather small warhead (comparable to a single average bomb) in comparison to earlier anti-ship missiles and the range is quite small (at least in comparison to the huge Russian anti-ship missiles).
Dedicated defense systems like Seawolf, Phalanx, RAM, Goalkeeper, AK-630, various jammers and decoy launchers were fielded within a few years, but many warships were still insufficiently protected two decades after the sea skimmer's appearance.
The damage and loss of warships (like HMS Sheffield, USS Stark, INS Hanit) that was inflicted by such sea-skimmer missiles was usually explained by insufficient defensive readiness - not hardware shortcomings, though.
- - - - -
The aforementioned two Chinese projects describe two new threats that need to be dealt with:

Problem 1: "Cheap" artillery rockets for saturation attacks

Most of the naval air defense depends on the few dozen anti-air missiles on board of the average warship. The close-in weapon systems (CIWS) have enough ammunition to handle many more targets, but their utility against many targets arriving at once is questionable (RAM looks best in this regard).
The ammunition cost for saturating attack is certainly much lower than the cost of a fully-equipped warship. It's probably even lower than the cost for the defensive munitions alone.
Naval defense against saturation attacks got improved in the 80's with the AEGIS system and much improved in the last few years with the arrival of SAMs with illumination-independent seekers (active radar, infrared; Aster, SM-6).
These saturation-proof defenses are probably too expensive to match the needs of the future, though. More cost-efficient systems (probably by addition of cheap command-controlled missiles) might be advisable.

Problem 2: Tactical ballistic missiles with anti-ship capability and very high speed

These missiles have a much better range, are difficult to defeat due to their velocity and possibly also due to their evasive maneuvers.
This is clearly a high-tech, high-cost approach. A very well-developed naval reconnaissance is necessary to exploit the range. This means satellites,over-the-horizon radars, Electronic intelligence and high-flying aircraft with long-range sensors. It's more difficult to detect a battlegroup at the open sea than many people imagine.
The defense against such a missile seems to consist of high-tech ATBM, jammers and possibly decoys.
The intense interest of Western navies in ATBM technology can be explained with this threat. The idea that ballistic missiles could aim at ships with their radars isn't very common in public discussions, though. There's probably a public relations deficit of Western navies. The taxpayers should be informed about the reason for the interest in ATBM technology.


These are two 'new', publicly known threats to naval surface ships. We'll see how many decades it will take till all major warships of so-called 'modern' navies are well-protected against these.
The technological potential for these threats exists almost since the sea-skimmer revolution (the Pershing II missile already had a target-seeking radar, for example).
We should be well-prepared by now, but maybe the preference for high-tech, high-end systems poses a problem for the preparation against cheap ammunition saturation attacks.

S O