Cyber Combat: Act of War

If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks...

Read the WSJ article here.

POTUS' Role in Cyber Defense

If the Internet is considered a vital U.S. asset, what powers does the president have in the event of a potentially catastrophic cyberattack?

Read the article here.

Make Out Online

A "kiss transmission device"  is being developed in Japan to enable simulated french kissing via the internet.

"If you take one device in your mouth and turn it with your tongue, the other device turns in the same way," says the device's inventor in a YouTube video. "If you turn it back the other way, then your partner's turns back the same way, so your partner's device turns whichever way your own device turns."

Read the article here.

From Guantanamo to Abbottabad

Emerging details about the investigation that culminated in the killing of Osama bin Laden have re-ignited debate over the practice and effectiveness of torture. John Yoo, former Justice Depaertment official in the Bush administration, cites the interrogation program he helped define as responsible for producing the actionable intelligence that led to bin Laden:

Sunday's success also vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden's door. According to current and former administration officials, CIA interrogators gathered the initial information that ultimately led to bin Laden's death. The United States located al Qaeda's leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.

In response, editors at the NYT claim the technique played a small role in finding bin Laden and cost the nation far more in terms of harming our reputation abroad:

There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.

Read the editorials here: WSJ; NYT

‘Three Cups of Tea’ Author Defends Book

The CBS news program "60 Minutes" investigated and questioned events portrayed in Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea:

While the publishing industry waited to see whether it faced the embarrassment of yet another partly fabricated memoir, Greg Mortenson, the co-author of the best-selling “Three Cups of Tea,” a book popular with the Pentagon for its inspirational lessons on Afghanistan and Pakistan, forcefully countered a CBS News report on Sunday that questioned the facts of his book and the management of his charitable organization.

An unofficial reponse:

“We continue to believe in the logic of what Greg is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we know the powerful effects that education can have on eroding the root causes of extremism,” said a military official, who asked not to be named under ground rules imposed by the Pentagon.

As Mara Naselli observes:

The debate between truth and fact in personal essay and memoir is an old one, and the test of authenticity has rarely been, “Did it really happen that way?” Many argue that memory is just too slippery to be held to that kind of standard, and that the discernment of fact itself isn’t obvious.

The question, then, is whether the US military should use such slippery accounts as a staple in COIN training.

Read the NYT article here.

Ethics of Human Enhancement

The US National Science Foundation published a report on ethical considerations over using technology to enhance human capabilities beyond normal functioning.  

Corrective eyeglasses, for instance, would be considered therapy rather than en-hancement, since they serve to bring your vision back to normal; but strapping on a pair of night-vision binoculars would count as hu-man enhancement, because they give you sight beyond the range of any unassisted hu-man vision. As another example, using stero-ids to help muscular dystrophy patients regain lost strength is a case of therapy; but steroid use by otherwise-healthy athletes would give them new strength beyond what humans typ-ically have (thereby enabling them to set new performance records in sports). And growing or implanting webbing between one’s fingers and toes to enable better swimming changes the structure and function of those body parts, counting then as a case of human en-hancement and not therapy.

Read the report here.

(Thanks to C3C Dan Pickett for forwarding)

"Immaculate Intervention"

George Friedman offers a perspective of OOD as a casual war fraught with good intentions. The new doctrine of humanitarian intervention - "go in light, go in soft and stay there long" - still leaves open the question of what happens in the aftermath.

I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values. They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.

Read more: "Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism," republished with permission of STRATFOR.

(Thanks to Capt Ashley Anderson for forwarding)

"Flying Solo"

The Colorado Springs Independent carried a story on '93 USAFA grad Grant McKenzie, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, dishonorably discharged, and incarcerated at NAVCONBRIG Miramar. The story highlights gaps in the military mental health service and provides a valuable perspective for future commanders.

"McKenzie wrestled with bipolar disorder, diagnosed by the Air Force within months of that sunny graduation day but never properly treated. As McKenzie cycled down into the abysmal clutches of the illness and its accompanying addictive behaviors — pornography, in particular — he repeatedly told superiors what he was going through. But the Air Force apparently ignored its own policies for how to deal with such disorders."

Read the story here.

Justice for Hedgehogs

Ronald Dworkin believes there are absolute moral values, that when we make a moral or ethical judgment, we are interpreting, and that many of our interpretations have truth values: true or false, and therefore, right or wrong.

"Well, for example, if I say abortion is wrong, I believe what I say is true, not that it's one legitimate opinion among many. I hate it when people say: 'It's OK for gay people to get married but that's only my opinion.' You can't think it's just your opinion or you wouldn't hold it. Imagine a judge who's just sentenced a man to jail for life saying: 'Other judges might have found differently and they're entitled to their opinions.' Who could reasonably say such a thing?"

Read Stuart Jeffries' review of Dworkin's new book in The Guardian here. 

The Moral Case for OOD

Jerome Slater, a research scholar at the University at Buffalo, argues the moral justification for intervening in Libya:

A common fallacy among those who regard themselves as hardheaded “realists” is to dismiss the role of morality in foreign policy decisions and claim it is all about narrow interests, especially economic interests, and most especially, oil interests. Such cynicism, however, is itself a kind of naivete, a reductionism unequal to the complexity of war-and-peace issues.

In the Libyan case, the argument that it’s all about oil is particularly unpersuasive. First, only a very small amount of our imported oil comes from Libya, and in any case for many years Gadhafi has been a reliable supplier, both to us and to our NATO allies. Moreover, in recent years, he has played a valuable intelligence-gathering role in the war against terrorism, especially al-Qaida. So if narrow self-interests really explained the U. S. intervention, we should be fighting to save Gadhafi, not to overthrow him.

In short, there is every reason to believe that genuine moral concerns were an important component — probably the most important component — in explaining the administration’s decision to intervene in Libya.

