Monthly Archives: June 2024

Incompetence

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Then (based on Wikipedia):

 

The abortive Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942 taught the Western Allies, Britain and the US, that a successful invasion of Europe could only be carried out if sufficient logistic support was made available to sustain not just the initial landing but subsequent operations as well. Next the naval commander for the Raid, British Vice-Admiral John Hughes-Hallett, declared that, if a port could not be captured, then an artificial one should be built and taken across the Channel. In this he was supported by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who, during his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915-16, had come up with the idea as part of his plans to capture some German islands in the North Sea.

Later that year the Chief of Combined Operations Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, outlined the requirement for piers at least one mile (1.6 km) long at which a continuous stream of supplies could be handled. Including a pier head capable of handling 2,000-ton ships. A headquarters was set up, an organization was created, and trials were held at various locations considered suitable both because conditions were similar to those prevailing in Normandy and for security reasons.

By September 1943—just one month after Dieppe—preliminary plans for building not one but two floating harbor—one for the British, one for the Americans—were in place. So were the processes leading to the procurement and manufacturing of the most important components. Including, first, sixty-one dozen old ships designated to be sunk so they could serve as outer breakwaters; second, huge floating caissons, made of concrete and designed to be anchored to the sea bed so as to form the main protection against the waves; and, third, a roadway whose parts could be linked with each other as well as the caissons by which they were going to be supported.

Excluding the blockships, the total weight of components built to be towed across the Channel has been estimated at approximately 1.5 million tons. As was only to be expected from such a large and complex project, problems there were aplenty. However, by the afternoon of D-Day (6 June 1944) all the component parts, both towed and those designed to cross the Channel on their own power, were waiting and ready. Such being the case, construction proceeded much as had been planned—the more so because German resistance was much weaker than expected.

Known as “mulberries,” both harbors were almost fully functional when on 19 June a large north-east storm blew into Normandy and devastated the one supporting the Americans at Omaha Beach. Later it turned out that this was the worst storm to hit the coast in 40 years. So bad was the destruction at Omaha in particular that the entire harbor was deemed irreparable. Most of the constituent parts were completely destroyed, or cast adrift, and the roadways and piers smashed.

The British Mulberry harbor at Arromanches was more protected and, though damaged by the storm, remained usable. Originally designed to last only three month, for eight months it was used to land over 2.5 million men, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tons of supplies, providing much needed reinforcements in France. In response to this longer-than-planned use, the breakwater was reinforced by the addition of specially strengthened caissons. The Royal Engineers had built a complete Mulberry Harbor out of 600,000 tons of concrete between 33 jetties, and had 10 mi (16 km) of floating roadways to land men and vehicles on the beach. Known to the troops at Port Winston, and in spite of being built in a hurry, to this day it remains one of the best examples of military engineering in history.

 

That was then. And now?

 

Al Arabiya English, published: 3 May 2024: 07:05 PM GSTUpdated: 03 May ,2024

“The US military temporarily has paused construction of a floating pier off the coast of Gaza due to weather that caused unsafe conditions for soldiers [my emphasis], the United States Central Command said on Friday. Forecasted high winds and high sea swells caused unsafe conditions for Soldiers working on the surface of the partially constructed pier. The partially built pier and military vessels involved in its construction were moved to the Port of Ashdod, where assembly will continue and will be completed before it is placed in an unannounced location.

Once done, the badly needed humanitarian aid will be delivered by ships and then by trucks to shore. Vehicles from third parties will drive off the ship and the temporary pier to a marshaling yard ashore, CENTCOM [US Central Command] said. The aid will then be offloaded in the shore facility before being transferred to partner organizations that will distribute it inside Gaza.”

 

A month and a half has passed and the pier, while spectacularly expensive, is still not operational. Instead, parts of it, carried by the currents, have been found as far north as the beaches of Tel Aviv.

Egypt

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As the wars between Israel and Hamas, Israel and Hezbollah, Israeland Syria, Israel and Iran, and Israel and the Houthi of Yemen keep going, the belligerents apart no country has assumed a more important role in the conflict than Egypt did and does. In this post I will try to shed light on some of the more important issues at stake as well as take a guess at what the future may bring.

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At the time Israel proclaimed its independence on 15 May 1948 Egypt was still under British occupation, as indeed it had been from 1882 on. However, this fact did not prevent the government of Egyptian King Farouq from sending their army into Palestine with the objective, first, to appease his own public opinion—which was very anti-Israeli—and second, offset any gains the remaining Arab states might make by invading Palestine and annexing part of it. As it turned out, the calculus did not work. By early 1949 the Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi excursions into Palestine had all been halted, though not quite turned back (the Jordanians in particular remained in possession of East Jerusalem and the West Bank). Meanwhile, further to the south the Egyptian expeditionary force had come close to being annihilated; in the event, they were only saved by the threat of British intervention.

The official end of Israel’s war of independence in July 1949 did not lead to peace either with Egypt or with any other Arab country. Instead, both on Israel’s border with Egypt—now moved northward so as to leave the government in Cairo in control of the Gaza Strip—there took place any number of incidents. Most were very small; a theft here, a murder there. A few, however led full scale between Israel and its neighbors, threatening not only the Middle East but, thanks to Superpower meddling, world peace. This period lasted until late 1973 when the last Israeli-Egyptian war came to an end. Resulting in stalemate it opened the long road towards peace, albeit that this was by no means always apparent at the time.

The next stage got under way in 1977 when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt visited Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Thanks in large part to US mediation, by 1981 a peaceful relationship between the two countries, along with a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, the peninsula’s demilitarization, and the establishment of diplomatic, economic and some tourist ties was in place and working fairly well. To be sure, things did not always proceed as smoothly as the Israelis in particular would have liked. In particular, Israel’s attempts to tackle terrorism from Lebanon by invading that country (1982 and 2007) as well as its persistent failure to move toward an end to its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza often led to grumbling in Cairo. Deliberately or not, the latter also failed to properly seal the tunnels linking the Sinai and Gaza, thus enabling Hamas to receive large supplies of money, arms and supplies. So much so, in fact, that when Israeli troops in early 2024 invaded the underground tunnels they described them as a “superhighway.” Still on the whole the peace agreement held, greatly benefitting both countries.

The outbreak of the next major round of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities on 7 October 2023 appears to have taken Egypt by surprise, causing it to try and follow a number of different courses simultaneously. Formally the peace between the two countries, including diplomatic relations, trade, and limited military cooperation against the independence-seeking Bedouins of the Sinai, remained in place. Faced with problems in the west (anarchy in Libya), the south (anarchy in the Sudan, Ethiopia’s attempt to divert the Nile), the southeast (the Red Sea where the Houthis’ have been mounting attacks on maritime traffic, causing a decline in Egypt’s income from the Suez Canal), and the east (where Iran has been doing whatever it can to stir up trouble) Cairo knew better than to add another country to its list of enemies. Yet it did not mind the Israelis learning some bitter lessons concerning the limits of their military power and the need to enter into some kind of relationship with Hamas; if teaching those lessons meant at least partially closing an eye to the vast inflow of money, supplies and arms from the Sinai to Gaza, so be it.

Above all, official Cairo has its own public opinion to consider. Especially but by no means exclusively that prevailing among the better educated and professional classes in the cities. Starting at least as early as 1982, it has been these classes which were most vehemently critical of Israel. If not to the point of actually abrogating the peace treaty and preparing for war, certainly by limiting contacts with it and putting them on hold.

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Prediction is difficult, especially of the future. Faced with the ongoing war, essentially there appear to be three courses of action Egypt might take. They are as follows:

  1. Stick to its present course of working with the US and Qatar to lean on both Hamas and Israel to end the shooting war in one way or another. This would probably be the preferred policy, except that it does not appear to stand much of a chance of achieving its objective anytime soon. One thing, though, appears certain: the longer the war, the harder it will be for Egypt to keep doing what it has been doing or trying to do up to the present.
  2. Take a much stronger pro-Israeli line in all that regards to a. the Israeli prisoners in Hamas’ hands; b. an eventual cease fire; and c. the weakening of Hamas control over Gaza. Given how unpopular Israel is in Egypt right now, and also how obdurate both Israel and Hamas have been and still are, such a change seems rather unlikely.
  3. In everything pertaining to the war, turn against Israel (and the US). In case the present regime continues in force, any such change will probably proceed slowly and gradually. However, in a dictatorship such as Egypt a sudden upheaval, most likely in the form of a military coup, can never be ruled out. Right now, sitting in my study I can see the balcony on which, years ago, I received two Canadian intelligence officers who had previously gained long experience serving in Egypt. To my question whether a coup aimed at unseating then President Hosni Mubarak was possible, both of them hastened to reassure me it was not.

As has been said, no one believes there is a plot to kill the emperor until he is killed.