Read the column in the Buffalo New here.

Europe After the War; JPB on the Ground

Ben Shephard's The Long Road Home documents  jus post bellum issues arising in the efforts to manage mass migrations of displaced persons after WWII:

One heart-rending chapter deals with the efforts to reunite children with their mothers and fathers. On the face of it, this sounds like an incontrovertibly good thing, in particular for those infants who had been stolen from their families by the Nazis on account of their “Aryan” looks and reassigned to German foster parents. Yet was it right to wrench children away from their new families against their will, especially in cases when it was not clear that the true parents could be found or that they wanted their children back? U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration staffers divided on the issue, some feeling that the effort had to be made by way of atonement for the original wrong, and others skeptical that returning children to their birth countries was necessarily in their best interests.

Read the NYT review here.

R2P: the Latest JAB Criteria

Covering the change in U.S. position regarding use of force in Libya, Foreign Policy magazine reports on the Responsibility to Protect, a principle cited by diplomats in the U.N. to justify the use of broad military force:

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also said on Thursday that the justification for the use of force was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), "a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community's failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

"Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community's determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government," he said. 

Read the article here.

For more on R2P, visit the INTERNATIONAL COALITION FOR THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT website here.

Moral Arguments

When making arguments about moral acts, can you build premises around objective moral facts? Or, are all our moral claims a construct of  opinion and/or cultural constructions? Discover Magazine posted the following debate between bloggers:

You can’t use logic to derive moral commandments solely from facts about the world, even if those facts include human desires. Of course, you can derive moral commandments if you sneak in some moral premise; all I’m trying to say here is that we should be upfront about what those moral premises are, and not try to hide them underneath a pile of unobjectionable-sounding statements. 

As a warm-up, here is an example of logic in action:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The first two statements are the premises, the last one is the conclusion. (Obviously there are logical forms other than syllogisms, but this is a good paradigmatic example.) Notice the crucial feature: all of the important terms in the conclusion (“Socrates,” “mortal”) actually appeared somewhere in the premises. That’s why you can’t derive “ought” from “is” — you can’t reach a conclusion containing the word “ought” if that word (or something equivalent) doesn’t appear in your premises.

This doesn’t stop people from trying. Carrier uses the following example (slightly, but not unfairly, paraphrased):

Your car is running low on oil.

If your car runs out of oil, the engine will seize up.

You don’t want your car’s engine to seize up.

Therefore, you ought to change the oil in your car.

At the level of everyday practical reasoning, there’s nothing wrong with this. But if we’re trying to set up a careful foundation for moral philosophy, we should be honest and admit that the logic here is obviously incomplete. There is a missing premise, which should be spelled out explicitly:

We ought to do that which would bring about what we want.

Crucially, this is a different kind of premise than the other three in this argument; they are facts about the world that could in principle be tested experimentally, while this new one is not.

Read the entry here, the counterpoint here.

New Humanism

NYT columnmist David Brooks argues that many of our failures in the realm of public policy can be traced back to our overly simplistic view of the world. Citing research in cognitive science, Brooks writes:

We have a prevailing view in our society -- not only in the policy world, but in many spheres -- that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below.

Read the column here. Brooks' new humanism is outlined in his new book, "The Social Animal." Thomas Nagel's review (and critque of Brooks' theory) is here.

(Thanks to C2C Grant Meyer for forwarding)

Psychiatry Turns to Drug Therapy

Talk therapy, which may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, has been dropped as a service rendered by some psychiatrists due to lower insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage the practice. In its place, the psychiatrists are relegated to adjusting medications, ordering tests, and referring their patients to psychologists or therapists for traditional talk therapy and counseling. The NYT reports that many psychiatrists are unhappy with the change, but have been co-opted by the economics of managed care; "A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session."

Read the article here.

SECDEF Addresses Cadets at USAFA

In case you missed it... SECDEF addressed the wing and permanent party today:

"I’m concerned that the view still lingers in some corners that once I depart as Secretary, and once U.S. forces drawdown in Iraq and in Afghanistan in accordance with the President’s and NATO’s strategy, things can get back to what some consider to be real Air Force normal. This must not happen."

Read the speech here.

US Loses Appetite for Job as the World’s Policeman

Financial Times.com reviews SECDEF's speech at West Point from the perspective that it "crystallised the arrival of a new era in US foreign policy." The author characterizes the shift, "from robust interventionism towards relative isolationism" as a product of both economic necessity and political reality. "The US is not just less able to be the world’s policeman. The country and its people have, for the moment, lost all appetite for the job as well."

Read the article here.

The Clergy Letter Project

Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Biology at Butler University, developed the Clergy Letter project to battle the misperception that science and religion are inevitably in conflict. Focusing specifically on the theory of evolution, Zimmerman maintains "numerous clergy from most denominations have tremendous respect for evolutionary theory and have embraced it as a core component of human knowledge, fully harmonious with religious faith." The Project aims to promote the view that "religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts." In the end, "the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist."

Additional resources from the Clergy Letter Project are available here.

Atheist Ads: You Can Live Moral, Meaningful Lives without God

The Christian Post covers the Center for Inquiry's multimedia campaign whose message is "that nonreligious people can find meaning in a life that is human-centered, and that reliance on the supernatural is unnecessary." countering CFI, a Biola University professor asks, "what does it mean to do good in a world that's really just a gigantic accident of matter and energy?"

Read the article here.

Protests at Military Funerals Are Protected Speech, Justices Rule

The Supreme Court decision to protect fundamentalist church members who mount anti-gay protests outside military funerals was rendered by Chief Justice John Roberts:

"Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker," Roberts said. "As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."

Alito strongly disagreed. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," he said.

Read the article here.