 

Cutting the Hype

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These days it is all but impossible to open the Net without stumbling over zillions of references to artificial intelligence (AI). What it is; the things it can and will do; the good things it will bring about; the fortunes it will make for those willing and able to make the fullest use of it; and, above all, the disasters which, thanks to God the Computer and His human acolytes, are just around the corner and, unless countered in time, may yet bring about the destruction of mankind.

In what follows, I want to cut the hype a little by providing a very brief list of some of those things. And, on the way, explain why, in my view, either their impact has been vastly exaggerated or they will not happen at all.

Claim: AI can and will make countless workers superfluous. The outcome will be massive unemployment with all its concomitant problems. Such as a impoverishment, a growing cleavage between rich and poor, class struggles, political upheavals, uprisings, revolutions, civil warfare, and what not.

Rebuttal: Much the same was said and written about the first computers around 1970, the first industrial robots during the 1950s, and so on backward in time all the way to the first steam engines during the first few decades of the 19th century in particular. Fear of technologically-generated unemployment may indeed be tracked back to the Roman Emperor Vespasian (reigned, 69-79 CE) who had the inventor of a labor-saving device executed for precisely that reason. World-wide, during the almost 2,000 years since then, employment has often gone up and down. However, taking 1900 as our starting line, not one of the greatest upheavals—not National Socialism, not the Chinese Revolution not decolonization, not feminism, to list just three—has been due mainly, let alone exclusively, to technological change. As my teacher, Jacob Talmon, used to say: I know all that stuff about history, anonymous political, economic, social, cultural, and, yes, technological forces. But, absent Lenin, do you really think the Russian Revolution would have taken place?

Claim: AI and the ability to manipulate and spread information of every kind (spoken, written, in the form of images) will make it much harder, perhaps impossible, to distinguish truth from falsehood, honesty from fraud.

Rebuttal: True. But so did the invention, first of speech, then of writing (see on this Yuval Harari Sapiens, which helped inspire this post), then of print, then of newspapers, then of photography, then of film, then of the telegraph, then of electronic media such as radio and TV. Every one of them was open to abuse by means of adding material, subtracting material, and plain faking. And every one of them often has been and still is being so abused day by day. Long before the invention of “intellectual property” thieves and counterfeiters were forging ahead. Photoshop and Deepfake themselves are computer-generated. But what one computer can generate another can counter; at least in principle.

Claim: In the military field, AI will help make war much more deadly and much more destructive.

Rebuttal: The same was said and written about previous inventions such as the machine gun, the aircraft, and the submarine. Not to mention dynamite which its inventor, Alred Nobel (yes, he of the Prize) hoped would be so deadly as to cause war to be abolished). In fact, though, it is not technology alone but politics, economics and various social factors—above all, the willingness of individuals and groups to fight and, if necessary, die—that will govern the deadliness and destructiveness of future war, just as they have done in the past. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul is said to have caused the death of a million people. Tamerlane in the fourteenth century wiped out perhaps 17 million. And even that is easily overshadowed by the number Genghis Khan, using nothing more sophisticated than captured mechanical siege engines, killed a century and a half earlier. Here I want to repeat a statement I have often made before: namely that the one invention that has really changed war, and will continue to make its impact felt in all future wars to come, is nukes.

Claim: AI will put an end to art and artists.

Rebuttal: A little more than a century ago, the same was said and written about film bringing about the end of the theater. Starting almost two centuries ago, the same was said and written about photography sounding the death-knell of painting. Need I add that photography and film, far from causing art to disappear, have themselves turned into a very important art forms?

Claim: “AI-powered image and video analysis tools are used for a wide range of social impact applications. They can detect anomalies in medical scans, assess crop health for farmers, and even identify endangered species from camera trap images, aiding conservation efforts.”

Rebuttal: as if all the things, and any number of others like them, were not done long before anyone heard of AI.

Claim: AI has changed/will change “everything.”

Rebuttal: Back in the 1990s, exactly the same things were said of .com. Yet looking back, it would seem that the things that did not change (the impact of poverty, disease, natural disasters, war, old age and death e.g, as well as that of love, friendship, solidarity, patriotism, etc.) are just as important as those that did.

If not more so.

Mexico

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Back in the spring of 1994, the CIA was in a bad way. Not because of a threat to national security; after all, the Soviet Union had just fallen apart, most of China’s rise was still in the future, and the US continued to enjoy the protection not of one ocean but of two. Rather, it was the lack of “peer competitors” to spy upon and warn against. Saddam Hussein and Iraq having been defeated, probably never in human history had a single colossus appeared to be so dominant and so powerful! And what, pray, do you do when you do not know what to do? Short answer: you bring in a consultant. Or, better still, entire teams of consultants to consult with.

That is where I got involved. Three years earlier I had published The Transformation of War, a book President Clinton was said to have read or at any rate ordered. Now someone at the CIA contacted me and asked me to give a short talk about “the most important threat facing the US” as well as write a paper on the same topic. Arriving at Langley at the appointed day and hour, I was ushered into a meeting hall where the analysts were waiting. Most appeared to be in their mid- to late thirties, meaning they were no longer at the entry level but had much of their careers still in front of them. Following my pearls of wisdom, which took about 45 minutes to deliver, we launched into the Q&A. En fin, the usual staid format many of us are familiar with and take more or less for granted.

What they did not take for granted, and saved the meeting from being staid, was one single word that kept recurring: Mexico. Not because it was in any sense a peer competitor—it was not and still isn’t. Not because it had nuclear weapons—it did not and still doesn’t. Not because it had the armed forces to invade the US—it did not and still doesn’t. And not because it was strong, united, highly developed, and determined to confront the US. But precisely because it was not strong, and not united, and not highly developed; let alone determined to confront the US.

When the Q&A started it was my turn to be surprised. Of the fifty or so persons in the room not a single one seemed to agree with me; then and later quite a few told me I had been spouting… well, you know what. After all, the US was much larger and stronger than Mexico. In terms of GDP (both total and per person), industrial capacity, armed forces, capacity for innovation, human capital (basically, literacy and the number of years spent at school) and, last not least, the “soft power” which at that time was being touted by Professor Joseph Nye at Harvard there simply was no comparison. True, Mexico with its 88 million people and 761,610 square miles of territory was not exactly a pigmy. Further south, some Latin American politicians even let loose an occasional reference to it as “the giant of the north.” But the most dangerous problem facing the US? Come on.

Twenty-two years later, in 2016, Nye’s fellow Harvard professor Samuel Huntington published Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Like Nye, Huntington focused less on material factors—so and so much of this, so and so much of that—as on cultural values. English rather than Spanish or some other language(s). Individualism versus a more family-oriented society. Respect for the law, normally seen not as an instrument for oppression but as a necessary framework for imposing justice and enabling society to function. The kind of society that in some ways helped turn most people into quasi-Protestants even without them knowing it. All these were being undermined by hordes of immigrants, either Mexicans or, increasingly, other Latin Americans originating in countries further to the south. Many immigrants did not even try to assimilate. Instead, entering ghettoes that were at least partly self-imposed, they proudly pronounced their original identity and their determination to stick to it even while defying the surrounding “native” population.

Nor does Mexico itself have much to be proud of. In 2021 the human development index (HDI), which is the one used by the United Nations to measure the progress of a country, stood at 0.758 points, leaving it in 86th place in the published table of 191 countries. Contributing to this sad state of affairs is a fairly low per capita GDP of $ 11,500 per year, just one sixth of the US figure. Next come widespread violence (the seven cities with the world’s highest per capita homicide rates are all located in Mexico); a large but inefficient government apparatus; wealthy and powerful drug cartels that are often both integrated into the government machinery (and the military, and the police) and capable of standing up to them. To these, add corruption; limited freedom of the press (in 2024 Mexico occupied place number 121 out of 180 countries); an exploding population that, between 1994 and 2024, went up 48 percent, in many ways making it necessary to run like hell just to stay in place; and a geographical position that made it a conduit for countless additional people from all over Central and South America.

Following the events of 1945-1960, when most of the former colonial countries in Asia and Africa achieved their independence, there was a widespread expectation that “they” (the countries in question) could and would become more like “us” (the “developed” west). So, for example, President Johnson’s National Security Adviser Walt Rostow (served, 1966-69) in his influential 1959 volume, The Stages of Economic Growth, which laid out a program for doing exactly that. In fact, though, the opposite is happening. A vast and apparently unstoppable influx of people is moving from south to north. With their number estimated at 2,4 million in 2023 alone, they either undermine or overwhelm the ability of American institutions, from the police to schools to hospitals to welfare systems, to cope. Instead of “they” becoming like “us,” “they” are well on the way of turning “us” into “them.”

Mexico’s recent elections, which for the first time put a woman at the helm, has been keenly followed both in- and out of the country. And rightly so; who knows, maybe she will start moving her people in the right direction. Meanwhile, though, America’s southwestern states in particular are begging for help so they can cope with exactly the situation I and others predicted thirty years ago.

And what has the Federal Government been doing? For decades on end, the answer was nothing.